Posted by sega_sai 6/29/2025
I, having just read an article like this, said "That's ok, sometimes saying a bad word can help you process your emotions and feel less stressed. Do you want to go down to the basement where nobody can hear you, and say the bad word?"
"Yes". She goes down the stairs, I close the door, and she yells at the top of her lungs: "I can't fucking find it!". I managed not to laugh, she comes back up, "Do you feel better?" "Yes." Great moments in parenting. :-) (We did eventually find whatever it was.)
It's a cute story. Fuck is just a word. They aren't going to grow up to be a bad person because they said it as a kid, and it's wild to say stuff like this to someone when you have literally no other context about their life or upbringing.
Your weird negativity to a stranger and implying they aren't doing a good job parenting based on them sharing a couple sentence long story is, in my opinion, a worse character trait than saying fuck every now and again. You have 0 idea what kind of kid they are raising.
Oh the horror of a "casual swearer"!
The trick isn't to hide them from bad words - no matter how much censorship you apply to TV, film, youtube, whatever they will learn them. But it's to teach them when to (not) use them. If done right, they'll know they shouldn't just casually use it.
Anyway, love seeing people without kids chime in.
Any proof of this?
Let the kids make some "mistakes", and let them think they got away with it. It gives them the some agency, it encourages them to explore and push boundaries, as long as you're there to make sure they don't cross a line they can't come back from. Light swearing is not where you need to draw that line.
And with a few more paragraphs it would also be perfectly formatted for LinkedIn.
Thanks for demonstrating the level of critical thinking you operate with as someone who likes to curse, though. Attempting to frame an insult as an objective reality (and at the same time insulting two other people on the basis of one internet comment) is surely less self-righteous than what I said.
That said, I could not give a fuck about who swears and who does not swear, but I do give a damn about volume.
(Says the guy who is going to get married to a Latina soon.)
Some don’t handle it well.
No idea if it helps with hitting your thumb with a hammer, but memorable teaching!
Inquiring minds want to know...
EDIT; and the teacher may have made the entire thing up of course! Loved his lessons.
For example, the lovely and memorable
Donaudampfschiffahrtselektrizitätenhauptbetriebswerkbauunterbeamtengesellschaft
would be translated into something like
"Association for Subordinate Officials of the Main Maintenance Building of the Danube Steamboat Shipping Company"
(Inasmuch as I've made my point, I will spare you any further woebegone prose.)
> While English has compound nouns, they are different in that they are not (generally) single words.
That's if you define "word" as anything that is separated by spaces in writing. But you could instead count all compound nouns as words. That would have the advantage of not being dependent on arbitrary rules in the writing system.
Goddamnmotherfuckingsonofabitch
etc.
Edit: It‘s irrelevant if you write it as one word, you certainly say it as one.
True, but you say everything as one word. You produce "It's irrelevant if you write it as one word" as one word. It has substitutable parts, which is also true of German compound words.
People are shockingly gullible about the fact that compound nouns in German are written without spaces while the grammatically identical compound nouns that are so common in English are written with them, as if spaces occurred in speech.
Yeah. And distinctions that don't even occur in speech are arguably not suited to define the general concept of "word". You wouldn't know from speaking that "coalmine" has no space but "file name" has. I would count them both as single words, because they are single compound nouns.
The "space theory of words" would mean that languages without a writing system don't have "words", or that people who can't read also can't distinguish "words", which is clearly nonsense.
The difference between primary and secondary word stress disappears when the word is put into a sentence.
There are stress patterns in sentences that don't exist in lexical words, but they do exist in compound phrases, and there is no symmetrical situation of stress patterns in words that don't happen in sentences.
It satisfies my urge, and it sounds funny.
Are you fucking kidding me == lol
Are you fricking kidding me == Rage
[1] https://tintin.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_Captain_Haddock%27s_C...
[edit] holy mackerel, you odd-toed ungulate, I found some!
Initially the work from the 70s-80s on vervet monkeys https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7433999/ which was then found to be generalized for a host of other primates
~1 for danger in the air
~1 for danger on the ground
misc for unspecified danger
I would bet that modern swearing maps to these calls in a less specific way. Equivalents of "this shite" "that arsehole" and "damnnit" may have an evolutionary origin.
That being a possible reason why certain words alleviate, they actually operate at a different level in our conciousness.
I dunno why, but wow seems to work well for me.
An adjective from the same stem would make another word with the meaning on the other side of the spectrum, which is basically "really cool, highly approved". An adjective similar but constructed in a little different way would mean "weird, crazy".
From the same stem you can make three most common verbs, one with meanings "beat up", "steal", another quite similar with meaning "lie" and a third one meaning "talk". Light modifications of the latter form allow some fine-tuning of the meaning, giving words describing more complex behaviour: 1) suddenly say something unexpected, that will attract the attention of others, causing amazement and approval, 2) unintentionally give up a secret, blurt out too much, 3) get yourself in trouble by talking too much, or even 4) fall down from a certain height or bump into an object receiving a light injury.
and so on, and so forth..
I think this is in part due to the nature of the words, they “appeal” (perhaps come from) a much older part of our minds than the idea that they might be offensive. The most effective swears are generally about procreation and other bodily functions - the things that we cared about before we even had that much of our current language.
Another side effect of this seems to be visible in those with dementia and other age or illness related degradations: some can barely say a few words normally but can still string a perfectly coherent set of expletives together when they need or want.