response 26 of 86:

Sep 23 22:02 UTC 1991

(I think he was asking Tim Tyler)

response 28 of 86:

Sep 25 04:45 UTC 1991

Actually, in complaining about the lyrics, Tim is in serious danger of
being a racist.  Y'see, certain groups commonly use that sort of
language, particularly in certainly types of intimate conversations.
I've heard it called "talking trash", and presumably, in the proper
context it's not nearly the objectionable noise it seems to us
uninitiated folks.

response 30 of 86:

Sep 25 14:32 UTC 1991

   Actually, STeve, I think you have a good point.  You do want to
keep kids away from stuff that promotes an abusive and violent
world-view.  (I seriously wish you much good luck in doing so,
since it is unhappily common in our society.)  Let them find out
that kind of stuff when they are older.  I have no objection to
'demoting' violence.

response 32 of 86:

Sep 25 17:26 UTC 1991

   Damon has already heard the word, so early in fact that it must have
been at the Gerber drop-off daycare back in '86 or so.  So yes, he knows
the "bad words".  That isn't the point: its the callous way that its used
that I'd *like* to protect him from.  Kids don't have nearly enough time to
be kids anymore, I'm afraid.
   I'll let people know how this works out, say in about 6 years.

response 34 of 86:

Sep 25 21:21 UTC 1991

It's rather easy to find things that portray abusive and violent world
views that don't use all those naughty words, & not impossible to find
things that use those naughty words without the black world view.  If
the concern is promoting a better world view, a better way might be to
provide lots of more positive role models, and work also to develope a
sense of appreciation for the kinds of feedback one can get from one's
world-view.  (Ie, one finds what one is looking for...)

Actually, the # one resource where abusive and violent world views are
shown is certainly TV, and that's rather interesting considering that
those naughty words have historically been forbidden.  There are even
studies that show that watching lots of TV makes people more paranoid &
afraid of the world, tending more to overestimate the prevelance of
crime and so forth.  It's kind of a shame, actually, as there is also
quality TV worth watching, it just takes a bit of effort to find it.

People were really shocked when the watergate tapes came out.  Seems
that our president couldn't utter one normal sentence in private
conversation without at least one or two dirty words.

There are other cultures that have no dirty words.  Many north american
indian languages, for instance.  Indulging in some good old
drunk-country-boy thinking, that's certainly interesting.  Perhaps dirty
words are a result of the christian church imposing taboos from afar? Or
perhaps it's a result of having large and diverse enough cultural
sub-groups sharing a common language that what's normal to one group
isn't normal to another? Whatever the reason is, there is something
rather attractive about a culture that never found any need to invent
dirty words.

So far as music is concerned, this sort of thing seems almost
inevitable.  Today, Rap music is almost universally dispised and
regarded as an instrument of the devil, not the least of it being the
language used.  In the 50's, rock music was almost universally despised
and regarded as the world of the devil.  I have no doubt that Jazz,
before that, was equally disreputable, although the presence of
prohibition may have effectively distracted any active opposition.
People were probably too busy sneaking drinks to complain about the
music in those speakeasies.  It's interesting, too, that all of these
musical forms owe a lot to black culture -- jazz and rap being
practically invented by the blacks.  Evidently, there is something about
modern white culture that discourages active inovation, and prefers to
"borrow" from elsewhere, at least when it comes to music.

response 36 of 86:

Sep 25 23:55 UTC 1991

Maybe you don't remember this, Jennie, but certainly when I was a boy, no
respectable newspaper would print the words "Hell" or "damn."  Surely
those are religious-based taboos, which were taken seriously within human
memory, even if no longer.

response 40 of 86:

Sep 26 08:13 UTC 1991

I've no idea off-hand where I read indians have no swear words.
Somewhere around here I have a Biloxi vocabulary, but I don't think
that's very convincing proof.  If they did swear, we'll never know how.

There is a more interesting problem however.  We all know what swear
words are.  But, if we were martians, we might well have some difficulty
in deciding what they were, especially if we looked at small somewhat
isolated integrated communities.  For instance, an ethnologist studying
the watergate tapes might naturally conclude that "fuck" (or whatever
words Nixon used) were in fact a natural "noise" word, inserted whenever
the speaker can't decide what to say next, like, uh, y'know, hmm, just,
o, sound that doesn't really, uh, mean anything, you know.  If he ever
discovered the derivation of the sound, I'm sure he'd come up with some
really dynamite footnotes "look how strange the natives of the third
planet are -- they mess up their oceans, and insert shit in their
sentences." A 2nd ethnologist with a paperback dictionary might conclude
that the word "shit" is extinct, and could scientifically prove his fact
with 40 years worth of movies recorded from AMC.

Today, in american society, "bloody" is a relatively weak epithet, but
in world war 2 british society, it was a really terrible thing to say.
Does that make bloody a "bad" word or not?  Some people manage to get by
for years without saying any swear words or ever hearing them, others
can't hardly manage a sentence without at least one or two of the damn
things.  In our culture we've all come to accept that there are swear
words that only "bad" people use.  Usually those are people we don't
like.  In a smaller society, where there are no strangers, and everyone
who can speak your tongue is a friend, and maybe a relative, is there
a need for swear words?

response 42 of 86:

Sep 26 14:34 UTC 1991

 When I lived in New Zealand, we didn't get "bloody noses," we got "blood
noses."

response 44 of 86:

Sep 26 22:25 UTC 1991

This is why I find it difficult to believe there are cultures with
*absolutely* no taboo words.  The words may be vastly different from the
ones one would normally view as "swear words", but they are still taboo
words.

response 46 of 86:

Sep 27 06:40 UTC 1991

In Germany, if I understand right, it's a really bad thing to call
somebody a pig, but I'm reasonably sure that "pig" is not inherently a
swear word.

Some cultures have really *different* ideas about things.  I understand
the Hopi indian language has no way to talk about a span of time -- you
can't say things like "3 days" or "a week".  That indicates a vastly
different idea about the nature of the universe and the importance of
time than we have.  Interestingly, English has one of the richest set of
time tenses of any language, including 3 different flavours of what in
French comes out as "Je parle".

response 48 of 86:

Sep 27 22:26 UTC 1991

How about 'a certain kind of pig'?  I do remember there was
some sort of nasty insult in this vein that made no sense
in english...