How are bad words invented?

[Eddo36]

Does it start with just a made-up unknown word someone starts and other begin to use with a negative connotation, and after a while the word becomes bad and considered profanity?

[Hurlshort]

Here's a couple answers:

 

http://urbanlegends.about.com/library/bl-pluck-yew.htm

 

You know, you could do your own research on this stuff.

[Surreptishus]

Witness the birth of a new bad word:

 

"This topic is worse than lame... it is Eddo."

Edited February 25, 2007 by Surreptishus

[metadigital]

Let's just keep the topic about the topic, and not about the topic starter, please.

[Bokishi]

lol

[Sand]

Well, in the medieval times when ever the king needed troops he conscritped them. These were often known as the "Forced Units of the Crowned King." Of ocourse those in charged were linguistically lazy and didn't want to say that to every conscripted soldier so they simply said... "You're f**ked."

[Gorth]

This entertaining (and educational) text brought to you by the BBC digs into the origins of a lot of english swear words.

 

Warning, many of the words are ones that would be filtered out here on the forums

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A753527

[Purgatorio]

From the above link.

A stronger British term for testicles, which rhymes with 'frollocks', is probably worth a guide entry of its own. To talk this word would mean to talk rubbish or to be misinformed, while to say something is 'the dog's...' (often gentrified as 'the mutt's nuts') would suggest it is the best there is. Legend has it that in the 1950s, construction kits like Meccano would be sold in boxes of various sizes. The list of contents which came with the standard size box would be headed 'Box, Standard' (which elided into 'bog standard' when spoken) and the larger box was the 'Box, Deluxe' which was spoonerised to create the phrase 'The Dog's B******s'. This is such a satisfying explanation for two common forms of British English usage that one really wants it to be true.

 

Fascinating....

I would like a Pom's opinion on the highlighted.

Edited February 25, 2007 by Purgatorio

[mkreku]

Have you ever seen two small children play? When they're at that age when they haven't yet fully grasped the language and lack vital aspects of the vocabulary? They are so slick and imaginative about it, they just don't let lack of words stop them from playing. If they play with something they don't know what it's called, they immediately come up with their own word for it, and the group quickly accepts it as the norm. It's amazing, how easy it is for the human brain to understand, learn and even create a language. I'm guessing that's how bad words (and all words) are created.

 

Besides, it would be fun to see some statistics about how many words are onomatopoeic in origin. We're like parrots.

[Walsingham]

Fethed if I know.

[metadigital]

From the above link.

A stronger British term for testicles, which rhymes with 'frollocks', is probably worth a guide entry of its own. To talk this word would mean to talk rubbish or to be misinformed, while to say something is 'the dog's...' (often gentrified as 'the mutt's nuts') would suggest it is the best there is. Legend has it that in the 1950s, construction kits like Meccano would be sold in boxes of various sizes. The list of contents which came with the standard size box would be headed 'Box, Standard' (which elided into 'bog standard' when spoken) and the larger box was the 'Box, Deluxe' which was spoonerised to create the phrase 'The Dog's B******s'. This is such a satisfying explanation for two common forms of British English usage that one really wants it to be true.

 

Fascinating....

I would like a Pom's opinion on the highlighted.

I've heard a competing version of the origin of "bog standard", apparently from the time of the European colonization of Africa, when the basic requirement for goods was that they were a minimum of British or German standards, which became BoG.

 

Have you ever seen two small children play? When they're at that age when they haven't yet fully grasped the language and lack vital aspects of the vocabulary? They are so slick and imaginative about it, they just don't let lack of words stop them from playing. If they play with something they don't know what it's called, they immediately come up with their own word for it, and the group quickly accepts it as the norm. It's amazing, how easy it is for the human brain to understand, learn and even create a language. I'm guessing that's how bad words (and all words) are created.

 

Besides, it would be fun to see some statistics about how many words are onomatopoeic in origin. We're like parrots.

In the neuroscientist anthropologist Dr Terrence Deacon's groundbreaking book on The Symbolic Species, which is subtitled The Co-Evolution of Language and the Human Brain, he argues that languages have undergone evolution under the Baldwinian effect, too, so that languages that are harder to learn have less chance of survival versus those that are easier.

 

Excellent book, btw, I recommend it very highly.