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Caius -> RE: So, if you don't believe in God.... (5/19/2010 11:21:30 AM)
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A little bit of context and empirical fact to support what most of us sense intuitively -- expletives are not exactly language in the strictest sense. They typically don't communicate complex ideas, but rather a state of mind. In this regard they are closer to a facial expression than they are to an utterance of language. We all have some understanding of this fact -- though the OP's question clearly shows we vary some in how literally we take the actual words employed; though notice that even the OP wrote the term as one word, rather than two constituent parts -- but it's interesting to note that neuroscience confirms it in a number of ways. The areas of the brain employed in these utterances contain only so much cross-over with those used for complex language; in fact, people who have suffered types of brain trauma that render them unable to understand or form speech (constituting a broad category of conditions called aphasia) still typically can curse to their heart's content -- and good thing since if anybody is going to need that release,it's going to be them. And speaking of release, the purpose is often just that; studies have shown that people can often endure pain for significantly longer periods if they curse as opposed to saying a 'neutral' word or talking conversationally. A good 'fuck' (talking about the word, not the act here for once) can relieve stress or allow emotions to return to a 'base' (that is, unexcited) state faster, by stimulating areas of the brain that operate in the complex intersection of emotion, sensation, parasympathetic nervous responses, social expression, and a slew of other mental and physiological functions.
So indeed such terms as the OP has brought into question serve as perfectly acceptable expletives exactly because they aren't granted any special weight by the nonbeliever. If they did, then their use might be inhibited by the fact that other cognitive/linguistic functions would be excited by their use and the person would move to something less likely to cause this interference (as evidenced by the people we all know or have at least met who will 'fudge' but not 'fuck' and 'shoot' but not 'shit' because of their sense of propriety. I've occasionally come to some heated arguments with some who take exception to my occasional cursing of the deific nature; if only they heard the likes strings of expletives I sometimes omit towards my computer or whatever other inanimate object that might happen to be vexing me -- I'm quite certain I could make some of them literally puke. However, for the sake of common compromise, I do try to inhibit this response in public spaces. However, when I, or anyone else, slips in this manner, I consider it beyond bad form for another party to try to shame the curser -- to me that has the air of trying to impose one's religious views upon another by sheer social force, something I find infinitely more offensive than any single word of any language that I've ever heard -- and I once came across a term that is supposed to represent the smell of the ass of a skunk during mating season. Yeah.
The thing that really gets me about people who take exception to these words is that the prohibition, like so much of language prescriptivism ( http://www.collarchat.com/m_3194469/mpage_4/tm.htm ) seems so arbitrary. For most the concept is put across as "That is for God alone to judge", "You're telling the Almighty what to do." or, even more commonly, "He simply doesn't like it" with no explanation whatsoever. If once, just once, someone said to me "I like to avoid it because God is love and I don't believe he wants you hating any part of his creation so much that you'd ask him to damn it" then I would go to extraordinary efforts to accommodate them. But no, for most people it is clearly a matter of pointless indoctrination to a set of arbitrary guidelines for behaviour all tightly and confusedly enmeshed with the notion of an unquestionable authority. So they can just suck it.
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