Tatiana: I think the emotional context/projection works the other way too. A benign word used poisonously, or a poisonous word used benignly. I once heard a female expatriate in another country sitting in a restaurant publicly use a local swear-phrase as an interjection. I don’t think she would have used it had she known the literal meaning, or the etymology.

I almost did a spit-take when I heard it from a female voice.

I went to a military school for a while, and we had a joke about going home for vacations, and saying “pass the ____ peas” at your family’s dinner table, and wondering why everyone is looking at you strangely.

I had occasion to hang out with a group of friends who served as correctional officers. They all used the most foul language constantly as a matter of course, so that it was robbed of all power or emphasis. What they meant by “m… f…” was roughly what I mean by “guy”, for example. Are they swearing or not? To them it was completely ordinary. But I couldn’t help but feel it indicated a lack of respect, at least. It made me uncomfortable, anyway. Worst of all is when those words began to pop into my head to use myself, if not caught in time by my internal filter. I didn’t like it and I wished they would clean it up, at least around me. But all I did was pretend not to hear or notice, and try to be careful not to slip myself.

I feel like swearing just sounds trashy. Not particularly evil but just ill-spoken, disrespectful of those around, and of the speaker as well. To me it indicates low standards in general. But is this a real moral difference between us or just a class distinction? I’m not really 100% positive.

Leaving aside your tone of self-righteous condemnation, and going to my tone, I always say “frack” as a joke, and never as an expletive. I don’t use it as a cuss word – I use it more as a way to signal to others I’m a Battlestar Galactica fan.

Words have spirit, and essentially are spirit things, because the spoken sounds (sound waves) or written scripts (ink on paper, or scratchings on wood/metal) are merely tags attached to a concept, and it is the concept that is essential to the thing’s meaning, not the tag.

I’d even venture that the emotion and spirit projected by the speaker give more weight to the meaning of his spoken words than mental intent or literal definitions.

I grant that your intentions are pure.

But communication requires that both the speaker and the hearer agree on a roughly common meaning for a word.

I can’t arbitrarily say that the word “prison” refers to a paradisiacal place and expect others to get that same meaning (or expect that they won’t get that meaning if they hear me muttering to myself) without some kind of explanation.

Like it or not, the most common use of “Frak is as a substitute for the F-word, popularized on the TV show “Battlestar Galactica.”

And, Tatiana, I’m afraid the same thing is true for OMG (although to a lesser degree — not everyone agrees about what the G in OMG refers to. But the most common meaning is certainly taking the name of the Lord in vain).

I read in some 19th century novel, perhaps it was Anthony Trollope, where one gentleman swore “You can go to the d___l!” and the publisher spaced it out like that. When I realized they were protecting me from having to read strong language like that, I was seriously glad, and I felt relieved and protected (laughs). I’m so glad there’s still such thing as polite society, where people do care about things like this.

Jon