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incognito124 19 hours ago

English is my second language, but all the examples in TFA* seem... mild. I wonder if they were filtered for the purposes of the article, or profanity just became more widespread in the past 50 years.

* = :)

mzk185 19 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Swearing was taken as more severe back then. The F word was legitimately nuclear in polite company in the 1960s. But these things evolve. In Puritan times, “damn” would have gotten you two days in the stocks but “shit” and “fuck” we’re just uncouth.

Today it’s identity slurs that are untouchable, which is an improvement because a lot of those words are legitimately hurtful and really shouldn’t be used casually.

And there are languages like Korean and Japanese where there are no profane words at our level of severity but there are ways of saying things that will end your career, e.g. certain second person pronouns and verb inflections that no one uses these days but are still recognized as viscous attacks.

nomel 19 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Yes, as any old person will tell you, everyone is rude and disrespectful these days (by comparison).

maybewhenthesun 19 hours ago | parent [-]

The eufemism treadmill works bot ways. Eufemisms loose their politeness. Swearwords loose their strength (to be replaced by new ones). Language changes. I don't think people are inherently more rude and disrespectful.

"The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise." - Socrates