Musings in Search of a Muse

Minced oaths - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: "Minced oaths are corrupted forms of (usually religion-related) swear words that originally arose in English culture sometime before the Victorian Age, as part of the cultural impact of Puritanism after the Protestant Reformation. The censorship caused people to develop a wide variety of minced oaths to avoid swearing on holy names. They were used for swearing and other types of interjections. With time they came to have a mildly comedic effect."

So when one says "By George!" meaning "By God!" or Cripes! meaning Christ!, is this taking the Lord's name in vain? I was thinking about that because I finally got around to sending the definition of frigging (root word frig) to a friend of mine. When researching a suitable definition of frigging I came across that great excerpt above. We had been talking about language, one of my favorite subjects, and I was reminded of one of my favorite classroom incidents:

Class broke up early and the kids were chatting while I graded some papers. I heard one of my favorite students use the F word so I hollered over "William Josephs!" (not his real name). He said "Sorry, Mr. Hunt" to which I replied "Pick another word, please."

He went back to his conversation and substituted friggin' for the offensive word. "William Josephs!" I hollered again. "That's a bad word, Mr. Hunt?" he replied. I told him "If you aren't sure, don't use it," then told him to grab a dictionary and come to my desk.

After looking up the word he said "Hey, that's as bad as the other one!" To which I assured him that since it was likely only he and I were the only people in the school who knew that it was okay to use it, but to remember its power and not over use it.

The only word that really makes me uncomfortable to use in any situation is the N word. Some words make me uncomfortable to use or hear in different situations, but I firmly believe that with over 300,000 words in the English language alone we have choices that can fit any situation and don't need to rely on the same seven all the time (that number is arbitrary and is a tribute to the great word master, George Carlin). Words have tremendous power when used with correct connotation.

Words also evolve, sometimes by not-so-intelligent design - but that's another issue (see bowdlerization for one example). Once bloody was a really nasty word but is now rather mild. Few dictionaries even acknowledge the word's history. Maybe the F word will be as mild one day. Apparently frigging is on its way there. Hopefully minced oaths have evolved enough that they aren't 3rd Commandment violations.