| | : What does meaning have to do with anything? Offensive words like cunt are offensive because they used offensively. Cunt just as technically means [[woman]].--[[User:Prosfilaes|Prosfilaes]] ([[User talk:Prosfilaes|talk]]) 00:03, 30 December 2012 (UTC) | | : What does meaning have to do with anything? Offensive words like cunt are offensive because they used offensively. Cunt just as technically means [[woman]].--[[User:Prosfilaes|Prosfilaes]] ([[User talk:Prosfilaes|talk]]) 00:03, 30 December 2012 (UTC) |
| | :: It's a feature of European/Judaeo-Christian-Islamic culture. There are other culture in which there is no offensive/non-offensive version of sexual/excretory terms. Most South American Indian languages have only one term for sex organs, which is considered merely descriptive and non-offensive; speakers are surprised to find out that Westerners do have "offensive" and "non-offensive" versions of those, which to them are as strange as it would be for us to have an offensive and a non-offensive word for "eye" or "nose" or "elbow". An anecdote: a missionary translating religious text into one of these languages felt uncomfortable with the fact that there is only one word for "to have sex" in that language. It is a transitive verb, taking the man as the subject and the woman as the direct object; the best English equivalent in terms of syntactic structure is {{term|fuck|lang=en}}, but without offensive connotations; but because of this clear structural parallelism, the missionary "felt" that the bad connotations were there (even though they weren't), so he introduced the practice of using another verb to also mean "have sex" -- a verb that had previously been used only to mean something like "to make (something) bad, rotten", "to spoil" (also "to betray"). So he literally introduced the practice of saying "he spoiled her / made her bad, rotten" to mean "he fucked her". The speakers apparently found that funny and, last I heard of it, were actually using this word in this new sense, following the missionary's lead. --[[User:Pereru|Pereru]] ([[User talk:Pereru|talk]]) 00:40, 30 December 2012 (UTC) | | :: It's a feature of European/Judaeo-Christian-Islamic culture. There are other culture in which there is no offensive/non-offensive version of sexual/excretory terms. Most South American Indian languages have only one term for sex organs, which is considered merely descriptive and non-offensive; speakers are surprised to find out that Westerners do have "offensive" and "non-offensive" versions of those, which to them are as strange as it would be for us to have an offensive and a non-offensive word for "eye" or "nose" or "elbow". An anecdote: a missionary translating religious text into one of these languages felt uncomfortable with the fact that there is only one word for "to have sex" in that language. It is a transitive verb, taking the man as the subject and the woman as the direct object; the best English equivalent in terms of syntactic structure is {{term|fuck|lang=en}}, but without offensive connotations; but because of this clear structural parallelism, the missionary "felt" that the bad connotations were there (even though they weren't), so he introduced the practice of using another verb to also mean "have sex" -- a verb that had previously been used only to mean something like "to make (something) bad, rotten", "to spoil" (also "to betray"). So he literally introduced the practice of saying "he spoiled her / made her bad, rotten" to mean "he fucked her". The speakers apparently found that funny and, last I heard of it, were actually using this word in this new sense, following the missionary's lead. --[[User:Pereru|Pereru]] ([[User talk:Pereru|talk]]) 00:40, 30 December 2012 (UTC) |
