Irritating when people try to draw our attention to otherwise banal things by exploiting the shock value of swearing.
People that swear liberally in everyday conversation irritate me intensely.
People that swear liberally in everyday conversation irritate me intensely.
Swear words communicate important and precise emotions that no other words can communicate.
I totally understand why some words aren’t appropriate in a given social setting but it doesn’t mean the words are forbidden. Also those words can hurt when they are directed towards someone and you have to be cautious with them. But sometimes you want to hurt someone, sometimes you want to shock your audience. Sometimes you just want to laugh.
We are animals full of emotions and we need precise words to communicate them rapidly.
I wouldn't call "fuck" precise. Its meaning is highly context dependent. Examples of use range from from disappointment (fuck) to anger (fuck you) to surprise (the fuck?) to delight ('merica, fuck yeah) to contempt (clusterfuck). It's closer to an intensifier than a precise denotation of a particular emotion, because it evades a precise meaning.
Other words certainly can communicate the same semantic function, but there isn't one that covers them all, even though shit comes close, which is a statement about the Freudian mind if there ever was one.
> Get over it.
Nah, people are different and you shouldn't get annoyed or irritated or tell people get 'get over it'; you can, but it's not very good for your health to care too much about stuff you cannot possibly change. Just don't hang with these people if you don't like them.
People not living in an english speaking country have a different appreciation of swearing in english as they are exposed to it differently: appart from our english classes at school we learn and hear english mostly in songs, movies, TV shows, even modern literature. We are pretty much inundates by the f-word which makes it more an innocent word than in britain and us english.
A few days ago I was doing some cleaning in the house. Usually I rather put music but this time I chose a tv shows instead. Bad idea, it makes you much slower. Bottom line is I chose action-drama Banshee randomly. It seems they literally say fuck or motherfucking every 30 seconds!
So my advice would be: before complaining of people living abroad and using the f-word, maybe you guys should clean your house and stop putting the f-word in every fucking piece of media you sell all over the motherfucking world.
Also swearing can be cultural. For example wear I live in Spain swearing is part of the normal language. Grandparents all say words like coño and de puta madre all day long and nobody seems to blink when their 4 year old kids do the same.
I am Spanish, can confirm. Also, the bleeping that you hear in American TV shows and the whole concept of F-bombs (or similar) sounds ridiculous and extremely prudish to us.