My cousins have recently become extremely religious. I don't mean like they started going to church every Sunday, I mean like they cleared out their iTunes and started speaking in tongues. I'm not knocking on anyone's religion-- that's a whole other issue-- but I find that many people take it to an extreme, and do so forcefully to the point where they don't even act naturally anymore. I'm all for believing in something that you find brings you peace of mind and all that.. what I don't understand are followers who don't practice what they preach.
I recently went out to a local fair with my cousins. During this outing, I found that my self-proclaimed holy and "saved" cousins made several insulting comments about people walking around, including fat comments and racist jokes. All the while, these jokes included random pauses and gulps that would confuse anyone into thinking my cousins suffered from Tourettes concealed by a slight stutter. With this newfound holiness in their lives came a change in speech, where they claim to no longer use "curse words,"-- except they still do and just claim not to. This is where I'm confused.. now instead of calling someone an "asshole," they refer to them as an "a-hole," which essentially carries with it the same meaning; & instead of saying something is a "piece of shit," it is now a "piece of sh-uh-ih."
Now I'm definitely not an expert on the bible, but I'm pretty sure that the problem Christianity has with the words "fuck" and "shit" has nothing to do with the phonemes involved in forming them. I'm assuming the point of not cursing is to provide a "holiness" about your speech and be "proper" and "dignified" and whatnot. I'm not exactly sure how replacing the last 2 letters of a word with "dge" provides for a higher standard of holiness-- the underlying intention is still there. I find that "curse words" are nothing more than a combination of letters, just like any other word, that allow for further expression of ones' speech, and I have absolutely no problem in taking advantage of these variations in letter combinations to express myself.
Obviously, as with everything else in life, everything in society has its time and place, and I'm not going to waltz into the office talking about how the movie last night was the shit and how the ending was a total mind-fuck... but I also don't condemn this sort of speech. If you do choose to denounce it, though, as my cousins have made claims of doing, then stick with it and don't find little ways to get around pronouncing the last syllable of a word when the same intention remains. |
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