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Bonus 63: What makes a swear word feel sweary? A &⩐#⦫& Liveshow
🕑 Added 2022-05-05 22:35:13 +0000 UTCSwear words often have an emotionally charged meaning, but that can't be the only factor - after all, there are polite versions of some swear words, such as "excrement" instead of "shit", and words that are treated as swears in some languages but not others, such as "cholera" in Polish and Dutch but not English. It kind of seems like a swear word is a word you have a memory of getting in trouble for...which both explains why swear words might not feel "real" in a language you learned later in life, and also why you can still feel weird about words kids are sometimes forbidden to say, like "shut up" and "liar".
In this bonus episode, originally recorded live through the Lingthusiasm Discord, your hosts Lauren and Gretchen get enthusiastic about your sweary questions! We talk about why it's so hard to translate swears in a way that feels satisfying, how swears and other taboo words participate in the Euphemism Cycle, a very ambitious idea for cataloging swear words in various languages, and more!
Announcements:
The LingComm grants have been announced! Thank you so much to everyone who made this possible, and congratulations to all our grantees. Go check out their projects as they keep rolling out over the rest of this year for a little more fun linguistics content in your life.
Here are the links mentioned in this episode:
- Our first sweary bonus episode - 'Real swear words vs pseudo swears'
- Our second sweary bonus episode - 'The grammar of swearing'
- @simongerman600's kid friendly swear words tweet
- @ProficientMinds's tweet about ordinary words that were taboo in childhood
- Etymonline entry for 'fiddlestick'
- Lingthusiasm episode 'Colour words around the world and inside your brain'
- Sharon Henderson Taylor's paper on the Euphemism Treadmill (Content Note: contains discussions of ableist slurs)
- The Strong Language
- Lauren's posts on Strong Language
- Gretchen's posts on Strong Language
- Clip of 'Bon Cop, Bad Cop' swearing lesson (French subtitles, English dub)
- On cross-sensory phonetics - Lingthusiasm Bonus 'When letters have colours and time is a braid - The linguistics of synesthesia'
- Lingthusiasm episode 'The grammar of singular they - Interview with Kirby Conrod'
- Arnold Zwicky’s blog post about 'libfix'
- Wikipedia entry for 'libfix'
- Etymonline entry for 'nostril'
- Lingthusiasm episode 'How languages influence each other - Interview with Hannah Gibson on Swahili, Rangi, and Bantu languages'
You can listen to this episode on this page, via the Patreon RSS or download the mp3. A transcript of this episode is available as a Google Doc. Lingthusiasm is also on Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter. Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com or chat to us on the Patreon page. Gretchen is on Twitter as @GretchenAMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic. Lauren is on Twitter as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.
To chat about this episode and other lingthusiastic topics with your fellow linguistics fans, join us on the Lingthusiasm Discord server.
Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, our production assistant is Martha Tsutsui Billins, and our production manager is Liz McCullough. Our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.
Comments
I can’t remember if I heard of this from Because the Internet or somewhere else, but there’s a good/funny paper on this: https://cla-acl.artsci.utoronto.ca/wp-content/uploads/actes-2018/Dow-2018.pdf
Tanner Gore
I think the pronunciation is different tho, sussy has the same vowel as suspicious, so I’m pretty sure it’s just ”sus“ + “y“ whereas bussy, cussy rhyme with p*ssy. Thrussy is a counter point because I think it can rhyme with sussy or p*ssy. But still -ussy has a strong link to orifices and sussy is more easily explained by just being sus (an already common abbreviation of suspicious) and -y (a very common adjective ending).
About the -ussy thing, during the last year there was the word "sussy" that was a meme in the among us/amogus community
