Poetry, Language and λόγος
Anyone brought up in a strict religious home will know something of the pleasure of swear words. Not as vulgarity, perhaps as a sweet moment of rebellion, but mainly because being denied them gives you a strange awareness of their sonic pleasure. The best ones are a syllable, they always start with a soft consonant, a sliding sibilant or labiodental that thumps into a hard consonant like a guttural. It’s like the vowel is pressured into a kind of projectile and hurled through the chamber of the first consonant into the flat wall of the second, giving a kind of pleasurable release, like a pain free punch of a wall with your fist, a bowstring pulled back and twanged into a target with a whack. fffffffffff — K
My point is swear words mean very little, the s word or the f word can be used interchangeably after oh… and while they might have slightly different uses, one sexual one fecal (like a kind of merism of vulgarity), they both tend towards a sort of onomatopoeic signification of a pure vented emotion. F you, you S.
This is means of introducing the importance of the distinction between vowels and consonants. Ancient sacred texts in languages such as Hebrew or Arabic both originally wrote using only consonants, and it wasn’t until later that scribes added the…
