Fuck off if you don’t like curses.

Today is a rant. While you might argue that most of what I write is a rant, today particularly comes from one conversation that infuriated me. I swear a lot in conversations. Not an unhealthy amount that would make people uncomfortable but enough to make a point. And every once in awhile I meet people who don’t appreciate it. And that’s what seems to be my problem.

Language is a tool for communication. It’s a means for taking what’s in your head and helping someone else understand it. Language is our only way to empathy. The ability to feel what someone else feels is an ability that does not come by easy and parallely, empathy remains one of the most important tools of nurturing human relationships. Which makes communication pretty darn useful.

This also means that language is cultural. The words that we use in a certain region might be very different from the ones we use in another region, even if the language remains the same. People from South Gujarat, from Central Gujarat, and from Kutch, all have a very different set of words they use on a daily basis. Language is defined by the places that we live in, the constraints that we have, and by the areas of life that demand the maximum communication.

This cultural dependency of language and it’s requirement to express the complete gamut of emotions makes way for what we call curse words. Now every language has them, abuses I mean. Words that are used to injure the other person emotionally. Words, that we are asked never to use for they are a taboo. But we still keep them, ready to be dispensed at the drop of a hat.

Curse words are a set of words that people generally look down upon. They are words that are categorized as “bad”, as an inherently flawed thing. And that makes me wonder about the real reason of doing so. Yes, I agree that in essence these words injure feelings and it is best to keep them at bay but to continue to feel that would mean to be completely ignorant of language development.

When I said that language is culturally dependant, what I really meant was it borrows from the times that we live in. Hardly do we find people who don’t say, “what the fuck?” the instant something unusual happens. “Fuck off!” is not a request for you to keep having sex, neither is it used only as an expression to ask you to leave. “Fuck off” has various emotional representations, all of which aren’t even fully discovered.

Fuck in itself with its versatile nature does the work of a verb (John fucked Marry), a noun (Marry is a fine fuck), an adjective (Marry is fucking beautiful), and an adverb (Marry is fucking riding away) while also helping express a wide array of emotions, like ignore (fuck if I know), trouble (I guess I am fucked now), aggression (fuck you!) and many more. It does the most grammatical heavy lifting by a single word than you can think of and yet, is categorised as bad.

We live in a world, that for its own righteous pleasure, would rather turn daft and dumb to language development than address the fact that it was wrong in its approach to begin with. We value utility far below we value the ability to call accuse someone of free speech.

Abuses, curse words, and the whole lot, form a critical part of language. They sometimes add an emotion that no other word is capable of adding and by doing that, become an indispensable and essential part of what language aims at doing, communicating emotions. And they do their job just as well as other words do.

So maybe we need to stop calling them bad. Call them something else that isn’t so unpleasant to look at. Call them something that could encourage people to call a fucking spade a spade. Because how we as a generation choose to express ourselves is going to define what our literature will look like and in turn everything that we document about ourselves, and I don’t think I would be very wrong in saying that we stand to lose immensely from a wrongly documented version of history.

Bad words are pretty just as long as we are. If our discussions are kept objective and free from the biases that otherwise creep in rather easily, curse words will find their place in representing frustration, anger, love, and remorse. We need to grow up to realise that most conversations fail not because people use bad words, but because they use bad language, a language that disrespects the other person’s viewpoint, discounts their need, and shows zero intentions of coming to a common conclusion. They can be kept humble if we all do one thing,

Try not being a cunt.