15 to religion cursing, blasphemy aims to attack the religion directly. These verbal
assaults would take the form of using the Lord‟s name in vain or cursing the deities.
3.
Obscenity
According to Jay 1992, obscenity is a legal of laws which has a function to protect the listeners. He states, “To call a word obscene means that it cannot be
used freely; it is subject to restriction; and to use such speech is to risk sanctioning from the courts.” Obscene words are considered the most offensive and are rarely,
if ever, used in public media. Examples: fuck, motherfucker, cocksucker, cunt, or tits.
4. Vulgarity
Vulgarity means the language of the common person, “the person in the street”, or the unsophisticated, unsocialized, or under-educated. Being vulgar is to
be common, not bad or evil. In other words, vulgarisms are not necessarily obscene or taboo, they just reflect the crudeness of street language Jay, 1992.
Example: snot, bloody, up yours, booger, slut, piss, crap, kiss my ass, snatch, on the rag, puke.
5. Epithet
According to Jay 1992, epithet is a disparaging or abusive word or phrase accompanying or occurring in place of the name of a person or thing. He also adds
that epithets are brief but forceful bursts of emotional language and powerful in presentation loudness or duration and in offensiveness than other types of
cursing, for example, joking. The epithet is uttered from frustration, a sense of PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI
16 hostility or replacement of physical aggression. Epithets may also be habitual in
nature, for example, someone always says the same word or phrase when someone hurts hisherself.
Examples: shit, damn, hell, son of a bitch, goddamn it, up yours, fuck you, fuck off, piss off, Jesus Christ.
6. Insult and Slur
Jay 1992 says that insult and slur are verbal attacks or the words to harm
other people by the words alone. He also adds that they both function to hurt the person directly through the particular words or phrases. According to Jay, slur
may be racial, ethnic, or social in nature and indicate the stereotyping or prejudice of the speaker, meanwhile, insults may denote the physical, mental, or
psychological qualities of the target and are commonly heard on the school playground.
Examples: pig, dog, bitch, son of a bitch, jackass, sow, whore, slut, bastard, homo, fag, queer.
7. Scatology
According to Jay 1992, scatological is something of or relating to excrement or scatology. Jay states scatological terms refer to human waste
products and processes. He also adds that scatology is the study of excrement or interest in or treatment of obscene matters.
Examples: poo poo, ka ka, poop, turd, crap, shit, shit ass, shit for brains, piss, piss pot, piss off, fart.
17
B. The Use of Swear Words
Although some people consider swear words taboo, the swear words and taboo words are different. Karjalainen 2002 claims that not all of taboo words
are swear words although words are taboo, for instance, cannibalism which is considered as taboo but there is no swear words derived from that theme. Ljung
2011 also thinks that taboo words and swear words are two different things. In defining the use of swear words, he states that there are four criteria common to
all instances of swearing. First, swearing is the use of utterances that contain taboo words. The use of taboo words in swearing adds emphasis to the message the
speaker wishes to convey. At the same time, swearing frequently violates cultural rules. Second, while the literal meaning of these taboo words is indeed used in
swearing, they do not carry much weight. Third, due to lexical, phrasal, and syntactic constraints, swearing is considered a type of formulaic language. Finally,
swearing constitutes an instance of reflective language use that reveals the speaker‟s attitudes and feelings p. 4
The point number two of Ljung‟s criteria underlines that taboo in the user of swear words might be referred to anything else which is possibly not taboo.
Shit , for example, refers to “feces”. Yet, in utterance “put that shit in your bag”,
the word shit might refer to “something which is considered unpleasant” p. 17.
At the third point, Ljung emphasizes on the formula of grammar which means the meaning are not simply from the composing word. The utterance “what the fuck
do you mean?”, for instance, is understood from the grammatical form rather than from each composing word p. 19.
18 Furthermore, the fourth point of Ljung‟s criteria notes that by uttering
swear words, the speaker deliver “direct expression of the speaker‟s attitude what heshe is speaking about”. It contains emotive function which might be identified
by some features of expletive interjections, emphasizer, and expletive slot-filler for example: “I need the bloody hammer” p. 21. He explains that expletive
interjections generally express surprise, pain, fear, anger, disappointment, and even joy, for instance, Shit, Damn, Fuck, Son of Bitch, etc. In addition, Jay and
Crystal note that expletive interjections are often considered to be basically cathartic which means not aimed primarily at others but expresses speaker‟s
reactions to different mishaps and disappointments as cited in Ljung, 2011, p. 30. Meanwhile, emphasizer is often used in the form of swearing as a following
noun for example, I need a glass of water, not a bloody bathtub, emphasis after and interrogative WH-word for example: What the hell are you doing?, and
forms of infixation in a word Absobloodylutely, Infuckingcredible, etc or a phrase Shut the fuck up p. 34. Infixation is the process of inserting an infix
Nordquist, 2015. Thus, expletive slot-filler indicates that the speaker use the swear words as adverbial or adject
ival intensifier for example: It‟s bloody marvelous, they drove damn
fast, etc. and adjective of dislike He‟s a bloody fool p. 34.
Above all, swear words are used in the context which indicates what the words mean further than their literal meaning. To gain the meaning behind a word
or a sentence, semantic and pragmatic fields might be suitable to be applied. Griffiths 2006 describes the study to analyze the context of word‟s use:
