13 officialese style and slang style. Officialese style employs scientific terms such as
nutriments referring to food while slang style employs nosh, a slang term for food. From the Table 2.1, it can also be seen that both slang and taboo style have
similiar pattern but the addition of word fucking in the sentence makes slang style changes into taboo style as fucking is offensive and categorized as taboo word.
d. Dirty Words
Terminology dirty word is quite tricky since there are many different labels proposed by scholars and experts. Expert such as Jay 1992, p. 1 uses the term
cursing in his Cursing in America to refer to “all sorts of dirty word usage”
though he knows that it might be “somewhat inexact.” Then later in his other studies, he refers what he calls previously as cursing as offensive words see Do
Offensive Words Harm People, 2009 and taboo words see The Utility and Ubiquity of Taboo Words, 2009. While another expert such as McEnery see
Swearing in English, 2006 proposes the terms bad language and swearing to refer the same notion. Other experts may use swear words or forbidden words as
well see Fägersten, 2012; Allan and Burridge, 2006. Noted by Fägersten 2012, p. 1 the term that she calls swear words have many alias such as bad words, curse
words, cuss words, dirty words, four-letter words, expletives, epithets, obscenities, profanity, blasphemy, bawdy language, foul language, rude language, vulgar
language, or taboo language. Kaye and Sapolsky 2009, p. 431, as cited by Fägersten 2012, p. 5, admit that the use of variety of broad terms
interchangeably is “to avoid repetition” and seemingly no other reason than that.
14 What language and words are perceived as dirty, foul or bawdy in a culture
having connection with what is considered taboo in the culture itself. Like taboos, the condemnation of some words as dirty and inappropriate is a social construct.
Thus, the concept of taboo is necessary to discuss. According to Allan and Burridge 2006, p. 1 there are several topics of taboos including bodies and their
effluvia; the organs and acts of sex, micturition and defecation; diseases, death and killing; naming, addressing, touching and viewing persons and sacred beings,
objects and places; food gathering, preparation and consumption They consider that some taboos are specific for a certain culture, but many are almost universal.
Those taboo topics construct dirty words and people use dirty words for many different purposes. Jay 1992, p. 2-9 divides them into ten categories which
are cursing, profanity, blasphemy, taboo, obscenity, vulgarity, slang, epithets, insults and slurs, and scatology.
Cursing, literally, means calling upon divine or supernatural power to send injury upon someone. According to Jay p. 2, the intent of cursing is to invoke
harm on another person through the use of certain word or phrase which are imbued with power granted through religious or social demarcation. The
examples of religious curses are damn you, goddamn you, to hell with you. Nowadays, those religious curses may be replaced by expressions like screw you
or go fuck yourself. Such curses are now expressing hostility or anger and their denotative meaning is not really important. Other curses that are non-religious but
still wish harm to the target person can be found in “eat shit and die” and “I hope
you break your neck .”
