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4.2.1. Taboo Words or Swear Words Uttered Descriptively
The utterances in this section contain descriptive taboo words or swear words. Descriptive here means that the taboo words still refer to their literal meaning. Literal
meaning itself is the state of affairs or situation in the world an expression represents Frawley, 1992, p. 2.
Considering this condition and Ljung‟s criteria of swear words, it is impossible to form swear words with taboo words which are still bound to their
literal meaning. Here are the utterances which contain descriptive taboo words: 1 “
Okay, I was thinking one night about the words you couldnt say on the public, ah, airwaves, um, the ones you definitely wouldnt say, ever, []cause I heard a lady
say bitch one night on television, and it was cool like she was talking about, you know, ah, well, the bitch
is the first one to notice that in the litter Johnie right” Each word bitch has literal meaning in the context of this utterance
since presumably Carlin relates the word bitch and the word „litter‟. The
presupposition is that he means a female dog in the litter by using the word bitch. This utterance is considered constative since there is only locution in this
sentence and has no illocutionary force. Hence, Carlin merely does the act of saying for the taboo words which means they are not used in offensive way.
2 “
And, uh, bastard you can say, and hell and damn so I have to figure out which ones you couldnt and ever and it came down to seven but the list is open to
amendment, and in fact, has been changed, uh, by now, ha, a lot of people pointed things out to me, and I noticed some myself.”
There are three taboo words in the utterance above i.e. bastard, hell, and damn. The word bastard is considered secular taboo which belongs to
ancestral allusion. This word has a sense of a terrifying notion about eternal
47 punishment, damnation. In the context of this utterance, those three taboo words
interpretatively own their literal meaning. This utterance is also constative which means it is a locution since it does not perform illocutionary force, further more
the do not have emotive function. 3
“ The original seven words were, shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker,
and tits .”
This utterance contains all taboo words banned by FCC to be featured in public airwaves. The word shit and piss belong to bodily effluvia theme.
Although these two words share the same theme, the word shit is considered more indecent than piss since it is more solid. The word cunt and tits belongs to
intimated part of the body theme. Meanwhile, the word fuck, motherfucker, and cocksucker
belong to sexual theme. This utterance is a locution and has no illocutionary force. In other word Carlin is merely doing an act of saying and no
act in saying illocution. 4
“ And now the first thing that we noticed was that word fuck was really repeated in
there because the word motherfucker is a compound word and its another form of the word fuck
.” In this utterance Carlin explains morphologically the word fuck and
motherfucker . It makes sense since the word motherfucker, as well as the word
fuck , belong to sexual theme. However, the word motherfucker is considered
obscene. Hughes states that this word represents the violation of the most extreme sexual taboo and was claimed as the wicked term p. 320. From this
idea, it can be derived that the word motherfucker refers to “person engaged in
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