Language Variation in Speech

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 .” 15 Jay also interprets religious taboos in his profanity and blasphemy category. There is an assumption that profanity and blasphemy mean the same thing but if one examine the intent of each speech form, he will see that they are different. According to Jay 1992, 3 profanity is related to the secular or indifferent to religion. Thus, to be profane means to be secular or behaving outside the customs of religious belief and to be ignorant or intolerant of the guidelines of a particular religious order. An example of profanity would be a word or phrase which seeks not to denigrate God, religion or holy affairs but would be based more on ignorance of or indifference to these matters. The examples are like “Jesus Christ, I’m hungry” and “For the love of Christ, get off the phone ” Whereas, blasphemy aims directly at the church and obtains scorn via the power of the church. Therefore, blasphemy would appear as a direct attack on religious figures re religious authority. The examples of blasphemy are “Screw the Pope ” and “Shit on what it says in the Bible” However, most theories do not make distinction between these two. Another category proposed by Jay is taboo. Jay 1992, p. 4 argues that a taboo operates to suppress or inhibit certain behavior, thoughts, or in this case, speech. Thus, taboo words are sanctioned or restricted on both institutional and individual levels under the assumption that some harm will occur if a taboo word is spoken Jay, 2009, p. 153. Further, Jay 2009, p. 154 describes that taboos in English are placed primarily on sexual references blow job, cunt and on those that are considered profane or blasphemous goddamn, Jesus Christ. Taboo extend to scatological referents and disgusting objects shit, crap, douche bag;