Were “curse” words always curse words? Or did they evolve into non-socially acceptable words overtime? If so, when did this cultural change happen?

by Millertym2

(This is mainly focused on the US/Western world, but I’d love to read answers about other cultures/regions as well.)

Muskwatch

There's a few things I can say on this topic. No word has always been what it is, they all evolve into their current meanings over time. This means that for any given curse word, it has arrived as it's meeting at some point or gradually developed the sense of taboo that some cultures have around certain words.

The second thing I can say is that not all cultures have a taboo type attitude towards certain words. A very common thing that I and many others have been told by Cree elders is that our language does not have curse words. I've asked this of some other indigenous language speakers and received the same answer from some other communities, well if you have told me that they do have curse words. Think of it this way: increase I can call you a dog, and I'm being mean or even incredibly rude, but you don't have the same sense of shiver or feeling of wow did he just use that word? You might still feel shocked at the rudeness, but not at the daringness to use a specific word. This seems to be if not confined to European languages, at least far more prevalent in European languages. At least in part this is linked to the strongly dualistic worldview that Western civilization has inherited from Greek and similar philosophy going back to the time of the presocratics. Has your language historically been associated with Christianity? You probably have swear words.

I should that I'm making a bit of a distinction between words that express anger or hurtful words like calling someone an idiot or a bastard, and words that are just considered curse words like tabernac and fuck or jeez.

There's a reason I go back to dualism rather than christianity is because the swear word type taboo seems not to be a biblical thing or even an early Christian thing. When the Bible says not to take the Lord thy God's name in vain (both old and New testaments) it's talking about making promises and keeping them. At some point this took on a different meaning and now we don't say Gods name as a swear word.

If you look in to swear words you often find they are related to power and control systems, for example the power of the church in Quebec led to religious swear words, and while I don't know if it's true or not, I've seen arguments that the Norman invasion led to English's stereotypical "Anglo-Saxon" swear words.

My own nation's language, Michif, is a mixed language with Cree verbs and French nouns, and we do have swear words or curse words, though nothing like the french language our forefathers spoke.

The last thing I'll add us that we also have the positive equivalent, have you ever heard someone tell a kid "say please!" People always ask me how to say please in the language I teach and are surprised that there isn't a way, or a way to say you're welcome. These are sort of our magic words to make something polite and I believe represent the same type of dualism applied to language.

One other aspect of this that I haven't gotten to is the way in which many different communities place taboos on using or saying the names of the dead. If you're in a community that names people after items and then stops using those words after they die you definitely have strong taboos around words, but I don't really know anything about if this leads to the same type of curse words or not. I expect that it would, for example using the name of a dead person in an inappropriate context would have a very risque/taboo result. I've never seen anything written about this so can only speculate. I similarly have no idea whether or not Polynesia, from where we get the very term taboo, has taboo words i e curse words or swear words in their languages. I hope this is answered your question to some extent.