They get scared. They get angry. They get frustrated. And, every so often, they need to let a bad word fly. Why go through the effort of replacing curse words individually when you can employ a blanket term?
Trump was in part elected for being similar in presentation and appearance to an everyday person, but his uncensored use of language has accelerated the normalization of curse words on television, and even further, the American dialect. There may be push back on this by politicians and other public figures, seeing that vulgar language makes the position feel less prestigious and official, this shift may see to benefit content creators. Upon the normalization of the language, this opens up the door for further official, institutionally approved usage.
Swear words hold a unique position in the human language, in that their usage alone changes the message, rather than just the literal dictionary definition. Swear words, in the right context, can make scenes more emotional, tense, or funny. In the short run, an accelerated rate of acceptance appears to be beneficial for content creators, but this is most definitely not the case in the long run.
The restriction makes them more appealing, and absolute freedom to use them may ruin the mystique, and in turn, the power of these words.
Incidentally, the conventional use of the dash also referred to as blank because of the space left between letters led to the swearing euphemism blankety-blank toward the end of the s. Using symbols for swears has a long history some even think it traces back to Ancient Egypt, as so many things do. The tykes were characters in The Katzenjammer Kids , a comic strip from the early s. The first recorded use of symbolic swearing occurs in a episode of the comic, where the impish Katzenjammers mess with Uncle Heinie on a ladder.
Over the decades, the comic-strip world so embraced swear-symbols that in the s the cartoonist Mort Walker devised the tongue-in-cheek term grawlix to describe them. Whichever way the papers censored the F-word, no reader could have been in any doubt what the word was. Each editor clearly felt their readers might have been offended had they read it uncensored. Tastes change over time but for most papers the rule of thumb when it comes to swearing is: if in doubt, leave it out.
The Sun or the Mirror are unlikely to follow suit as it would be commercial madness with circulation and advertising revenue on both titles under pressure. The UK-wide success of the Metro and city-centre Manchester Evening News proves people will still pick up and read a newspaper.
0コメント