Cleaning up our language

 I am so sick of seeing nasty language everywhere I go. It's everywhere nowadays - social media mostly, but in the real world too - business communications nowadays are full of it, although it's mostly a different subset of nasty language than we see on social media, and I think for different reasons. 

It is said that profanity is the refuge of the uneducated, but I am not talking about traditional profanity here. 'Fuck' is a perfectly good Anglo-Saxon word; so is 'cunt', and we can find both in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, a book commonly acknowledged to be a great work of literature and one that is frequently forced upon school children.  Anyone who is still getting hysterical about these words is probably American, and would therefore do better to turn his attention to the deficiencies of his own country.

I am not talking about the kind of swearing that's sourced from religion, either. If you're a Christian, as I am, then you ought not to take the Lord's name in vain, and I have no problem with this, although I still struggle with it myself. If you're some other religion, I bet they have a similar stricture too.

I am talking about words that by their sheer inappropriateness, their monumental idiocy, are more offensive than traditional swearing could ever be. 

I have a selection of these words to look at today. They are arranged not in order of precedence or offensiveness, but in alphabetical order, because I'm a nerd.

F-BOMB

You can see this everywhere. I believe it originated in America, but it has tainted the speech of my own country, too. The reason it is so offensive is the complete failure of elementary logic it embodies.

Consider. If the word 'fuck' is too offensive to say, that can only be due to its meaning. It cannot be the sound of it, for no one has a problem with 'duck', 'tuck', 'buck' et alia. It therefore follows that it is the reference to the act of coitus that is offensive. How, then, is 'f-bomb' not equally offensive? It refers to the word that refers to the act of generation. So, if you find copulation so dreadfully offensive, just don't talk about it. The same applies to deliberate misspellings such as 'f*ck'. 

PASSED

This one always makes me want to scream. The only situation in which someone passes are if he is taking some kind of test or exam. When the verb is used transitively, it refers to something being excreted in a bowel movement. For the quibblers, getting through a military checkpoint is a kind of test. He DIED. He is DEAD. 

UNALIVED

I really think this is the most stupid of them all. It is used in place of the simple 'killed' We also see 'unalive' in place of 'dead'. It is offensive for exactly the same reason as 'f-bomb'. What is this lunacy? If you genuinely believe that your audience is so delicate that it will be traumatised by the very notion of death then don't talk to them about it.