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Concept
Profanity
Summary
Profanity, also known as cursing, cussing, swearing, bad language, abusive language, foul language, obscenity, expletives, vulgarism, or vulgarity, is a socially offensive use of language. Accordingly, profanity is language use that is sometimes deemed rude, obscene, or culturally offensive; in certain religions, it constitutes sin. It can show a debasement of someone or something, or be considered an expression of strong feeling towards something. Some words may also be used as intensifiers.
This term derives from the older, more literal, sense of "profanity." This refers to sacrilege, or a lack of respect for things that are held to be sacred, which implies anything inspiring or deserving of reverence, as well as behaviour showing similar disrespect or causing religious offense.
The term profane originates from classical Latin profanus, literally , pro meaning and fanum meaning . The term profane carried the meaning of either "desecrating what is holy" or "with a secular purpose" as early as the 1450s. Profanity represented secular indifference to religion or religious figures, while blasphemy was a more offensive attack on religion and religious figures, considered sinful, and a direct violation of the Ten Commandments in the majority-Christian Western world. Moreover, many Bible verses speak against swearing. In some countries, profanity words often have pagan roots that after Christian influence were turned from names of deities and spirits to profanity and used as such, like famous Finnish profanity word perkele, which was believed to be an original name of the thunder god Ukko, the chief god of the Finnish pagan pantheon.
Profanities, in the original meaning of "blasphemous profanity", are part of the ancient tradition of the comic cults which laughed and scoffed at the deity or deities: an example of this would be Lucian's Dialogues of the Gods satire.
In English, swear words and curse words like shit have a Germanic root, as likely does fuck, though damn and piss come from Old French and ultimately Latin.
Official source
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