No Such Thing as Dirty Words

I don't believe there is such a thing as "dirty words." Think about it, why are some words "dirty"? What makes them dirty?

Words are not intrinsically good or bad. Do you believe in magic words? To believe in dirty words is the flip side of a belief in word magic.

Word magic is a very old human superstition. Look at abracadabra, hocus-pocus, open sesame. In Old English (or Anglo-Saxon) times, there were charms you could say, for example, to cure a stitch (a pain in one's side), and there were curses (magic spells placed on a person whom you wanted to harm). Hopefully we don't believe in charms and curses anymore, yet we still insist on ascribing a magical power (rather than absolute neutrality) to some words. (If you want to stop and analyze human behavior in which we ascribe special efficacy to words, blessings are an example of "good" magic words that many believe in. Note that much worship is done in a special or even dead language--Hebrew, Latin, Coptic, Old Church Slavonic--and the priest knows the special, or "magic," words to say.)

The aversion to many "dirty" words is really just a matter of our being uncomfortable with talking about certain things—specifically the sex act, body parts, body functions, and bodily secretions. An English anthropologist has a very interesting theory to explain some of this: he says we are uncomfortable with bodily secretions (for example) because they pose an ambiguous case as to whether they are "me" or "not-me." One might reply to this that we ought to be similarly uncomfortable with hair clippings and fingernail clippings. And maybe we are: Orthodox Jews will flush fingernail clippings down the toilet while saying a special prayer.

But why are the "clinical" terms (for example, urine) somehow nicer than the four-letter, Anglo-Saxon words (for example, piss)? Somehow the clinical words are more detached, since they are "learned," often Latin words.

Note: This posting is an abridgement and reworking of an article titled "Dirty Words and Magic Words," IDEAS, Dec. 1990.

Copyright © 2009 by Richard Stein