Lovely embedded cartoon about people borrowing trouble melting down over an inoffensive word that reminds them of something else that they'd like to be offended by, if only they could catch someone saying it out loud instead of simply understanding that they're probably thinking it really, really hard.
"I can't keep up with you kids and your crazy vulgarity."
There's a genuinely interesting philosophical problem here what makes a word mean something. For example, when the boy says, "Your team whomps" and the other boy gets offended, we all know why. We know what the first boy meant. Even if the word "whomp" has no denotation, it definitely was being used to connote meaning in all of those applications -- and all of those meanings were vulgar.
ReplyDeleteIn a sense, then, you might say that the word does mean something -- it means something vulgar, since that is the only way in which it is used and also the essential purpose for its use. It doesn't mean any vulgarity in particular, but it does mean some vulgarity.
Against that argument, you can raise the problem that the word really doesn't denote anything. It has no etymology, no history, no language in which it is rooted and from which it draws its meaning. It only has connotations, and that is the way in which you might say that 'it doesn't mean anything.'
People substitute other words for vulgarities all the time. Jumping Jehoshaphat! Fudge! Dagnabbit! Goldurnit! are just a few examples off the top of my head.
ReplyDeleteIn the cartoon, the invented word, Whomp!, was a generic, one word substitute for all the vulgarities kids are "forbidden" to say.
At least, that's my impression.
In my family, "whomp" has always meant to hit something (or someone), usually used when narrating the event after the fact. "So all of a sudden, I heard a whomp! against the back window, and sure enough, a big ol' dove had hit the glass."
ReplyDeleteI've never been certain if it was a dialect term (Scots-Irish via Louisiana and East Texas) or something made up that flowed down the generations.
LittleRed1
When someone says "darn it," of course we know what they "mean." (It reminds me of the send-up of evangelical comic books in which the Angel solemnly intones, "Yes, Bobby, your friends' souls have been darned.") We also know they're not being vulgar.
ReplyDelete"Let's Go, Brandon" means "we have neither confidence in nor respect for the President-or-whatever, and still less for his media lapdogs." That does not make the sentiment vulgar, only unwelcome. Anyone may find the unwelcome sentiment insulting, but to claim it's coded vulgarity is plain silly. It's like arguing that a reference to "limbs" is a coded but vulgar evocation of the "legs" that no proper Victorian should name. The objection is not to the mode of expression but the expression of a taboo concept.