I found this amusing brief article amusing.
Taken from Esquire’s May 2009 Issue:
THE PURPOSE OF SWEARING is to cause a small explosion. To get the right bang, you need to plant the right charge. In our bag, we carry George Carlen’s seven dirty words (shit, piss, fuct, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, and tits) with twat, prick, and fuckface added for good measure. Honest cursing serves three basic functions:
Abuse:
Go with simple noun forms (twat, prick, cocksucker); compounds (“motherfucking tit pisser” or “cunt-licking shit-for-brains”) will only undermine your seriousness.
Blasphemy: Let the cotext do the work. Calling your neighbor’s nosy nine year old boy a prick or even a “shit sniffing faggot” will have a leveraged impact; so will using tits with reference to police officers. (“Sugar tits” works especially well in that context.)
Expressiveness: Mix forms and context. Be playful, bold, counterintuitive. Shout “Tits!” or “Ass hair!” rather than “fuck” when you hammer your thumb.
Finally, a word about fuck: in too many cases, it’s just a signifier of unhappiness – “fucking pain in the ass,” “fucking bullshit,” “Al fucking Gore” – with no potency. For optimal impact use fuck sparingly and with unusual imagery (“Did he just finger-fuck me?”) or for reverse the conventional forms (What a freaking fuck show”); alternatively, multiply it (“fucking four eyed fuck”).
The Following is an Apology from Esquire:
In the “How to Curse” section of our May 2009 feature, “How to Skin a Moose,” we presented a parody of extreme profanity and its users, contrasting exaggerated examples of offensive language with ordinary situations. The target of the parody was profanity itself and not the various people who might be its object, including gay people. But we used a particularly offensive phrase we shouldn’t have. It certainly was not our intent to cause pain. Judging from the reaction, we did. For that we are sincerely sorry.
