Profanity is a socially offensive use of language, which may also be called cursing, cussing, swearing, or expletives. Accordingly, profanity is language use that is sometimes deemed impolite, rude, indecent, 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.
A noun is a word that generally functions as the name of a specific object or set of objects, such as living creatures, places, actions, qualities, states of existence, or ideas.
In linguistics, an adjective is a word that modifies a noun or noun phrase or describes its referent. Its semantic role is to change information given by the noun.
English grammar is the set of structural rules of the English language. This includes the structure of words, phrases, clauses, sentences, and whole texts.
Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Someone who engages in this study is called a linguist. See also the Outline of linguistics, the List of phonetics topics, the List of linguists, and the List of cognitive science topics. Articles related to linguistics include:
Bloody, as an adverb, is a commonly used expletive attributive in British English, Australian English, Irish English, Indian English and a number of other Commonwealth nations. It has been used as an intensive since at least the 1670s. Considered respectable until about 1750, it was heavily tabooed during c. 1750–1920, considered equivalent to heavily obscene or profane speech. Public use continued to be seen as controversial until the 1960s, but since then, the word has become a comparatively mild expletive or intensifier. In American English, the word is used almost exclusively in its literal sense and is seen by American audiences as a stereotypical marker of British English, without any significant obscene or profane connotation.
A dummy pronoun is a deictic pronoun that fulfills a syntactical requirement without providing a contextually explicit meaning of its referent. As such, it is an example of exophora.
German declension is the paradigm that German uses to define all the ways articles, adjectives and sometimes nouns can change their form to reflect their role in the sentence: subject, object, etc. Declension allows speakers to mark a difference between subjects, direct objects, indirect objects and possessives by changing the form of the word—and/or its associated article—instead of indicating this meaning through word order or prepositions. As a result, German can take a much more fluid approach to word order without the meaning being obscured. In English, a simple sentence must be written in strict word order. This sentence cannot be expressed in any other word order than how it is written here without changing the meaning. A translation of the same sentence from German to English would appear rather different and can be expressed with a variety of word order with little or no change in meaning.
Ughele is an Oceanic language spoken by about 1200 people on Rendova Island, located in the Western Province of the Solomon Islands.
The phrase expletive deleted refers to profanity which has been censored by the author or by a subsequent censor, usually appearing in place of the profanity. The phrase has been used for this purpose since at least the 1930s, but became more widely used in the United States after the Watergate scandal.
The following is a list of words and formulations commonly used as profanity throughout Romania.
In linguistics, an intensifier is a lexical category for a modifier that makes no contribution to the propositional meaning of a clause but serves to enhance and give additional emotional context to the word it modifies. Intensifiers are grammatical expletives, specifically expletive attributives, because they function as semantically vacuous filler. Characteristically, English draws intensifiers from a class of words called degree modifiers, words that quantify the idea they modify. More specifically, they derive from a group of words called adverbs of degree, also known as degree adverbs. When used grammatically as intensifiers, these words cease to be degree adverbs, because they no longer quantify the idea they modify; instead, they emphasize it emotionally. By contrast, the words moderately, slightly, and barely are degree adverbs, but not intensifiers. The other hallmark of prototypical intensifiers is that they are adverbs which lack the primary characteristic of adverbs: the ability to modify verbs. Intensifiers modify exclusively adjectives and adverbs, but this rule is insufficient to classify intensifiers, since there exist other words commonly classified as adverbs that never modify verbs but are not intensifiers, e.g. questionably.
Like natural languages, the constructed language Esperanto contains profane words and indecent vocabulary. Some of this was formulated out of the established core vocabulary, or by giving specific profane or indecent senses to regularly formed Esperanto words. Other instances represent informal neologisms that remain technically outside the defined vocabulary of the language, but have become established by usage.
Universal is an Esperantido, a constructed language based on Esperanto. It has inclusive and exclusive pronouns, uses partial reduplication for the plural, and inversion for antonyms. Inversion can be seen in,
An attributive verb is a verb that modifies a noun in the manner of an attributive adjective, rather than express an independent idea as a predicate.
Profanity in science fiction (SF) shares all of the issues of profanity in fiction in general, but has several unique aspects of its own, including the use of alien profanities.
An expletive attributive is an adjective or adverb that does not contribute to the meaning of a sentence, but is used to intensify its emotional force. Often such words or phrases are regarded as profanity or "bad language", though there are also inoffensive expletive attributives. The word is derived from the Latin verb explere, meaning "to fill", and it was originally introduced into English in the 17th century for various kinds of padding.
The aggressive is a verb construction that occurs in the Finnish language, especially in emotional outbursts. It expresses negation or rejection and resembles a negative clause, but it lacks the Finnish negative auxiliary. Instead, the aggressive is often marked with an obscene word, which tends to be seen as a distinctive feature of the construction. The aggressive has playfully been described as a grammatical mood by the inventor of the term, but the construction operates on the syntactical level and morphologically the verb is in a regular mood. It is only found in the vernacular, with the written examples almost always being an example of code-switching.
Swedish profanity can be divided into several categories. A substantial number of curse words in Swedish have religious origins. Euphemistic variants of the religious curses are commonly used as well. References to genitalia or bodily functions are common in the Swedish profanity vocabulary. Notably, no word for sexual intercourse is commonly used in invectives, unlike many other languages. However, calques of English fuck using knull (noun), knulla (verb) do occur; this comes across as more offensive than fuck does in English. In general, knull(a), along with genitalia slang words like kuk ('cock') and fitta ('cunt') are the most offensive single words. By contrast, most of the traditional religious profanities are not considered very offensive today; this is in line with Sweden's long-standing secularism.
An expletive is a word or phrase inserted into a sentence that is not needed to express the basic meaning of the sentence. It is regarded as semantically null or a placeholder. Expletives are not insignificant or meaningless in all senses; they may be used to give emphasis or tone, to contribute to the meter in verse, or to indicate tense.
