Cheesing Hell

Language is such a bitch, very much in the way that one person's "bitch" is another's "naughty word". It's just as subjective as philosophy, religion or social standing, and yet it's one of the key things that's supposed to keep us all united in the same frame of reference.

In the flashback portion of this post, I'll be taking you way back to my A-Level English Language days. I studied Sixth Form in my old High School, thus knew the teachers from the age of eleven. Therefore, reasons for not swearing in school were two-fold:

1) On some moral level, you didn't want the teachers to have a negative view of you as an uncouth, monstrous, little devil child.
2) On some selfish level, you didn't want to get detention.

During one of my first English Language classes at the A-Levelly age of sixteen, therefore, when asked to read out from a given sheet, one girl hesitated when she came to the word "shit". That dilemma hit. I could read her mind. 

"Do I say it and risk being told off for swearing in school? Do I say it as if it's just a normal word and no-one cares about its use? Do I skip it as if it doesn't even exist?" 

It was at this pause that the teacher stepped in and said the thing I made you read through all this expositional bollocks for, the thing that stuck with me in regards to my view on, not just "swear" words, but on language as a whole. 

"Don't be afraid of language. As linguists, we're here to study language, and part of that means looking at language which may seem bad, and why it may be used in this way." 

OK, that's not exactly what she said; please remember it was over six years ago that this linguistic epiphany came about, but that's pretty much the message I got from it. Now, I wouldn't particularly call myself a linguist. I don't study language for a living. If anything, I observe it as a hobby, and the fact that I do that just proves to you how boring I actually am. But the general point I'm trying to get across here is that I am not afraid of the various uses of language and all the linguistic possibilities that language has to offer. (Are you bored of me using the word "language" yet? You should be. Anyway...) The fact that I see little problem with words in this way makes me wonder why other people (who are not myself) do. This means I have to crawl out of this narcissistic shell of mine and take into account that, yes, there are other people on this planet, and yes, their minds do work differently to mine.

To explain the random mess of my mindstuff slightly less erratically, let's take a typically formally-unacceptable word. Pretty standard one: "fuck".

"Fuck" exists. You might like it, you might not. Whether you like it or not, it exists.
        Fuck.
        F-U-C-K
        /fʊk/
        fuh-uhh-kuh
It is fact in both combinations of written letters and phonetics. There is no denying the existence of the word "fuck". Complaining about the existence of "fuck" is like complaining about the existence of Simon Cowell: people may not like it, but nevertheless, it is fact.

However, when it comes to the meanings of words, "fuck" has - over time - adopted generally negative, unpleasant and occasionally uncouth connotations. Yet there is nothing within that set of letters, or sounds, to suggest such negativity. "F" and "U" both appear next to each other in the word "fun", while "C" and "K" can often be used to refer to items of stylish mens' clothing. Otherwise, the "CK" combination can be found in many words; one such word being "lucky", a fairly positive-feeling word, n'est-ce pas? Therefore, those who claim not to like the word "fuck" whenever it's used cannot possibly disapprove of the word itself, but rather the connotations it conjures up in their minds, which just seems totally ironic considering that those who disapprove of the word would, in fact, be the last people you'd expect to have such uncouth thoughts in their heads in the first place.

It's by this logic that I do not particularly regard "fuck" to be a "bad" word. In fact, I'd probably view it in the same way I view the word "baby" in that they both consist of four letters: three consonants and a vowel. That is, of course, only looking at the words as entities in their own right. If I were to look at the meanings of both of them, I'd view them differently, seeing as "baby" denotes a human infant, all cute and pudgy and running around and screaming the house down, whereas "fuck" indicates an expression of sudden shock that the irate parent may exclaim when the infant starts accidentally drinking bleach, or (in some respects) could refer to the physical action that functioned as a precursor to the resulting existence of the baby.

If, for some strange, fucked-up reason, the various meanings of "fuck" were reversed with that of another word - "cheese", for instance - then "fuck" would not actually be considered a bad word. If its meaning could be defined as "a dairy product made from curdled milk", "fuck" would seem like a fairly normal word indeed; whereas any use of the word "cheese" in television broadcasts before 9pm would be bleeped out, teenage boys would talk about "cheesing" as many girls as possible and the stressed out parent would scream "cheesing hell" as the baby's stomach turned inwards on itself after guzzling too much Cillit Bang.

Anyway, that was just my general observation on language as a whole. I don't really think there was any fucking point to this, except I do like the fact that it gave me an excuse to say "fuck" a lot.