I curse, so I don't believe.

"The cheapening of profanity in modern America represents, more than anything else, the crumbling of belief. There are very few ideas left at this point that are awesome or frightening enough for us to enforce a taboo against them."

I love this quote because it really expresses a lot of thought relatively concisely. Alan Ehrenhalt, in his article "Maledictoratory, The high costs of low language," attempts an explanation as to why cursing is done so publicly in today's world.

I'm curious about what makes a word profane, so this article was actually very interesting to me. I have for a long time thought that it was only one's perception and use of a word that might make it profane. This article made me think again about that train of thought.

Ehrenhalt makes a good point when he notes that any culture needs a certain amount of taboos, if nothing else as "yardsticks by which ordinary people can measure...themselves." Like everything, society needs to see a "good and bad" angle on language. Good language is that which is used everyday in common society. Bad language is a curse word used to express extreme emotion. So why is it that that which was supposed to express extreme emotion is now casually tossed around between friends and family? Has humanity become so emotional in the last century that the casual use of words like f--- and damn is really called for?

Personally, I don't believe that for a minute. The nature of humans has always been to question and push boundaries, and I think that's all the deterioration of the modern language is. Frequent cursing used to only be seen among the "rebels" of society, those wacky kids that got tattoos and piercings in ungodly places, riding motorcycles and having a good time at life, regardless of society's taboos. These are the people that pushed boundaries and questioned what was right and wrong and traditional. They questioned society's beliefs and their own. Ehrenhalt is right when he says that casual cursing is a sign of disbelief. People today are losing faith in religion, in politics, in the general well-being of the world (and the people that inhabit it) around them.

I curse a lot, personally. For me, it’s more like a bad habit that started in 7^th grade. I think I agree so much with what Ehrenhalt writes because it explains why I started cursing freely, and I feel sure that others can connect with it as well. I wanted to push boundaries, to see how true my long-held belief was; that if I did say “damn” aloud, my mother would appear out of thin air, jump on me with a bar of soap in hand, and proceed to wash my mouth out.

Can anyone honestly say that they didn’t start cursing in a similar manner?