Freedom's Curse

I chose the article, “Freedom’s curse,” from the Atlantic. The article was about swearing and how some people think it is inappropriate and they censor TV. However, the writer argues that it depends on the way and context the word is used in. She also believes that “taboo words relinquish their literal meanings and retain only a coloring of emotion ,and then just an ability to arouse attention.” The article from the Atlantic states that words and phrases like close the fucking door, what the fuck?, holy fuck!, and fuck you violate rules in English, but they were just created to replace the phrases, closed the damned door, what in hell?, holy Mary and damn you. “Freedom’s curse” explains that they were replaced because religious profanity lost its appeal and those new words were created to replace it to express emotion.
The other article, “Shifty Talk” is about how frequently used words change and obscure words become popular. Researchers found 200 vocabulary word meanings and in 87 Indo-European languages then used statistics to compare how many of them had corresponding words in English, Russian, Greek and Spanish. They determined how many times the word changed in a given amount of time. In the article, they also determined how many times a word would change and predicted this. If words are constantly changing, like this article states that words such as dirty and turn change nine times in 10,000 years it makes sense. For example, they changed the phrases holy mary and damn you to holy fuck and fuck you. The words change as the languages get older, and “Shifty Talk” says that this data is useful in the sense that you could retrace the history of major language families, reconstruct ancient tongues and predict what words will undergo future alterations. Those phrases that were mentioned in “Freedom’s Curse,” went through alterations because the writer thought they no longer expressed emotion. This article, “Shifty Talk,” supports that languages and words undergo a change as time goes by and language and linguistics change.
Shifty TalkBruce Bower. Science News. Washington: Oct 13, 2007. Vol. 172, Iss. 15; p. 227 (2 pages)