Thursday, April 10, 2008

Decay of Language!

My idea revolves around the decay of language. For someone like me, who does not use profanity, I've found that the range of words that are considered "appropriate" is shrinking... and fast. It's becoming more and more difficult for me to avoid using profanity, because it seems as if almost every word has some alternate, vulgar meaning. I remember when there were only four or five obscene words that I could think of. But now I'm finding out that "trick" is a bad word? People who curse, intentionally or not, are taking more and more words for their own usage, leaving the rest of us to scramble to find words that have not yet been contaminated. If this trend continues, I'm afraid that one day there will only be four or five words that are not profane, leaving myself with a diminished vocabulary. For instance, if someone says "balls" or "screw", the first things that come to mind for very few people are a bunch of baseballs or a household tool. So... yeah. That's my idea. I'm thinkin' of making some kind of dictionary comparing normal word definitions to modern, vulgar definitions, but I don't know. I might need help 'translating' some of these, too. I mean, "trick", "clit"...? What the heck do these words even mean...?

3 comments:

Unknown said...

I highly recommend urbandictionary.com, keep in mind that since they're all user-submitted and not moderated like Wikipedia, some definitions may be weird to just plain wrong, you may have to read a few for a word to fully make sense.

Christina / tide & bloom said...

So, you're making like an actual dictionary? Like a physical book? Or an online website? Or...?

Hale said...

I think it is exaggerated to say that you are left with a diminished vocabulary. Knowing that English has more than 475,000 words, I don't think your worry is legit. Think more, I think you need to develop it.