“A rose by any other name…” But you can change the connotations a given word has, if you want, because words are just placeholders for concepts around us. You cannot change concepts by switching their labels around. Look at it this way: I am not trying to make murder more acceptable, simply by calling “murder” by another name such as “wexelflugen”. In grand Orwellian fashion, you propose to make odious words acceptable by simply indoctrinating people.
But now I think I see what you are doing. PASCAL: You are persuasive, but servants of the Devil often are. No one will ever be offended by “dirty” words again, because there will be no dirty words! We would have a society in which censorship would be nonexistent, and in which freedom of expression would reach new, unexplored levels. I propose to remove an arbitrary system of “word regulation” from our society, because doing so will make our society that much better. SOCRATES: Not at all, my bridge-dangling friend. PASCAL: You propose an end to all that’s decent! SOCRATES: Ah, but there’s the rub: how will they know which words are obscenities and which are not? What if society refuses to sort this out for them? Proper people will always be aghast at the mentioning of obscenities. How could such an action harm society? Wouldn’t it help, in the sense that no one will ever again feel mental distress when that particular word is pronounced within earshot? It means, simply, “sexual intercourse”-if taken as a verb-or “I am very displeased” if taken as an interjection. Well, we are society, all of us, are we not? What if we simply said that “fuck” is hereby no longer a “dirty” word. SOCRATES: Why not? We’ve already shown that a word like “fuck” offends only because society arbitrarily says so. There are always words that will be vulgar you cannot make them less so. SOCRATES: Can you really believe that allowing certain words to become less vulgar would mean that all society would crumble?
PASCAL: Society would become unraveled in its place would be. If we allow vulgarities, the whole framework is weakened significantly. PASCAL: The foundations of society rest on certain conventions, certain morals. SOCRATES: It can’t be tolerated? How come? What would happen if you did show tolerance? After all, that particular word denigrates what is actually a solemn bond between man and wife. SOCRATES: So you would agree, would you not, that being offended by a word like “fuck” is a completely arbitrary, learned behavior? One must learn correct etiquette, the right manners. SOCRATES: So being offended by “fuck” must be learned. They haven’t been raised in an English-speaking culture, so they don’t know that the word isn’t proper. PASCAL: Oh, uh…well, they don’t know it’s a vulgar word. SOCRATES: But we agreed that being offended doesn’t come from the meaning of the word. PASCAL: They wouldn’t know what the word means. SOCRATES: But do you mean that literally? Everyone? Would a person who speaks no English be offended? SOCRATES: For what reason? Is there some intrinsic property of the word that offends you…perhaps the way the word rolls off one’s tongue? Or perhaps you hate the word because it scores 13 points in a game of Scrabble, and 13 is an unlucky number? PASCAL: OK then, it is not the content of the word that offends, but the word itself. SOCRATES: So the content of a word like “fuck” is not what offends, after all. Would the word “sex” offend an ordinary person, a person that…perhaps…had not written the Pens ées? SOCRATES: But how does such distress come about? Do the concepts cause distress? It is not physical harm that such language can cause, but mental harm. I am simply at a loss to understand how any word, any single morpheme, could possibly harm anyone, apart from the word being delivered at a dangerous volume level.
SOCRATES: But why? Does the sound of a voiceless labiodental fricative preceding a mid-back, unrounded vowel and followed then by a voiceless velar stop somehow produce a dangerous resonance pattern that could damage the eardrums of unsuspecting people? Decent people would hate to hear such rubbish. SOCRATES: What exactly does that mean? Would the word, if heard, harm the listeners in some way? PASCAL: The word f-, uh, the word you mentioned, is obscene. SOCRATES: But why not? The word simply means “sex” or “intercourse” and you can say those words on the air. SOCRATES: And I bet you think that we shouldn’t be able to say “fuck” on television? SOCRATES: What, you don’t like hearing that word? PASCAL: Well, there are certain words you can’t say on TV.
SOCRATES: They just bleeped a word on my favorite show!
0 kommentar(er)
