A Study of Profanity

As this is a site based largely on the literary arts and the tools of the trade are words, I would like to perform a study on some of them. Brought up from our banter on Douche bags with Scumbag_brain and two of the mods. I am not attempting to usurp their decisions nor influence how the site is run. It is a private enterprise and they may run it as they wish. This is simply for curiosities sake on the heels of an interesting discourse.

As a few of you may know I am fascinated with peoples stigmatization of a few words simply for their uncouth nature. I don't hold the various collections of sound to be particularly offensive, so I can't make heads or tails of everyone's big deal over it. So I call upon the great minds herein to assist. I know we've discussed how we personally view profanity and to a certain extent, there seems to be a general consensus that profanity in it's correct place is alright. My question is that, as a society creating these rules of etiquette, we seem to censor words for their potential to offend now.

An example I'd like to bring up is in the Douche-bag discussion; Douche-bag is perfectly accepted as a word with a specifically targeted meaning however the actual word itself is to associate with the used cleaning products of women implying a dirty or disgusting emotion in the context of the female sex organs, and another word was brought up, Faggot, which has a dual meaning of both an inconsiderate person and a homosexual. The decision rendered was that the word shouldn't be used to offend the former group for fear of accidental association to the latter. Which I find interesting.

We all know the definitions of words change. I think the writers of South Park summed up the status of the word Fag quite nicely as denoting inconsiderate peoples and not homosexuals. I think Jag and Dealing With It made the safe and correct call by disallowing it's use for it's potential to offend. However I'd like to pose these question to the audience for my own curiosity:

What is the definition of the word faggot to you? and what association, if any, does it have to homosexuals?

Should a word be not be used or even censored based only on it's potential to offend?

What about other words of dual meaning? Such as calling someone retarded or associating them with various sex organs of either gender.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/RolePlayGateway/~3/ih1AYJuysJw/viewtopic.php

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