The word "damn" has a long and complicated history. How it entered the English language and answering the questions how, when and why it has come to mean the things it does is difficult to answer. It can be used to mean condemn or condemn specifically to hall (by God), and can be used as mild profanity. Tracing the road damn has traveled to become both a religious term and a swear word shows many interesting features of language and the ways in which language are used.
The word damn entered the English language from the Old French word damne-r during the Middle English period and first appeared in writing in the early 14th c. (OED s.v. damn). In Latin the word dampnā-re meant to damage, hurt or condemn, which, with the suffix con-, meaning together or intensive, became the French and English word which is more or less condemn. It did not get its current spelling until the sixteenth century; before it was sometimes spelled or . It is now spelled and pronounced /dæm/.
To address what the word originally meant, we must look at what types of word it was and who was using it when it was first borrowed into the language. Most of the early appearances of damn in writing are religious texts. It first appeared in Cursor Mundi (OED s.v. damn 1), a middle English poem describing the history of the world based mostly on the Christian Bible. Because so many manuscripts of this poem have survived, we can assume that it was popular (Watson 334), so it was likely influential as well. The OED quotes this text twice in defining damn, once as “[t]o pronounce adverse judgement on, affirm to be guilty; to give judicial sentence against” (OED s.v. damn 1 a), and once as “[t]o condemn to a particular pena...
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Kearse, Randy “Mo Betta. Street Talk: Da Official Guide to Hip-Hop & Urban Slanguage. Fort Lee: Barricade Books, 2006.
Metzger, Bruce, M. The Bible in Translation: Ancient and English Versions. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2001.
Rawson, Hugh. Wicked Words. New York: Crown Publishers, 1989.
Smith, Jeremy J. “The Use of English: Language Contact, Dialect Variation, and Written Standardization During the Middle English Period”. English in Its Social Contexts. Eds. Charles T. Scott, Tim William Machan. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. 47–68.
Watson, Nicholas. “the Politics of Middle English Writing”. The Idea of Vernacular: an Anthology of Middle English Theory 1280–1520. Eds. Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, et al. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999. 331–352.
Raffel, Burton. and Alexandra H. Olsen Poems and Prose from the Old English, (Yale University Press)Robert Bjork and John Niles,
The way you can express the word ‘fuck’ is overwhelming. It could be used for fun, to express anger, and just about every other way you could think of. Personally, I use it in just about every sentence while speaking and typing. I feel like it’s a huge stress reliever for me.
May, Robert. “Lesson 6: The Early Modern Period.” English 110S Course Notes. Queen’s University. Kingston. Summer 2010. Course Manual.
In these readings, the word is used to express frustration and anger as well as a sense of being abused and forced to endure. Sonia Sanchez uses the compound motherfucker/motherfucka to emphasize her disdain of whites in the poem TCB (Taking Care of Business). At the end of that poem however she says “now, that is sed. Let’s get to work” (Sanchez 723). This seems to have used the “fuck” as a cathartic mechanism to vent her frustrations. Once these frustrations are unleashed Sanchez conveys her willingness to “get to work” on the issues she has with the cursed whites. June Jordan uses fuck to describe both the physical and mental rape that occurs in her “Poem about My Rights”. Disgust with a French law that stated if a man penetrates a woman but does not ejaculate then he is not guilty of raping her, Jordan responds to this with asking if she smashed his head in with hammer and he and his buddies fuck her that she consented because they did not ejaculate. She then states how this “fucked me over” (Jordan 767) because she is in the wrong place at the wrong time and the wrong color skin so she must have wanted to get
African American Slang has had many other names: Ebonics, Jive, Black English, and more. The Oxford English Dictionary defines slang (in reference to language) in three different ways: 1) the special vocabulary used by any set of persons of a low or disreputable character; language of a low and vulgar type 2) the special vocabulary or phraseology of a particular calling or profession; the cant or jargon of a certain class or period 3) language of a highly colloquial type, considered as below the level of standard educated speech, and consisting either of new words or of current words employed in some special sense. Whatever one’s perspective on slang, it is a natural and inevitable part of language. In this paper I will discuss examples of current slang being used that some people may not understand.
Have Curse Words Become So Common They Have Lost Their Shock Value?Curse words started being used in school and are used against one another, but now students talk as if there is no meaning to them.In my opinion I think that curse words are used too much because, curse words are supposed to be used when you are mad, they are used in every sentence, and people curse everyday.
Though it may seem like military talk, the profanity is really used to cover up how they are feeling. The use of the profane words helps solidify how difficult the times were during one. During a tunnel check Lee Strunk crawled out meeting his comrade’s words, “Right out of the grave. Fuckin’ zombie.” (274) While it seems they are joking around with death, shortly after Ted Lavender is shot and killed by a sniper while using the bathroom. Again described by “Oh shit, the guy’s dead” (275) Profanity is used today as an emphasis on description. In both the war and on paper it is easy to feel the tension of the men and the situation that they are in.
Sakenfeld, Kathaine Doob, ed. The New Interpreter's Dictionary of the Bible: D-H: Volume 2. Vol. 2. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 2007.
How can I ever forget a time when I said a swear word in front of my mom. I was at the grocery store shopping with my mom and cousin. I was already upset because I got in trouble at home already. My cousin just kept messing with me and making fun of me and I just told her to “shut the fuck up.” Don’t you just hate those nagging little cousins that laugh at everything? I tried to say it as low as possible but my mom has ears like a hawk. Man I swear I never got slapped so hard a day in my life. From that day forward I swore that I wouldn’t say any swear words ever. Do you ever wonder where swearing words originated from? Or even people views on how they feel about them? Barbara Lawrence has an issue with swearing words because people use different terminology such as: “Broad”, “chick”, “piece of tail” and other sorts of harmful words to downgrade women. Bill Bryson on the other hand says that swear words are merely considered bad because they are considered bad. A similarity that both Lawrence and Bryson have is when they mentioned the word “ficken”, which is a German or Latin word meaning f***. The difference between the two are that Bryson explains the different words the Romans created and used over 1,500 years ago and Lawrence explains that some
There are still people that go to church and don't cuss and cares about there family vale and try to keep that away from their kids as long as they can.they want the censor stuff for there kids.Cursing
GREENSPOON, LEONARD. “Biblical Translators in Antiquity and in the Modern World: A Comparative Study.” Hebrew Union College Annual, vol. 60, 1989, pp. 91–113. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/23507839.
The Holy Bible: giant print ; containing the Old and New Testaments translated out of the original tongues ; and with the former translations diligently compared and revised, by His Majesty's special command, authorized King James version ; words of Chri. Giant print reference ed. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan Pub. House, 1994.
Geoffey Chaucer lived from 1343-1400, and during that time wrote multiple works (Smith 7). Chaucer’s language soon became the new standard for writing, for which it differed from Modern English by the pronunciation of long vowels (Weiner 1). “For example, Middle English’s “long e” in Chaucer’s “sheep” had the value of the Latin “e”, which sounded like the Modern English’s “Shape”” (Weiner 1). And while his writing poses multiple similarities to the English spoken today, it still provides enough difference to see the change with the years in between. Without his work, many linguists would not have a clear understanding of how the linguistics shifts within Middle English itself
Have you ever wondered where the names of the different items you use daily came from? Or listened to people talk and find a particular word interesting or odd and wonder why it has become part of our English language? The English language that we speak today has developed as a result of many different influences and changes over thousands of years. The resulting changes to the English language can be split into three time periods that include, Old English or Anglo-Saxon, Middle English and Modern English which is commonly used today
Baugh, A.C., & Cable, T. (2001). A history of the English language (5th ed.). Abingdon, UK: Routledge.