Why did people ever make up bad words.?

Question

Why did people ever make up bad words.?

Answer 1

check a few of these searches in yahoo search curses derivation

pluck you Pluck Yew (Origin of 'The Finger') - Netlore Archive

... how one of the most popular curses in the English language, not to mention ... the other hand, is of Latin derivation and there is no known linguistic ...

urbanlegends.about.com/library/bl-pluc... - 22k -

Comments: Pay no attention to the pseudo-academic bluster about pheasant pluckers, labiodental fricatives and the English longbow; this is a clever and amusing spoof, not to be taken seriously.

Jesse Sheidlower, author of "The F-Word" (Random House: 1999), says the "totally ludicrous" tale erroneously conflates the etymology of the word **** with an older bit of folklore, itself questionable, purporting to trace the origin of the European "two-finger salute" (roughly analagous to "f***************d" in America) back to the taunts of British archers against the French during the Hundred Years' War.

Etymologists say f_ck found its way into the English language from Dutch or Low German during the 14th century and made its first written appearance around 1500. The word pluck, on the other hand, is of Latin derivation and there is no known linguistic connection between the two English words. It's doubtful the expression "Pluck yew" was ever uttered before 1996, when this apocryphal story first went into circulation online.

The middle-finger gesture, which has apparently had phallic connotations in every culture in which it has been used, is much older. We know it dates back to ancient Greece, at least, where it was referenced in "The Clouds," a play written by Aristophanes in 423 B.C. It was also well known to the Romans, who referred to it variously as digitus infamis ("infamous finger") and digitus impudicus ("indecent finger"). In all likelihood its origins were prehistoric.





  



Puttin’ on the Dog

Adventures in the Idioms of Our Mother Tongue

by James Breig





Eighteenth-century Americans enjoyed blessings in disguise and built castles in the air, but none lived on Easy Street or ever put on the dog. They kicked the bucket but never knocked at the pearly gates. They knew mum’s the word, but kept nothing under their hats. Which is to say that they enriched their speech with idiomatic expressions that still trip from our tongues, but that some of the colonial derivations given for old folk phrases turn out to ring hollow.



“Blessings in disguise” is a British expression recorded in 1746 and a phrase that could well have been used in colonial Williamsburg. So could have “castles in the air,” an expression that dates to the sixteenth century. “Easy Street,” however, did not grace the language until 1901, in the book Peck’s Red-headed Boy, and “putting on the dog” is a nineteenth-century coinage. “Kicking the bucket” is defined as dying in the Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, published in 1785 by Francis Grose. But “pearly gates” did not signify the entrance of heaven until just before the Civil War. William Shakespeare wrote of “keeping your own counsel,” in Hamlet, 1602, and “mum’s the word” is recorded in 1704. But we did not begin to “keep things under our hat” until about the 1940s.

Adventures down the byways of our language are, of course, among the things that attract us to the streets of Colonial Williamsburg. Visitors can travel back in time by riding in carriages, donning three-cornered hats, and admiring a gunsmith make a musket or a silversmith etch a salver. But among the more cerebral ways to recapture the feeling of the eighteenth century is to listen to costumed interpreters speak the words and phrases of that bygone time and to distinguish them from ours.

In a sense, eighteenth-century English is a foreign language, and learning to use idioms deepens the understanding of a tongue. Though Americans of that era had expressions and sayings we use today—such as “one foot in the grave,” “the powers that be,” and “waste not, want not”—they also employed slang, clichés, and idioms that would baffle us. For example, Gouverneur Morris, an early United States ambassador to France, told William Short, a Virginia protégé of Thomas Jefferson, not to “kick against the pricks,” and John Adams, writing from Europe, informed his wife, Abigail, in Massachusetts that he would take a “virgin” to bed if he got cold. Morris meant that Short shouldn’t fight a cause that is lost and Adams was employing a British vulgarism for a hot-water bottle, something he explained later in his letter to the distant Abigail.



“Blockhead” derives from wooden forms used to make and maintain wigs. - Colonial Williamsburg  



Where the street is named for the Duke of Gloucester, the man in the street—an early nineteenth-century idiom—has a lot to learn about colonial neologisms and Virginia verbalizations. Interpreters don lutestrings, an eighteenth-century dress of glossy silk, and spencers, a kind of wig, and pepper their conversations with words like “blockhead,” a term derived from the wooden wig stands used in the 1700s. They also take care to avoid linguistic old wives’ tales—an expression in use in the eighteenth century.

Myths arise and get passed about as gospel, a process sped up, extended, and given a sheen of authority by the Internet. For instance, though “blockhead” is an authentic expression, “flipping one’s wig” did not appear until the twentieth century.

“Sleep tight” does not trace to beds with ropes pulled taut by such tools as the one shown. - Dave Doody



Many a visitor to bedrooms in the homes of Colonial Williamsburg has been told that “sleep tight” derives from tightening the ropes on which mattresses rested 250 years ago. It makes a good story, but it’s not true. “Tight,” as an adverb, means “soundly,” “snugly,” or “closely,” so the expression means “sleep well.” This use has lasted into our times, as anyone knows who has seen The Wizard of Oz. Glinda the Good Witch tells Dorothy to “keep tight” inside her ruby slippers. And who hasn’t responded to a telephone caller asking for help by saying, “Sit tight; I’ll be right over.”

There is a propensity not to let the facts stand in the way of a good story, and the enchantment of folk etymologies is sometimes so strong that boneheaded derivations are cheerfully propagated by people who know better, or have at least cause to. Sold in Williamsburg is a durable old pamphlet about eighteenth-century expressions that, after disclaiming pretension to academic accuracy, retails, pig-in-a-poke, word origins collected willy-nilly from tourists and guides. By the way, Chaucer gets credit for recording “pig in a poke” and “willy-nilly” was put to paper by Middleton in 1608.



A “powder room,” as the booklet says, was a closet where a man or woman of the 1700s could have a wig repowdered, and “slipshod” did mean “shod in slippers” and therefore slovenly. So far, so good. But the author says “big shot” derives from colonial cannon being fired when someone important came to town. In fact, the term wasn’t used in America until the 1920s. Nor does “spooning” come from young eighteenth-century men whittling spoons to keep their hands occupied while courting. The word came into use in the 1870s.

A more popular gaffe is “putting on the dog,” which the booklet says came from a colonial custom of making shoes or gloves out of dog skin. That sounds like a fascinating fact from our pre-Revolutionary past, but research in sources like the Oxford English Dictionary shows the expression is no older than the 1860s and probably traces to wealthy people with lapdogs. An 1871 reminiscence titled Four Years at Yale demonstrates that the phrase had become college slang by that time. The book says: “To put on dog is to make a flashy display, to cut a swell.”



A “powder room” was an apartment where wigs were dressed. - Colonial Williamsburg





Faulty derivations can also be found in such more serious works as Common Phrases and Where They Came From, published in 2001. It says eighteenth- and nineteenth-century phrases like “not giving a damn” and “not worth a damn” refer not to damnation but to a monetary unit in India that had little value. The Oxford English Dictionary says such an explanation is “ingenious but has no basis in fact.” It dismisses the theory that the expression is a shortening of “don’t give a tinker’s d**n,” recorded in 1839 by Henry David Thoreau. A tinker’s dam is a bowl of dough shaped by a tinker that keeps solder from running off his work area. The dough is used once and discarded, making it worthless. The notion that people observed this and then punned, “I don’t give a tinker’s dam,” says the dictionary, is “baseless conjecture.” The expression more likely arises from the propensity of tinkers, like sailors, to curse profusely, making their oaths too common to have power or effect.





The small, slovenly man at left in this 1736 Hogarth print is abroad in his slippers, and thus “slipshod.” - Colonial Williamsburg

  

With no eighteenth-century audio recordings on which to rely, researchers turn to printed material for accurate reconstruction of eighteenth-century speechways. They pore over letters, diaries, novels, and other documents for expressions to determine when they were in vogue and the context in which they were used. The work is not easy, but it is getting less tedious, according to Linda and Roger Flavell, experts in idioms and co-authors of The Chronology of Words and Phrases and Dictionary of Proverbs and Their Origins.

Responding to e-mailed inquiries, they said: “The researcher has t

Answer 2

I was under the presumption the F - word was For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge, which was used in Britain for holding Prostitutes in courts.

As for the others.... tis is why we have various search engines.

Answer 3

They had nuthin better to do, no I'm jk!

These words weren't actually bad. They just meant things. Now in modern civilization, we consider it inappropriate to say these words.

Answer 4

because they wanted to feel good by using these bad words to give vent to their frustration / anger / disappointment

Answer 5

Almost all "bad words" stem from peoples shame of the human body, or its functions.