Thursday, October 16, 2003, 01:54 GMT
These words are not curses, they are merely obscenities or perhaps blasphemies. "Fuck" is an obscenity, "bloody" is a blasphemy since is it a contraction of "by Our Lady" which sets Catholic but not Protestant teeth on edge.
A curse is usually a phrase magically or religiously calling something bad down. ("What's the difference between magic and religion?", I hear you cry. Wish I knew.)
Examples - "May you live in interesting times." said to be Chinese and the Arab or mock-Arab curse "May the fleas of a thousand camels infest you pubic hair".
Don't use euphemisms. "Moron". "idiot" and "imbecile" mean people of grossly subnormal intelligence and each one once had a precise meaning. These got euphemised to "subnormal" then when that wasn't euphemistic enough it became "mentally challenged" and more recently and more euphemistically "differently challenged". But they are still morons, idiots and imbeciles. Likewise "gays" are either boring people or homosexuals (some people might say that homosexuals are boring).
A curse is usually a phrase magically or religiously calling something bad down. ("What's the difference between magic and religion?", I hear you cry. Wish I knew.)
Examples - "May you live in interesting times." said to be Chinese and the Arab or mock-Arab curse "May the fleas of a thousand camels infest you pubic hair".
Don't use euphemisms. "Moron". "idiot" and "imbecile" mean people of grossly subnormal intelligence and each one once had a precise meaning. These got euphemised to "subnormal" then when that wasn't euphemistic enough it became "mentally challenged" and more recently and more euphemistically "differently challenged". But they are still morons, idiots and imbeciles. Likewise "gays" are either boring people or homosexuals (some people might say that homosexuals are boring).