(np) Swear words, etymology, and the history of English

[Jochen Stremmel]

Now you can see how the poetic value of something low can be very high.

A-and you brought back to mind one fine beginning of one of the finest
autobiographical books I've ever met:

In hospital language a patient does not urinate, micturate, pee, piss, or
take a leak. He voids.



2016-04-20 7:43 GMT+02:00 Smoke Teff <smoketeff at gmail.com>:

> The same basic concepts in English often have a high/Romantic variant and
> a low/Germanic variant.
>
> Urinate/piss
> Defecate/shit
> Copulate/fuck
>
> On Apr 19, 2016, at 4:58 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen <lorentzen at hotmail.de>
> wrote:
>
>
> > Have you ever noticed that many of our swear words (or *curse words *in
> American English) sound very much like German ones and not at all like
> French ones? From vulgar words for body parts (a German *Arsch* is easy
> to identify, but not so the French *cul*), to scatological and sexual
> verbs (doubtless you can spot what *scheissen *and *ficken* mean, but
> might have been more stumped by *chier* and *baiser*), right down to our
> words for hell (compare *Hölle* and *enfer*), English and German clearly
> draw their swear words from a shared stock in a way that English and French
> do not. Given that nearly two thirds of the words in English come from
> Romance roots and only a quarter from Germanic roots, this seems odd ... <
>
>
> http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2015/06/swear-words-etymology-and-the-history-of-english/
>
>
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