Swearies - they're just words...

I like words. Swearing is words. Ergo, I like swearing.

Put simply, this is my attitute to profanities. I like all words, by virtue of the fact that they're words. There's something fantastic about the fact that a strategically arranged sequence of letters can make people feel shocked, elated, sad, joyous and, of course, offended.

Words are ace; ranging, as they do, from the outrageously general (such as "nice", "good" and "fine") to the oddly specific (such as "ucalegon", "scrumping" and "discombobulated") with an infinite variety of categories in between. They all mean something to more than one person or they wouldn't exist; ergo no word is more or less valid than the next. If it wasn't understood by more than one owner of the eardrums it beats on then that word wouldn't, by default, be a word.

Now that our house has smaller ears than it used to when it was just myself and my wonderwife, I tend to use swear words a little less freely than I used to (except if I'm engaged in DIY where anything goes language-wise as my other half will testify).

It would be exceedingly dull if there were no swearing and the world is a richer and healthier place for having colourful words that make old ladies scowl and cause children to be chastised. I'll cheerfully use them all, except the "c" word. It's the exception that proves the rule, though I'm happy for society to possess a word that is set on a frequency so high that it's beyond my comfort levels.

Just to completely contradict my argument though, there are some words I have no time for. Namely, those used by the texting generation who use single character abbreviations for words (such as "UR") or compound numbers and letters to save on space, like "gr8". This, to me, is a product of function alone, and is to the detriment of the language. Plus it looks a bit shit.

I can't really count text examples like the above as real words because they've got numbers in them, and phonetically sound just like their better-spelled counterparts. It grates me to see them written though, which probably makes me sound like a bit of a grandad. Or maybe a "gr8 grandad".