The popular American sitcom, Modern Family聽once featured a swearing toddler in an episode. It was not a 鈥渇leeting expletive.鈥� The show intentionally included a cursing two-year and bleeped out all swear words.
When the show premiered, wrote about how accurately it reflected contemporary American families, and that the storylines seemed to be an accurate portrait of what many parents go through. With the profanity conundrum, parents of young children may have felt an uncanny sense of familiarity. Just as your three-year-old is learning to form complete sentences, to say words like almost, and generally to absorb all language around her, she will accidentally acquire some dirty words.
黑料网’s a parent to do?
Even if the parent does not swear in front of the child, there are many other opportunities鈥攁round older siblings, or even aunts and uncles, and out in public鈥攆or children to learn foul language.
On Modern Family, the toddler鈥檚 dad cannot stop laughing at the situation. In real life, it is hard to explain to a child what 鈥渂ad鈥� words are. The child will inevitably ask, “Why?” And that鈥檚 a really hard question. Why are some words 鈥渂ad鈥� and other words 鈥済ood鈥�? In some cases we have euphemisms to code otherwise illicit topics. (Learn more about euphemisms here.)
A Jimmy Fallon segment, 鈥淪hootin鈥� the Bleep,鈥� mocked the use of bleeps to disguise profanity. He highlighted the fact that when a word is bleeped on television, the vast majority of the audience knows what word is being censored. So what鈥檚 the point? Obviously the point is to preserve decorum despite what is actually there.
Swear words and censorship
Before the 1960s, most printers would not allow them in books (which led to coinages like fug in Norman Mailer鈥檚 1948 The Naked and the Dead). The word profane聽literally meant 鈥渋n front of the temple鈥� in Latin (pro meaning 鈥渋n front鈥� and fanus meaning 鈥渢emple”).
Good and bad words allow us to mark something as outside of the normal realm. In this way, profane words can be a very important tool of communication, if used sparingly. If you rarely swear, when you do, it is taken with intense gravity. The most honest reply to that innocent question鈥�Why do we have bad words?鈥攎ight be, “We just do.”
