The Catholic Church in Quebec has surprised everyone with a peculiar publicity campaign. They have purchased space on billboards, bus-stops, and other advertising places, in order to display swear-words. This requires some explanation. French Canadian swearing is the lamest on Earth. Don’t expect anything like the baroque splendour of Mexican swearing, or the earthy imagery in Russian curses, or even the repetitive sexual obsessions we are familiar with in English. The basic French Canadian swear words are distorted forms of the words for the articles used in a mass: “tabernacle”, “chalice”, “host”, “sacristy”.
However, this cannot be explained by any religious sensitivity. French Canada, especially in Quebec, is one of the most secular societies on the planet. Church attendance is very low in Canada, but by far the lowest in Quebec. The overwhelming majority of French Canadians have little or no interest in organized religion, though many will say they have some private, personal faith, uninfluenced by any church. Most people have no idea whatsoever what any of these “swear words” mean. If you catch your finger in car door, you say “tabernac’ ”, or “tabernache”. It doesn’t call up any image. It’s just a meaningless word. The average person, if asked to explain its origin, probably wouldn’t be able to tell you. By contrast, nobody who swears in English is unaware of the meanings of the swear words.
The Catholic Church in Quebec has apparently come to the conclusion that it might be able to regain some of its former influence if it can “reclaim” the sacred swear-words. Since few people even know the words have any religious significance, they’ve put up advertisements with dictionary definitions of them. The campaign has created a lot of amusement.
[A note to those unfamiliar with the French language: Canadian French differs significantly from European French, to approximately the same degree that the English of Chicago does from the English of London. None of the Canadian “swearwords” are used in Europe.]
This brings to mind various questions about the mysterious word-magic of “swearing”. It is very hard to come up with any logical or even coherent explanation of why certain words are selected to be taboo, and assigned such absurd emotional power and significance. It is as bizarre as the equally irrational nudity taboo. Most proposed explanations collapse with any shift in time and place. English swearing is mostly concerned with sexual acts, so an anglophone will come up with explanations based in sexual psychology. But Dutch swearing is mostly about disease, not sex. French Canadian swearing has virtually nothing to do with either, though nobody has ever proposed that French Canadians are less interested in sex.
In fact, the meaning and subject matter of swearwords probably have nothing to do with their functioning. “Fuck” is a swearword. “Copulate” is not. “Fuck” was used without any sense of impropriety in ancient Anglo-Saxon religious poetry, but it could not be used that way today. I can write “copulate” in a newspaper article or a scientific paper, but I can’t write “fuck” in either without somebody getting upset. Why? Nobody has come up with any explanation that makes any sense, just as nobody has ever come up with any explanation of why the human body would be considered “dirty”, and nobody has come up with any rational explanation of why Americans elected George W. Bush ― except for the simplest one: people are very, very, very stupid.
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