Timeline for Is there a reason behind the phenomenon of English becoming more vulgar with time?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
29 events
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| Jul 18, 2018 at 4:28 | history | edited | Nick Nicholas |
edited tags
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| Apr 13, 2017 at 13:00 | history | edited | CommunityBot |
replaced http://aviation.stackexchange.com/ with https://aviation.stackexchange.com/
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| Dec 30, 2014 at 16:42 | comment | added | the_lotus | It's called "getting old" ;) People were vulgar in the past, they might have used different words (ex: bloody) or ways of expressing themselves. It depends on what is considered vulgar in a culture. Reading old political debate can be quite entertaining. | |
| Dec 30, 2014 at 14:23 | history | edited | dotancohen | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
Add example from SE network.
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| Dec 30, 2014 at 9:23 | comment | added | Ben | I don't mind expletives. As for explicatives, I would imagine that they are a boon to modern discourse. | |
| Dec 30, 2014 at 8:51 | vote | accept | dotancohen | ||
| Dec 30, 2014 at 7:25 | comment | added | dotancohen | @JonHanna: I expect such an audience on a wikipedia talk page about a technical subject (vector quantization). I would not expect such an audience on the teletubbies page. | |
| Dec 30, 2014 at 7:03 | comment | added | The111 | What the hell do you mean by "explicatives?" | |
| Dec 30, 2014 at 3:11 | answer | added | Ken McSwain | timeline score: 5 | |
| Dec 30, 2014 at 3:03 | answer | added | ckames | timeline score: 1 | |
| Dec 30, 2014 at 1:34 | comment | added | Jon Hanna | Why would you expect "a professional and learned audience" on a wikipedia talk page? | |
| Dec 29, 2014 at 17:12 | comment | added | Xen2050 | You're referring to financial classes then, as opposed to Dickensian social classes or castes where some people are "just better"? I don't know if people with less income happen to be more vulgar... Or maybe I'm a little OT there, those types of classes aren't supposed to exist in the "land of the free." I do think there's something else about the internet that encourages, or at least anonymizes vulgarity in almost anyone. | |
| Dec 29, 2014 at 16:06 | comment | added | dotancohen | Sure predominantly English speaking countries have classes. Perhaps not as vividly as India, South Africa, and China have classes, but certainly technologies such as Internet access became commonplace among the rich first, then the upper class, then the middle class, and now to the less financially secure. | |
| Dec 29, 2014 at 15:26 | comment | added | Xen2050 | Um... "lower classes?" "the fact that in years recent the Internet has become more accessible to lower classes"... I can't confirm that fact, I was under the impression that predominantly English speaking countries didn't have classes or "castes"... Maybe the phenomenon you see results from confirmation bias | |
| Dec 29, 2014 at 12:07 | comment | added | Janus Bahs Jacquet | It's not a matter of where you live—as it has been throughout recorded history, the amount of profanity employed by any given speaker inversely correlates to various other factors, in particular register. Pothead high schoolers rarely have a need for high registers, whereas IT professionals (or anyone in a communicative job) do, and such professional needs tend to spill over into your non-professional life. I'm pretty sure pothead high schoolers swore just as much when chit-chatting with each other 100 years ago as they do now. | |
| Dec 29, 2014 at 11:46 | comment | added | dotancohen | @JanusBahsJacquet: Thank you for mentioning that the phenomenon might not be happening where you live. My concern was that I see this phenomenon in people from all over the world. Al least some areas might still be nice to converse in! | |
| Dec 29, 2014 at 11:39 | comment | added | dotancohen | @DangerFourpence: I would venture that the demographic I currently communicate with (professionals in IT) would be less inclined to swear than the demographic I communicated with 20 years ago (pot smoking highschoolers). | |
| Dec 29, 2014 at 11:30 | comment | added | Janus Bahs Jacquet | I can see no indication whatsoever that the English vernacular as she is spoken colloquially has become more vulgar or experienced an increase in the frequency of employing profanities. We just happen to have access only to current colloquial usage. | |
| Dec 29, 2014 at 2:17 | comment | added | Danger Fourpence | Perhaps you're communicating with a different demographic now than you were 10, 15, 20 years ago and this is affecting how much swearing you hear. | |
| Dec 29, 2014 at 1:24 | answer | added | Qwan Lee | timeline score: -3 | |
| Dec 29, 2014 at 0:00 | history | tweeted | twitter.com/#!/StackLinguist/status/549354182206296064 | ||
| Dec 28, 2014 at 22:57 | answer | added | user6726 | timeline score: 4 | |
| Dec 28, 2014 at 19:48 | answer | added | Philipp | timeline score: 8 | |
| Dec 28, 2014 at 19:48 | answer | added | Guntram Blohm | timeline score: 12 | |
| Dec 28, 2014 at 14:28 | history | edited | dotancohen | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
added 126 characters in body
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| Dec 28, 2014 at 14:24 | comment | added | dotancohen | @DietrichEpp: Thank you. I actually do find that off-line cursing has increase (markedly) as well, and that is the crux of the question. I'll clarify that. | |
| Dec 28, 2014 at 13:48 | comment | added | Dietrich Epp | In the past, informal communication was almost always verbal. Today, people are writing more than ever before, and much of it is in informal contexts like text messages and Facebook. So it may appear that people are cursing more often, when perhaps the only difference is that now the curses are written down. I suspect if you limited your corpus to sites where participants use a more formal register, like the Stack Exchange network, you would find a fairly low occurrence of swear words. This is not to say that people aren't cursing more often. Finding the right data for this is hard. | |
| Dec 28, 2014 at 13:06 | answer | added | Be Brave Be Like Ukraine | timeline score: 24 | |
| Dec 28, 2014 at 11:51 | history | asked | dotancohen | CC BY-SA 3.0 |