Freakin' Words

accessmenj
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Freakin' Words

Post by accessmenj »

I am interested in finding out more about what words are considered "bad" from our forum members around the world. And since Billy Elliot The Musical is about children, what words would prevent parents from bringing their children to the show?

I know that times and language are changing, and older people tend to be more prudish? They are particularly protective of what they consider the "virgin ears" of children. But can these people possibly be so out of touch that they think that their own little darlings don't use these words every day?

Also, we are all changing. I remember "bloody" being an unacceptable word. I remember when "geeze" was unacceptable, because it was too close to "Jesus" (which is now used by small boy).I remember when "screw" was unacceptable. All these have now magically lost their censorship status.

And finally, why are words that originated from Anglo-Saxon or German deemed to be vulgar, and words from Latin are deemed acceptable? Urinate, deficate, masturbate, etc., do not shock like their Anglo equivalents. Yes, I think that we are silly and we need to grow up.
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ERinVA
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Re: Freakin' Words

Post by ERinVA »

I'm not quite sure what you are trying to accomplish. If you want a list of naughty words in multiple languages or dialects, I'm afraid you are going to have to look up the words yourself.

If you are looking for a discussion of why words are "naughty" or "nice," I think that in English, at least, we owe the classification of words in this way to the Victorians. For them, words that described body parts or actions having to do with either sex or elimination became taboo. Why this was the case probably had to do with the fact that social thought and behavior tends to swing back and forth through cycles over time from more liberal to more conservative and vice versa, and the Victorians, as we know, were overtly very conservative.

Of course, we can't lay it all at the feet of the Victorians. Over the centuries, religion, social class and education also have been huge factors in what is considered acceptable to discuss in polite society, and what words are used in the discussion. You point out that latinate words are often considered more acceptable than Anglo-Saxon ones meaning essentially the same thing. Well, if you study a bit of European and British history back to the Middle Ages, you will find that Latin was the language of the Church, and hence the language of the educated people, since it was mainly through the Church that people became educated. The other route to education was by being a member of the ruling class. In England, thanks to the Battle of Hastings in 1066, the Normans, who spoke French, a latinate language, became the ruling class, and the Anglo-Saxons became the underlings. French and Latin were the languages of respectability; whereas, Anglo-Saxon was the language of the uneducated common people. There you have it: Religion, social class and education.

The point of the "language" in BETM is to ground the story firmly in a particular stratum of British society. Anglo-Saxon is alive and well among the working classes, and BETM makes that very clear.

So then I guess the other part of your question is whether factors of religion, social class and education have influenced the dictionary of "naughty" or "nice" words in other countries/languages as they have in English, or are there other influences that apply?
Ellen



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kport
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Re: Freakin' Words

Post by kport »

Profanity, like curry powder or chili peppers, has a purpose if used sparingly. One cannot pretend it does not exist. Profanity (and profane or 'rude' expressions) exist in the Bible (Song of Songs 1:5); medieval religious poetry (Carmina Burana); throughout Shakespeare, often as a double-entendres:

And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day.


It can be easily abused and its shock valued debased, and does so when it becomes part and parcel of daily discourse in communities, as indeed is the case in BETM. I have certainly witnessed (and indeed may have occasionally indulged in) such parlance in such situations. The point is this: like spice, it has a function (albeit a crude one) in certain situations; overused, it loses any ability to shock, threaten or impress.

There is no question that the US tends to be more restrained in its approval of profane language; though less so than in my youth. I recall being upbraided by my third grade teacher for being heard saying 'I need to take a crap'; that word was profane to her; one used among the boys but definitely not to be heard in front of Miss Hartt or - horror of horrors - Mum! A decade later I recalled that every time I availed myself of the loo at my college: proudly labelled 'Thos. Crapper & Sons, Oxford'. The etymology of the word suddenly dawned on me, and it was exactly the meaning I meant and my teacher misconstrued!

(Since I mentioned Mum, it is perhaps interesting to note that the only adult character in BETM never to utter any form of profanity or negative thought is Dead Mother. I think that is significant. An oasis of almost Virgin Mary-like perfection set clear against Billy's profanity-laced world.)

When I first arrived to study in the UK, I was soon greeted by a term used in BETM: 'w**ker'. New to me; I had never heard it before, but its meaning quickly sank in. It did not mean fool, idiot, dolt, inbred, like it did when introduced to millions of US families in the tv series 'Married with Children', where Peg Bundy's maiden name is 'w**ker' from w**ker County...........you get the gist. I always found it a little more 'off' (in the British sense) than my American siblings, who simply thought it meant 'person of lower intelligence/social standing'. In other words, different nuances in different places. Mr Braithwaite (and indeed Billy) on the London stage make it very clear with a certain hand motion exactly what w**ker means to them.

My father, like so many of ours from the boomer generation, rarely talked about his WWII experiences. Only after his death did I come across his war diaries, and learned that he had piloted a B-17 on raids over Germany before transitioning to flying C47s filled with high octane fuel over the Himilayas from India to Kunming, China (the infamous 'Hump') - two very dangerous operations. Yet I cannot think of him ever using profanity in front of us in all my life, except the very rare 'damn'. But the diaries had more than a few good Anglo-Saxon expletives in them, usually concerning the SNAFUs and FUBAR screw-ups of the high command (those Air Force acronyms contain profanity!). The point is that for my Dad, and many of his generation, the lessons of Ecclesiastes were well learned: 'To every things there is a time and a season....'

Back to BETM: somewhere in these thousands of posts on the Forum is one I made, round about Feb 8 2011, after my second ever performance, in Tampa. In it I described the Talk Back with the cast after the performance. Amongst the audience were several parents, including the mother of one of the Michaels. She was asked: 'Don't you mind your son taking part in a musical with so many curse words?' Great question! The audience froze in anticipation of the answer. The mother's response: 'Our son knows people use these words, and he knows this is fiction. He knows there is a right time and a wrong time for such things...' or words to that effect. A learning moment for some adults, I think.

Since profanity is more common, or tolerated, in certain sections of British society than in American, I think they got it right when then toned it down a bit on the US Tours, whilst retaining it on Broadway and, of course, the West End. After all, there is 'a right time and a wrong time' for such things. When a Tour ventures into a local community, it has to take into account local sensibilities over such matters. It will be interesting to see what will happen in next summer's regional productions.
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Re: Freakin' Words

Post by Katwoman »

Was it Churchill who said of the UK and the USA "two countries divided by a single language"?
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ERinVA
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Re: Freakin' Words

Post by ERinVA »

kport wrote: . . . after my second ever performance, in Tampa
You performed in Tampa?? 8-)

Sorry, couldn't resist. ;) :D
Ellen



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kport
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Re: Freakin' Words

Post by kport »

Katwoman wrote:Was it Churchill who said of the UK and the USA "two countries divided by a single language"?
There is some debate over who first said this. Some attribute it first to Oscar Wilde: 'We have really everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, language.' - Oscar Wilde, The Canterville Ghost (1887).

Reader's Digest attributed this variant to George Bernard Shaw, but there no evidence among his written words.

Churchill's variant is 'The gift of a common tongue is a priceless inheritance and it may well some day become the foundation of a common citizenship.' (speech given at Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts (September 6, 1943))

I suspect it was a fairly common saying among Anglo-Americans literati/wags in the late 19th/early 20th centuries, well before Churchill's quote. He may well have heard it from his American mother. A close variant is is a quote from Henry James published in Sketches and reminiscences of the Radical club of Chestnut street, Boston (1880).
accessmenj
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Re: Freakin' Words

Post by accessmenj »

ERinVA wrote:I'm not quite sure what you are trying to accomplish. If you want a list of naughty words in multiple languages or dialects, I'm afraid you are going to have to look up the words yourself.

If you are looking for a discussion of why words are "naughty" or "nice," I think that in English, at least, we owe the classification of words in this way to the Victorians. For them, words that described body parts or actions having to do with either sex or elimination became taboo. Why this was the case probably had to do with the fact that social thought and behavior tends to swing back and forth through cycles over time from more liberal to more conservative and vice versa, and the Victorians, as we know, were overtly very conservative.

Of course, we can't lay it all at the feet of the Victorians. Over the centuries, religion, social class and education also have been huge factors in what is considered acceptable to discuss in polite society, and what words are used in the discussion. You point out that latinate words are often considered more acceptable than Anglo-Saxon ones meaning essentially the same thing. Well, if you study a bit of European and British history back to the Middle Ages, you will find that Latin was the language of the Church, and hence the language of the educated people, since it was mainly through the Church that people became educated. The other route to education was by being a member of the ruling class. In England, thanks to the Battle of Hastings in 1066, the Normans, who spoke French, a latinate language, became the ruling class, and the Anglo-Saxons became the underlings. French and Latin were the languages of respectability; whereas, Anglo-Saxon was the language of the uneducated common people. There you have it: Religion, social class and education.

The point of the "language" in BETM is to ground the story firmly in a particular stratum of British society. Anglo-Saxon is alive and well among the working classes, and BETM makes that very clear.

So then I guess the other part of your question is whether factors of religion, social class and education have influenced the dictionary of "naughty" or "nice" words in other countries/languages as they have in English, or are there other influences that apply?

Thanks, ERinVA. I learned a lot from your post. It is even more absurd that our idea in America of what words are unacceptable resulted from whoever won a battle in England in 1066 AD.

But your statement that we are swinging back and forth from conservative to liberal gives us hope that, years from now, when Billy returns to Broadway, the original language will no longer be a problem.

I do hope that some forum members who are familiar with Dutch and Danish will let us know if some of the words in the translations will have to be carefully chosen, or maybe even dropped. Also, perhaps someone can explain how it worked in Korea.
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Re: Freakin' Words

Post by kport »

ERinVA wrote:
kport wrote: . . . after my second ever performance, in Tampa
You performed in Tampa?? 8-)

Sorry, couldn't resist. ;) :D
:D
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Re: Freakin' Words

Post by Todd »

accessmenj wrote: But your statement that we are swinging back and forth from conservative to liberal gives us hope that, years from now, when Billy returns to Broadway, the original language will no longer be a problem.
Guess that depends on which side of the conservative/liberal pendulum you happen to align yourself with. Personally, I preferred the toned-down language on the North American tour over the more harsh language that's used in the West End.

A question I have - for those of you who happened to catch a regional production or a school production of BETM in the U.K. - is how much (if any) the language was toned down in those shows. I believe Josh Baker emerged from one of those regional productions to eventually end up in the London show, correct ?
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Re: Freakin' Words

Post by madashell »

I can not believe that someone would be offended that their children would hear the word "piss" that is used in Billy Elliot. That word is so close to the word "pee" that everyone uses with their kids from when they are two years old.
Is it a bad word because it is onomatopoeic? Do they think that their middle school kids never use this word at school? The sooner people develop a more mature attitude towards bodily functions, the better.
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