The Meaning Of Profanity

Profanity is certainly one of the best subcategories within language when it comes to demonstrating just how diverse the applications of words or the intentions behind them truly are.  Few other classes of words get used so broadly, so precisely, and so differently.  Profanity is not always directed at a person or object, and it is not necessarily degrading when directed at someone, nor are its uses limited to just one circumstance.  There are many things a person could mean in using it.  Misunderstanding this can involve more than mere fallacies; it can involve slanderous assumptions about the character and motivations of someone who uses profanity in various situations.

Someone who utters "damn you," for instance, very well might not mean that they hope or would want the person they are addressing to literally be damned to an afterlife of punishment, much less the heretical eternal conscious torment for all in hell that most people mistakenly equate with the Biblical position.  "Damn you" does not have to mean anything more than that one person is expressing anything from frustration to rage to disgust towards someone else.  It can even get used sarcastically as a joking phrase.  Even when some people might not understand that it has more than one possible meaning, it is not automatically an actual wish for damnation.

A more culturally controversial phrase with similar diversity of possible meanings is "fuck you."  The word "fuck" is assumed by some to always refer to rape, when not only is rape not the only sexual meaning of the word, but many of its uses are not sexual at all.  Are most people calling for the sexual abuse of a car when it does not start and they use the word, saying "fuck this car" out of frustration?  In all likelihood, not at all!  Many uses of the word directed at actual people do not have this idea behind them.  Ultimately, the word "fuck" is one of the most versatile words as far as its range of different uses go.  Any word could be said or written with any meaning intended, yes, as I will address shortly, but few words actually seem to be used in such diverse contexts.

Profanity having no single intended meaning is a reflection of how language in its totality has no inherent meaning.  All words used have some sort of meaning (or at least they do not mean certain things even if someone is not sure of exactly what they do mean), as it is objectively true that everyone is expressing some sort of thought in using language.  It is also true that apart from intended meaning of a word, there is no meaning at all.  Collective trends in using language do not mean a word only or inherently has a specific application, just that a word is treated in a certain way in a particular society.  Individual people can recognize this and, without any irrational beliefs or assumptions, still use language within cultural norms for the sake of convenience.

Perhaps their intended meaning fits in with the cultural usage of a word, and perhaps not.  That individuals need to use language consistently with how they themselves regularly use it and how others regularly use it if they wish to have smoother communication does not change the fact that there is no such thing as an intrinsic meaning to any word.  Words are contrived by conscious beings to communicate ideas or, in some cases, organize their own thoughts.  Ideas are objectively true or false or knowable or unknowable independent of language, but there is no such thing as a word that only means one thing because the only true meaning of a word is whatever its user intends by it.