Is a cigarette a faggot? I've heard it called a fag, but never a faggot. Or were you saying she was going to buy some firewood?
And how come the new meaning of something is always either the sexual or offensive meaning? So we take a word that has one meaning, and then say that it has a second, different, meaning that is either sexual or offensive, and that becomes the meaning of the word.
What about saying "that sucks" or "douchebag"? Didn't they used to have much more vulgar/sexual meanings and then lost them?
Also, some words used to be seriously offensive if they were related to religion, "damn", "bloody", "hell", and "Jesus Christ!" but these are generally not considered that offensive any more.
From what I remember, taboo words tend to fall into 4 categories: excrement, sexual, religious, ethnic.
Some cultures have a greater taboo about one side more than another. In Spanish people often say "I will **** on God/The Virgin Mary" and French Canadians have some weird thing about thinking "tabernacle" is like the most offensive thing you can say.
In English, cultures that used to have religion as the worst words could have you up for blasphemy if you used religious words inappropriately and they were still considered pretty bad until a generation or two ago. Then excrement and sexual swearwords probably were the worst word you could use hence Carlin's Seven Words you can't say on TV all to do with them. The "C-word" was probably the most offensive word in the US even though it is a perfectly ordinary term of affection between family members in Australia, "Hey granny you old ******" sounds bad in America, but it is a perfectly ordinary way to wish your granmother happy birthday in Brisbane (
I may be exaggerating)
An Australian colleague of mine recently said to a kid, "Come here ya little bugger!" and I had to tell him it's probably best he doesn't use that. Why? Because although the word "bugger" is becoming more and more associated as a word you could call some kid, anyone looking it up in the dictionary is probably going to find it referred to as offensive and sexual.
These days, I think all these words can be on TV and if you object you are a bit of an old fuddy duddy.
However, words that have supplanted those are racist terms, and people's acceptance of them is going down all the time. Even uses of it that seemed to indicate someone's character are becoming difficult for audiences to stomach. The N-word raised a slight eyebrow with Pulp Fiction, but with Hateful Eight some people were beginning to think that Tarantino was enjoying it a bit too much. I
think it might get even harder for him to put it in his scripts as willy-nilly as in the past.
Peter Jackson, if he remakes Dambusters, has said he will rename the black labrador Digger, and the name is not usually broadcast on TV anymore. You can object if you want, but personally, if you broadcast it during the day, I don't blame people for thinking, "Hey, this name is not going to go over as well today as it did in the past. Maybe we censor it from the 2 o'clock broaddcast....?"
So in answer to your question, it's not all one-way traffic, and people begin to get accustomed to taboo words in some cases, and less tolerant of them in other places. Languages and societies change.
I could insist that a raised middle finger means "Peace be with you", but no one would ever buy it, because they think of something offensive for that gesture, but when someone says there's an offensive meaning to the familiar "ok" gesture, now people are fired for making the gesture. (See the "cancel culture" thread.)
Yeah, but making up your own slang and your own meanings almost never works. I could insist that helicopters are called Escadors but that doesn't mean people will start agreeing to my use does it? It requires
agreement among speakers.
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