An AP article on profanity made me wonder: are swear words becoming mainstream? I was thinking about this last night while watching some ABC Family. I thought to myself: “this is what ABC considered ‘family’ material?” I suppose the downward spiral is inevitable. Besides, they’re just words right? Personally, I find it very hard to express myself on here sometimes becuase I choose not to use certain words. I think these colorful words have begun replacing thoughtful adjectives…
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You put your finger on something. Profanity is thin sauce. It engages base emotions, and avoids reasoned thought. Since its emotional, it distracts the listener from looking for the content of the communication. This distracts them from seeing that the speaker/writer has little content to offer.
Entertainment (as opposed to literature) appeals almost exclusively to the base emotions. One could define base emotions as the seven deadly sins of the bible and you’d have a working definition. These base emotions exist in all of us. Higher thinking (complex patterns), analysis, critique, etc. are less well expressed in the population at large.
So, if the goal of entertainement is to sell advertising to 14 - 24 year olds, and to sell advertising you have to have their eyeballs and ears in front of the ad, which content do you choose, two people swearing, screwing, etc., or two people enaged in a debate about how China’s economic growth impacts oil prices?
That’s exactly what I was getting at: fuck oil prices…