Pacific Standard, “Will We Ever See the End of Swearing?”

March 11, 2014

Paul Hiebert, “Will We Ever See the End of Swearing?” (Pacific Standard, Mar. 11, 2014)

“If you draw a circle around acceptable language and that circle just gets bigger and bigger, there still has to be something outside of the circle,” says Ben Zimmer, the executive producer of vocabulary.com and a language columnist at the Wall Street Journal. “There’s always going to be a need for language that transgresses or subverts polite discourse. If some words happen to get devulgarized, then other ones will come along.”

Read the rest here.

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