Am I too sensitive about bad language? TW bad language

[Bundit]

I'm just back from an unplanned evening out. I went out late afternoon to have a drink with friends and then various other people turned up and we ended up going for a meal. There were nine of us, including a woman I hadn't met before.

She was interesting and funny and, like the rest of us, in her 50s with grown-up kids. She's a director of the local health board, so not stupid. Beautifully groomed and elegant-looking. But every other word that comes out of her mouth is a swear-word.

I'm no pearl-clutching Snow White myself: I swear a fair bit. But when I swear I swear because I'm angry and use the words for emphasis. This woman just peppered fairly ordinary conversations with expletives. I can't begin to reproduce her way of speaking. It wasn't just 'fucking this and fucking that'. It was all sweary and rude. Everyone in her life, including her colleagues and kids, she described as fucking arsewipes and cretinous wankers and worse. She's very inventive in her cursing. There were moments when it was quite Shakespearian.

I started off thinking it was weirdly amusing, but that wore off and I began to find it aggressive and unpleasant. She must had read my thoughts because she took me aside and said she knew she was strong meat and she hated seeing people pulling back as a result of her language. She said she's always been like this and her kids, in their late teens, are the same. She showed me a video on her phone of her stunning young daughter, who's hoping to study medicine, calling her mother every name under the sun.

She actually seems quite a warm person, and she's got to be intelligent to hold the position she does, but the swearing began to feel really repellant and I ended up being the first to leave. Someone else in the group asked for a lift and on the way home commented on how funny this woman was with her non-stop swearing. I said well, it really began to grate on me and I didn't think I could bear being around her for long. The person I was giving the lift to told me I sound really old-fashioned and need to stop being so sensitive. Now I don't know what to think. It's not a simple matter of disliking the language she uses. The effect of all those words really feels aggressive to me. Does anyone here understand what I'm talking about?

Interesting. Don't know if it's still in print, but when I was a student I went to a lecture by Dale Spender about her book Man Made Language (now out of print but available secondhand if anyone's interested).
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Man-Made-Language-Dale-Spender/dp/0863584012

It's about how the masculine is emphasised in so much language and how women's words are pushed to the margins or used to abuse men. So you call a man you disapprove of a cunt or a pussy. Now, of course, in the latest misogynistic pushback against women the NHS is busy removing the words 'woman' and 'mother' from all its information and replacing them with phrases like 'birthing parent.'

It's only words.

You can cause great harm and offence without 'swear' words. There's also a huge difference peppering your language with 'swear' words v targeting abusive language at someone.

Are people still offended by cunt? Poor Shakespeare had it hard.

What do idiots like this woman do to express extreme annoyance and anger when they've used up all the swearwords in general conversation? She sounds an absolute bore.

Forgot one balls/little balls can be used as a term of endearment/between mates.

I'm with you OP, I'd find that so off putting and would probably spoil the get together for me. It's also really wearing when someone peppers ever other word with swearing, male or female but I know lots of people don't mind it.

Each to their own and all that though.

What baffles me is those who use every swear word apart from one. I deliberately use this word in these cases.

Do you, now.

I will happily call someone a cunt. I will also happily call someone a bell-end or an arsehole or a tit or a prick. There is no difference. I also don’t think any one body part is ‘something to be proud of’ when you have no control over whether you’re born with one or not. I’m proud of my actual achievements, not something that I have purely because I inherited two X chromosomes. I might as well be proud of my little finger or my spleen.

When I call someone a cunt I’m not implying disapproval of women’s genitalia any more than I’m implying disapproval of a man’s genitalia when I call someone a prick. It’s just standard across almost all cultures for insults to be based on bodies - males or female - and bodily functions, whether that’s sex or defecation or whatever.

FWIW, ‘cunt’ is also my preferred term for my genitalia when I’m in the bedroom. Words can have more than one meaning.

Shakespeare never spelt his own name consistently. I don't think he'd be fussed by this.

@ItGhoulthere absolutely is a difference between cunt and prick,dick and bell end. Why else choose cunt for Elon Musk..

Yes, the worse thing you can call a man is a cunt.

I didn’t know that. That’s very interesting, thank you.

I agree with this entirely.

I came on this thread, thinking you might be super uptight in some way. However, I totally get what you mean.

One of my dearest and closest friends doesn't swear at all. She'll say things like, "oh sugar/oh fiddlesticks/by Jove"....
I love her as a friend, and I naturally curb my language around her because I know she doesn't like it.

That doesn't cause me any problems at all. I can swear with abandon with different friends, and I do. But, with this friend, it's just not appropriate.

There's a time and a place for everything, swearing included, and yes I do partake should the occasion arise.

But it kind of loses its effect when someone peppers every sentence they utter with expletives like this, and it is pretty uncomfortable to be around.

YANBU.

Three of my friends are doctors and I've never heard them swear.

Um, I conclude that you use the N-word???!!!!

When I gave up swearing a few weeks ago (not completely, but mostly) I found it a challenge to come up with descriptive phrases that aren't swear words; it's much harder to come up with a non-swear phrase for "little fucker" than it is to just say little fucker. I realised my vocab had atrophied a bit. Exclamations are easier. Rather than yelling "Fuck!" I find that "Rats!" is good, because the r and ah sounds are quite harsh, so you can really blow that word out of your mouth.

Someone in another thread called someone a toilet goblin last week, which is so much more creative and so much funnier than, say, "little fucker."

I agree, mostly. But I think it would be much more descriptive and much more insulting to call him an evil goblin, which is what I'd use instead of the swear phrase.

You have to be really careful with the C word. Many, many people have a viscerally negative reaction to that word, and will draw all manner of negative conclusions about you from it. It's a really vicious word, and not a few women who were in abusive relationships will have been called it under frightening circumstances. I would seriously say away from that word unless you're very sure of your audience, unless you're OK with upsetting some people and/or causing an instant strong dislike towards you.

@ItGhoul I will happily call someone a cunt.

You really, really shouldn't. See above.

To all the people on here who are proudly declaring that they often swear like sailors or whatever, it's really nothing to be proud of, you know.

I once worked for a family who didn't allow any kind of swearing whatsoever including minced oaths like fiddlesticks. Their reasoning was the words, in an of themselves are just words but it is the intention to swear that is the offensive part. In their view a minced oath was a swear word via intent.

I swear without taboo words and I don't think I spoke any more than 2 words in my first couple of weeks working there but they did have some thought provoking perspectives on things.

I think there are two issues here. One is the swearing and two is the character assassinations.

I can deal with someone swearing but I would find someone backstabbing other people and calling them names insufferable.

Her taking you to one side and showing videos of her daughter calling her names is plain weird.

What's wrong with pearl-clutching? You SHOULD clutch your pearls; society would be much better if more people did, and swearing is nothing to be proud of.

In your examples, I would have said, "She left without paying and I had to foot the entire wretched bill, the cheeky article," and "I had to go grocery shopping AGAIN. Such a pain."

I think those two alternatives are far more descriptive than the swear version.

I agree completely.

I'm not a practising Christian, but I won't say the lord's name in vain either ! So "oh my goodness" instead of "oh my god !" I do occasionally slip up though 🤪.

It’s nothing to be ashamed of , either. It just is.