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?

I'm not being disingenuous at all and I'm not pretending.

You don't like swearing, you're entitled to dislike it but you are not better than everyone else by making up what you think are creative insults because at the end of the day they are both insults and not OK in any circumstance.

Toilet goblin isn't mine, but I think it's much better than "fucking wanker" etc. And I do think that people who take the time to make up creative insults are cleverer than those who swear like a roadie, and in that sense at least, better.

As for insults not being OK, that's a whole other discussion.

👌🙄

She sounds like she’s trying to impress people and it would bother me too. I also do swear but only when it feels necessary!

Swear words definitely have a place.
I would find her behaviour annoying.

But when it comes to swearing, the perceived severity of the swear word isn’t really indicative of how people perceive the thing it describes.

For example, ‘twat’ means exactly the same thing as ‘cunt’ but is nowhere as severe as a swear word and is on a par with, say, ‘dickhead’. ‘Bugger’ and ‘sod’ mean anal sex but are considered much milder than fuck/fucker/fucking which means ordinary reproductive sex, despite anal sex itself being something society has far more prejudices about than vaginal sex. A ‘bugger’ or a ‘sod’ has historically been deplored than someone who has vaginal sex, and yet those terms have always been considered much milder swear words than ‘fucker’ or even ‘wanker’. There simply isn’t a logical basis in the argument that ‘cunt’ being the worst insult means that society considers women’s bodies disgusting.

I’ll do whatever I like, thanks. See above.

The fact she showed you a video of her daughter calling her names would make me think she’s an absolute tool.

Yes, I'm sure you will, since the people who don't care about upsetting others tend to also be the same people that use uncouth language, but be prepared for the consequences of using that word.

Absolutely.

And Berk is seen as really mild but it is rhyming slang - Berkely Hunt = cunt.

I agree. It's an abhorrent word and absolutely unnecessary to use in any way shape or form. I'd think less of someone for feeling it was ok to drop the word into conversation whilst talking to me. I'd think they were brash and disrespectful.

Many people might giggle along and have tight plastered smiles on - but most of them will be thinking the same.

Nah, I surround myself with people who also like the word cunt. None of my friends mind. If they did they wouldn’t be my kind of people.

Exactly.

I mean, if you know your audience and are doing it only with them, then you (and your friends) do you.

It might still slip out at the wrong moment, though. What if you're on a date and it slips out, gives him the ick, and you've lost an in with someone you really fancied?

Or, you could easily be overheard and, given the violence of the word, attract the attention of a nutter. That happened to me once. I was on a train bitching about my horrible boss to a man I was with. The boss had had an affair and his wife had attempted suicide. I said to my friend, "I'm not surprised - if I was his wife, I'd attempt suicide too!" I hadn't even realised that the person in the seats opposite could hear, but she jumped up and went MENTAL! Screamed something about suicide at me and then went into another carriage and slammed the door REALLY hard. Complete nutter. Then, about ten minutes later, she came back and did it again!! I was so glad I was with a man.

So just be aware when using inflammatory speech...

It sounds like a bad comedy sketch. I'd find it tedious too. I have known a few people to do similar and it has been either in lieu of anything actually interesting to say or due to lack of confidence/ masking insecurities. At least you know what she's like and can choose whether to meet her again.

My DP was sooo relieved when he realised he could say cunt in front of me. 😂.

If it gives someone the ick, we weren’t meant to be!

That will happen when it becomes general to use a go-to four-letter word instead of using our rich stock of available words.
The way it's going makes me think people will soon be grunting. It reminds me of the hippies off their heads and lolling about with a vocabulary of about three words for everything. Hey, man. We see posts of three letters often, not even three words.

There are studies which came up with the findings along the lines claimed above. It could be because there's a trend for swearing among the middle, well educated, political and media ruling classes. I think of it as an affectation, a form of swagger and often used as a sign of power and dominance.

I didn’t say I used it indiscriminately, did I? It’s perfectly possible to say ‘cunt’ on a regular basis without doing so in circumstances where it might upset someone.

Do I say it in the office or in front of my mum or on a crowded bus or around people I don’t know? No, of course not. Never.

But I do say it around my DP, my older brother, close mates who aren’t bothered or selected colleagues outside work. I have one colleague in particular, who speaks English as a second language, who only has to catch my eye in the pub for me to know he’s dying to describe someone as a cunt. It’s usually a fascist politician from his home country but occasionally it might be, eg, people who drop litter. It’s become our a long standing joke between us.

On the occasions when I’ve actually called someone a cunt to their face, I would damn well hope they were upset by it, because it’s only ever been because they damn well deserved it. I think the last time was when a grown man threw a lit firework at my elderly neighbour.

I was once the victim of a sexual assault in the street. I still remember making my statement to the police and the officer saying “And did you say anything to him when he did this?” and me replying, “Yes, I called him a stinking cunt before I kicked him”. If you want to condemn me for that, go ahead, but I’m not going to be apologetic for using the word ‘cunt’ to a stranger who had just assaulted me on the street in broad daylight.

A wider vocabulary of swear words, perhaps, which isn't the same as a wider vocabulary full stop.

No, studies have shown that people who swear actually do also have a wider vocabulary in general. It’s not limited to swear words.

No

Talk me through your thinking

You've implied that you use the N word and parts of the US are full of shameless racists who have no problem using that word.

It's trashy.

Why don't they use it, then?

Obviously those are exceptional circs. But you said that you use it all the time when larking about with your friends, and that's what I'm responding to. I'd have responded differently had you posited those scenarios.