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Bezig met laden... Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing (editie 2013)door Melissa Mohr (Auteur)
Informatie over het werkHoly Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing door Melissa Mohr
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Meld je aan bij LibraryThing om erachter te komen of je dit boek goed zult vinden. Op dit moment geen Discussie gesprekken over dit boek. I love swearing, and this was a truly interesting overview of how certain words and phrases exist in the English language. It’s also a great history lesson on certain time periods as well. I listened to this but will continue to dig deeper into the book itself as there are some things I don’t think I caught on the listen (also not that big a fan of the narrator; considering this was written by a woman, I can’t figure out if it was the subject matter that had them have a man read it…). Þessi bók kom mér skemmtilega á óvart. Hún reyndist vera fræðileg úttekt og samanburður á blótsyrðum Rómverja til forna, enskumælandi miðaldamanna og að lokum Vesturlandabúa síðustu aldar. Það er skemmtilegt að sjá hvernig blótsyrði Rómverja eru lík okkar blótsyrðum í dag og hvernig menningarviðhorf höfðu áhrif á það hvernig þau voru með öðrum hætti. Síðar á miðöldum þegar áhrif kirkjunnar og eiðar urðu mikilsráðandi þá tóku blótsyrði mið af þeim og síðar þegar einkalíf og feimni nútímamanna við að hægja sér á almannafæri gerði vart við sig þá birtust sömuleiðis blótsyrði í þá veru. Að lokum bendir Mohr á að í dag eru dónalegustu blótsyrði á enskri tungu þau sem snerta kynþáttafordóma þar sem f**k, sh*t og álíka orð eru farin að missa vægi sitt m.a. vegna ofnotkunar.
Mohr's scholarship seems to be sound and her approach positively twinkles with pleasure and amusement. She gives her chapters headings such as "Shit, That Bloody Bugger Turned Out To Be A Fucking Nackle-Ass Cocksucker!", and she's not above finding it funny that a paper on urinary incontinence was co-authored by Splatt and Weedon. I'd like Mohr's account to have tipped a wink to Viz comic's monumental and still-growing Profanisaurus. Her argument might have been strengthened, too, by reminding us that Eric Cartman, in South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut, saves the world from Satan and Saddam Hussein with the words: "Fuck, shit, cock, ass, titties, boner, bitch, muff, pussy, cunt, butthole, Barbra Streisand!" But here I pick nits. This is a cracking fucking book, and innominables to anyone who says otherwise.
"Holy Sh*t tells the story of two kinds of swearing--obscenities and oaths--from ancient Rome and the Bible to today. With humor and insight, Melissa Mohr takes readers on a journey to discover how "swearing" has come to include both testifying with your hand on the Bible and calling someone a *#$&!* when they cut you off on the highway. She explores obscenities in ancient Rome--which were remarkably similar to our own--and unearths the history of religious oaths in the Middle Ages, when swearing (or not swearing) an oath was often a matter of life and death. Holy Sh*t also explains the advancement of civility and corresponding censorship of language in the 18th century, considers the rise of racial slurs after World War II, examines the physiological effects of swearing (increased heart rate and greater pain tolerance), and answers a question that preoccupies the FCC, the US Senate, and anyone who has recently overheard little kids at a playground: are we swearing more now than people did in the past?"--Amazon. Geen bibliotheekbeschrijvingen gevonden. |
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Google Books — Bezig met laden... GenresDewey Decimale Classificatie (DDC)417.2Language Linguistics Dialectology and historical linguistics DialectologyLC-classificatieWaarderingGemiddelde:
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As background she starts out with the Romans, who were clearly great enthusiasts for bad language based on sexual activity or body functions, and moves on to what the Bible can tell us about the Judeo-Christian tradition of religious oaths. As we all know, an exchange of promises between the God of the Old Testament and his followers was at the core of Jewish and Christian theology, so that any vain or ill-intentioned use of religious oaths was seriously frowned upon. A false oath had the potential to hurt God’s body.
This transferred into medieval Christian societies: the big taboo words people used to express their feelings in medieval England were all religious. Mohr suggests that the famous “Anglo-Saxon words” — most of which are actually of Middle-English origin — would have been considered relatively harmless by most people, partly because of the strength of emotion involved in breaking religious taboos and partly because of the very different attitudes to personal privacy in medieval times. When sex and excretion mostly happened in the presence of others, they might give rise to ribald jokes, as in Chaucer, but they couldn’t really be seen as big taboos to break.
Mohr charts the rise of “obscene” language after the reformation, from Elizabethan drama to Lady Chatterley and Lenny Bruce, and looks at the way sexual and excretory words are gradually being displaced from top taboo position by racial and other epithets. She speculates briefly about how we might be swearing in the 22nd century, but of course admits that such a thing is impossible to predict.
An endlessly fascinating topic, partly because we all enjoy reading about the quasi-forbidden, and partly because this is an area where language gets pushed to the limits of creativity and words rarely mean the same as what they did even a generation ago. ( )