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John,
You're opening subjects on which people write Doctorates!
Sorry to give everyone an impromptu history lesson, but until Victoria's reign, the 'English', as a nation (the Scots having been same since Wallace 1st bared his arse to Longshanks) were a very free and 'bawdy' people.
Read any poetry by Shelley or Byron, or any play by Webster or, indeed, the Diaries of Pepys, and you'll see that it took a certain 'type' or social pervasiveness (i.e. 'Victorian attitudes') to bring all that to a halt. More's the pity, as it stifled what existed naturally (a wonderfully varied and expressive tongue) in the populace and drove it underground, made it 'dirty' (a childish discription if e're I heard one) if you will, and resulted in what your Scando mates now perceive to be our sexual repression!
Now whether we as individuals think that to be for the better or worse is up to our own pallets; but I know I'm in favour of people keeping their own views on and levels of propriety to themselves. I'm glad that we can feel free to express ourselves in the vernacular for comic-effect or emphasis - I'm not advocating its wholesale use every other word.
Oh, and FYI, English is a genderless, non-inflected Indo-European language that has sucessfully 'magpied' from it's Romano-Greco and Germanic/Nordic roots and transmogrified itself rather successfully into that which we use (as do several billion other people) today.
And lastly, the word 'F**k' is not Anglo-Saxon: it has its root in early lower Dutch. Its etymology is maritime - hence the phrase "He gave a typically 'Lower-decks' response".
Any chance we can get back to divng now?? Please??
(Edited by Bren Tierney at 8:47 pm on Feb. 2, 2003)  |