This year, I’ve been participating in Chris Rogers’ Langauge Science and Exploration Group. This month, we talked about slang, taboo, and subversive language. For my mini-project, a few of us conducted an informal survey about swear words and other taboo terms. The survey had a list of about 30 words of varying degrees of severity. I then asked them to indicate the inappropriateness of each word, from “completely” to “not at all”. I tallied up the responses and put them in order from overall most inappropriate to least. We sent it out to people in the BYU community and to other members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Here are the results:
There’s a lot to dissect here, and I won’t overanalyze it too much because it’s so informal and based on a small sample size. But, what I will say is that it’s interesting how high words the words Jesus and god are ranked—this is something that is likely unique to the BYU community and would not be found in too many other places!