Talk:Expletive (disambiguation)

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shoudl they go somewhere here while we are talking about subjects being replaced where not one. I don't see placeholders in teh grammar page either! —Preceding unsigned comment added by 195.197.28.252 (talk) 09:00, 11 February 2008 (UTC)

Wrongheaded syntax

I've revised the syntax half of this page rather radically because it struck me as wrongheaded. One example: I can imagine that there do exist recent grammar books that claim that expletive "it" is not a pronoun, but I haven't seen them. For a recent theoretical approach, see Andrew Radford, Syntactic Theory and the Structure of English; for a recent descriptive work, see Huddleston and Pullum, The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. -- Hoary 10:44, 2 Dec 2004 (UTC)

I wasn't going to touch the non-syntactic stuff, but the earlier statement that "bad-language" expletives "often share the characteristics of lacking meaning and grammatical function" was so blatantly wrong that I had to fiddle with it and I ended up revising it quite a lot. (If you're lost, syntactic expletives definitely do have a grammatical function -- that's precisely why English requires them.) -- Hoary 08:35, 3 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Darned strange revision

While I do think Wikipedia should include examples with swear words wherever that's necessary or helpful, I don't think the section on expletive attributives needs so many of the examples to be swear words (especially ones as offensive as "bloody," which as I recall, is supposed to be very offensive in the U.K.); and indeed, I think the current set-up suggests (incorrectly) that an inoffensive word like "wretched" is only sort-of an expletive attributive. So, I'm changing it. (Just in case anyone was concerned I was trying to clean Wikipedia of swear words, or anything.) Ruakh 18:44, 10 Mar 2005 (UTC)

I'm British, and I bloodied up the article before Ruakh changed it. Yes, "bloody" is offensive; here, it needs to be. Meanwhile, "darned" makes me think of a somewhat mandarin American politician of the old school (George notdubya Bush, say), attempting to sound jus' plain folks while expressing irritation, admiration or whatever. And I said, I still believe correctly, that "wretched" works very much as an expletive attributive does, but is not called an expletive simply because it's not offensive. See Huddleston and Pullum, The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language p. 558; note how H and P distinguish between two kinds of "expressive attributives", the being inoffensive (dear, poor, wretched) and the second potentially offensive (bleeding, bloody, fucking). They point out that the the two kinds are actually used in the same way, and use "expletive" for the second. Thus the distinction is one of (potential) offensiveness, and this is obscured by the use of the milquetoasty darned. It's for this reason that I've reverted Ruakh's revision. However, I'm sure that the revision was made in good faith -- and I did notice, and have adopted, some of the tweaks to internal links. -- Hoary 07:21, 2005 Mar 11 (UTC)

I notice that you reverted much more than the change from "bloody" to "darned." I also made changes that did not hinge on whether "expletive attributive" could describe certain uses of inoffensive words, and you reverted those as well. May I ask why?

Also, if it is indeed the case that only offensive words qualify as "expletive attributives," then the word "expletive" actually only has two uses: syntactic expletives, and bad language (with an "expletive attributive" being a use of bad language in an expressive attributive). If that is so, then the article needs to be changed significantly: the second section and all other references to expletive attributives need to be deleted, and a short note needs to be added to the third section explaining how bad language earned the name "expletive." Ruakh 19:03, 11 Mar 2005 (UTC)

P.S. I should also note that some sources (e.g., WordNet r2.0; see http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=darned) do describe "darned" as an expletive when used in this sense. I don't have access to H&P, but perhaps the reason they don't call "wretched" an expletive is that it can only be used as an adjective? (For example, you can say "You'd damned well better [...]," but you can't say "You'd wretched well better [...]," because "damned" is a full expletive, while "wretched" is not?) Ruakh 21:53, 11 Mar 2005 (UTC)

No, Huddleston and Pullum don't distinguish between the group including wretched and that including bloody on the grounds that the former are only adjectival. Instead, it's a matter of (potential) offensiveness.

To me, darned is only adjectival, and "I hope he darned chokes on his pretzels" is unidiomatic. I can imagine that this differs among idiolects: to you, it may be idiomatic. This is one reason why I'm dissatisfied by the use of darned here. If bloody is gratuitously offensive even for use here (and to me it is not, but to others it might be), I thought for a moment that we could compromise with damned; however, this for me has the same drawback: "I hope he damned chokes on his pretzels" again isn't idiomatic.

Like the great majority of words in natural languages, expletive has a long history; since first introduced, its meanings have changed. The core meaning has surely been something like "meaningless verbal filler" (MVF). But to explain it as such would be to ignore its much commoner use these days to mean "bad language" (BL), and this would be perverse and unhelpful. True, if expletive covers both MVF and BL, there at first seems no reason to point out that it also means MVF-used-as-BL. However, some people use the term in just this way. Moreover, explaining the term as (i) MVF, (ii) MVF used as BL, (iii) BL in general makes the result easier to understand. Or anyway, I hoped that it would, although my attempt at this may well have been incompetent.

If wretched and similar inoffensive words are not "expletive", why discuss them? What I hoped to do was to comment on an idé reçue about the "expletive" use of bloody and the like: that they are bad not (only) because they're offensive but also because they're meaningless filler. This seems a reasonable position; but if you hold it you should also oppose the use of the similarly meaningless wretched, and I don't think that anybody does. Strictly speaking, this does indeed seem beyond the normal scope of an article on expletive and it certainly wouldn't merit a long section. I hoped that a short paragraph would be justifiable.

"That was a bloody good meal" seems entirely idiomatic to me. (I don't think I'd say it myself, and I'd have been startled if my mother had said it, but various friends would say it.) I'm not aware here of any oddness about the "bad" word bloody being used for something good. Thus I think it's better to say that the word "suggests the anger, irritation, admiration, etc. of the speaker" than that it "suggests the strength of feeling (usually anger or irritation) of the speaker", though I'm not happy with my phrasing either and will change it in the next few minutes. -- Hoary 03:27, 2005 Mar 12 (UTC)

Re: "True, if expletive covers both MVF ['meaningless verbal filler'] and BL ['bad language'], there at first seems no reason to point out that it also means MVF-used-as-BL.": But you're not saying that it covers both MVF and BL. You're saying that it covers one type of MVF (syntactic expletives), and that it covers BL. There's a whole type of MVF (expletive attributives) that you say is only expletive if it is also BL; that is, the qualifying criterion is not that the word in question is MVF, but that it is BL. If you want to say that BL is especially expletive when it's also MVF, then that merits a mention within the section on BL, but it doesn't merit a separate, MVF-seeming section before we even get to the BL section.

Re: the strength-of-feeling change: How it is now (after your most recent change) looks good. :-) Ruakh 04:03, 12 Mar 2005 (UTC)

I don't quite follow, I'm afraid. But I think that the problem may be either in the second paragraph or in the way that the order (A, B, C) of present-day uses in the second paragraph differs from that (A, C, B) in what follows. Without fixing the order discrepancy, I've done a little work on that second paragraph and hope that I've slightly improved it. -- Hoary 04:25, 2005 Mar 12 (UTC)

-Hoary- When I read this page, I was taken aback by the following:

"Expletive attributives common in English include damned, fucking, and motherfucking. Note that not all uses of such words are of this kind: "The concert was fucking brilliant" contains an expletive attributive, but "They filmed themselves fucking""

That seemed to be excessively descriptive for an article that defines "Expletive" —Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.167.57.98 (talk) 02:38, 14 September 2007 (UTC)

Oh, darn it. I've edited the article accordingly, but I think I've thereby weakened it as "damned" now sounds (I think) merely quaint rather than possibly offensive. I'm inclined to self-revert. -- Hoary 05:44, 14 September 2007 (UTC)

As native speaker, professional practitioner, and occasional educator of the English language, I find myself agreeing with HOARY on every point. I would also like to bring to an sharper point that, while all expletives are intensifiers, not all intensifiers are expletives, insomuch that said intensifiers and expletives are expressive attributives. That which differentiates the expletive from the general mass of intensifiers is its vulgarity. And, No, not its "bad language", because using "bad language" in this context is bad language, even bloody bad language. Now that last sentence provided a good example of that which is "bad language." Moreover, its final clause shows two expressive attributive intensifiers: even and bloody. However, only the latter, bloody, could be considered an expletive, and then only if the writer's audience is British or some non-American colonials that might find "bloody" to be offensive.

On the topic of expletives in general, any argument about whether an English word is or is not an expletive based on whether it might be offensive or not cannot meet common ground when it crosses various English speaking cultures. This is to say that a word may be an expletive in one place and not in another. For example, the expletive "bitchin'" became widely used in California surfer vernacular in the '60s but its use spread into the Valley and continued to be used as the surfers and valley kids grew up and used it in front of their kids, such that it became a completely unoffensive intensifier... in California. So, imagine my surprise when I visited family in Los Angeles and the bishop at church, same denomination as my church back home, introduced this "bitchin'" new family who had just joined the congregation. The sound of that word resonating in the chapel nearly knocked me right off the pew right and onto the floor, but nobody gasped or chuckled. I looked around: nothing, no reaction. Being from the Midwest, the "B" word in its various forms was one of the two most offensive expletives one could utter, and the single most offensive in the presence of a female. Direct reference to a female at hand not required, using the word would most probably get the user slapped or worse. A zero tolerance word, it was one where you would crane your head around in all directions before saying it, unless starting a brawl is what you wanted and for those who wanted to start a brawl that was a very popular way to get it going. Likewise, in rural Minnesota and Wisconsin, "goshdarn" is widely seen as an end run to "God damn" and so even more offensive than the real words because it's the sin of blasphemy by intent plus an overtly dishonest attempt to loophole the law of God. A "Goddamn", while still offensive, can slide by as a slip of the mind in the gust of a moment, but "goshdarn" is a recidivist trying to trick God with a bald face lies. Not only will offense taken, one can expect a stranger's lecture on the hypocrisy of "goshdarn" and how it would be better to say "Goddamn" because at least that is keeping it honest. So, like bloody or bitch or goshdarn, categorizing a word as an expletive cannot be applied universally across the entirety of the English language. It is culturally and anthropologically dependent on that which the audience of the writer or speaker might find offensive.

After all this, the broader point of the sharp point I wanted to bring is that language's sole purpose is to bring people together into communities of notions, ideas, emotions, and understanding. As the web of people who use our language grows and change, as society evolves, language must adapt in lock-step. This weird pathological need people have to categorize speech and cast hard rules and control how thought is allowed to be presented, in spite of wide general understanding of so called unacceptable grammar, inhibits our collective growth. The common use of the contraction "ain't" dates back to the 1500s, but even after 500 years we call it unacceptable and the intellectual contributions of anyone brought up using that word who has not since otherwise reformed and conformed to its grammatically acceptable counterparts are too often dismissed out of hand for coming from someone too ignorant to put forward a thought worth considering. The irony of all our English sticklers is that English was chosen back at the beginning of the Renascence to be the language of expression and the language of science. By way of inquisitions and papal dominance, European languages became strictly regulated, censored, and transformed by church and state through education and media in a manner that completely changed the way people spoke and in turn, transformed the way people thought throughout entire countries. If there is an idea that is subversive to the powers that be, obliterate any words that can express that idea. To control language is to control thought. The dark art of mind control practiced from the 13th to the 15th centuries was not voodoo magic, it was schooling people not only on what to think but how to think it with systems of logic to narrow thinking (i.e. limiting expression to a strict set of rules, relying on past events, tradition, and lore to drive current decision making without considering or even having it occur to explore other alternatives or possibilities, etc). England's break from Catholicism and efforts by King Henry VIII and King James, along with the Magna Carta, freed speech, freed English to develop organically and grow unfettered to incorporate any idea anyone might have such that today English has over 20 million words, more words than any other language in the world. In contrast, French continues to be completely and strictly regulated by the State in an effort to prevent the polluting of all that is French. As a result, France has the smallest vocabulary in the Western World with not even a million words. For example, in English we feel nostalgia and we feel homesick, two different sentiments. In French, there is one word for both. What's interesting about that is that a number of studies of the French people indicate that the French do not recognize any distinction between these two feelings. It's like English affords its speakers an extra emotion or a deeper understanding of that particularly type of emotion that is collaterally missed by the French by being surmised into an aggregate.

The study of language and its parts is important, especially as it helps one communicate more clearly to reach common ground and overcome cultural biases resulting from not communicating within acceptable norms, but let it stop there. All these grammar pages, especially the discussion boards, seem to lose themselves in meaningless minutia. Does the language rule us or do we rule the language. If one does not think that this is precisely what the first amendment of the Bill of Rights is about, then that is a mistake. Expression trumps all, not artificially contrived rules for expression imposed by self-appointed expert institutions of conforming thought and their legitimated, legitimizing legates - an upward cycle of people pretending authority over thought itself - word - logos - logic. People should guide the language they speak, not the other way around. Let the language breathe and in return it will give breath and mind. And A-fucking-men to that! Added at 08:03, 4 January 2012‎ by 204.106.254.151

• today English has over 20 million words -- Then either (a) I look forward to the hundred-volume third edition of the OED, or (b) I resign myself to the utter inadequacy of anything like its second edition.
• In contrast, French continues to be completely and strictly regulated by the State in an effort to prevent the polluting of all that is French. Extraordinary. Terrifying. But how, and where? (The last I heard, the AF is sluggishly attempting to put out an overdue revision of something purporting to be an official dictionary, which is routinely ignored by the government, let alone the populace.)
• As a result, France has the smallest vocabulary in the Western World with not even a million words. The poor Frenchies!
• For example, in English we feel nostalgia and we feel homesick, two different sentiments. In French, there is one word for both. What's interesting about that is that a number of studies of the French people indicate that the French do not recognize any distinction between these two feelings. I wonder what these studies are. In the meantime, French has two words for bicycle: vélo (masc) and bicyclette (fem). I'm willing to bet that a majority of miserable anglophones are like me in lacking any notion of a gender difference among bicycles.

Enough. Please read this and this and any amount of other material about language by qualified, informed linguists, or anyway pay no attention to the santorum about language emitted by know-nothings. -- Hoary (talk) 01:09, 5 January 2012 (UTC)

PS Twenty million, one million -- let's not quibble over niceties as long as the number is big and impressive and far more than the poor frogs can muster. But as for any "one million" figure, it's probably related to this. About which, please read "The 'million word' hoax rolls along". -- Hoary (talk) 03:52, 7 January 2012 (UTC)

Yet another meaning

The sense of 'bad language' seems to have extended to another class of words sometimes called expletives - interjections of anger or frustration, even those that aren't swear words, such as "sugar" or "bother". -- Smjg 16:34, 28 Apr 2005 (UTC)

needs so many of the examples to be swear words

In my humble opinion, bloody is not offensive at all in England, in fact its considered to be rather old fashioned. For example, its not a word you'd hear at my local skate park, where I can assure you that the use of expletives has increased to the point that not only is there at least one expletive between each word in the intended sentence, but indeed many of the words also contain expletives between syllables. Use of the word bloody is more likely to be found in distinguished gentlemens clubs in London than in the conversations of young people. So I would be inclined to leave the phrase "as is" as it achieves its goal and is not offensive to the degree required to justify removal from this site (some of us quite like the human imperfections of wikipedia (even though it should have been spelt wikipaedia !!). Cheers. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.33.82.91 (UTC) (talk • contribs) 19:57, 25 July 2006‎

List of fictional expletives?

Where in the wide world of sports did it go? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Ziggythehamster (talk • contribs) 04:08, 6 February 2007 (UTC).

See Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of fictional expletives. —Ruakh_TALK 05:30, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

Category Richard Nixon?

Forgive my ignorance, but should this article really be in Category:Richard Nixon? If so, what is the rationale? Silly rabbit 21:49, 11 June 2007 (UTC)

Wrong

Whereas it makes no sense to ask what the it refers to in "It is important that you work hard for the exam",

This isnt true, consider the following

"It is important" "What is important?" "That you work hard for the exam" 81.79.81.15 03:52, 11 August 2007 (UTC)

Yes, good point. "Refer to" wasn't the best choice. But what meaning does it add? That you work hard for the exam, perhaps? If so, then the result would be That you work hard for the exam is important that you work hard for the exam. And this isn't just unidiomatic, it's actually wrong (in my idiolect, anyway). -- Hoary 05:27, 11 August 2007 (UTC)

Yeah, but the thing about that is that you're using the copula "is." cf. "She's the Queen of England," which by your algorithm would become "The Queen of England is the Queen of England," - an uninformative tautology..... —Preceding unsigned comment added by 137.122.133.201 (talk) 16:50, 24 January 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia is not censored

Quote: "In original Wikipedia content, a profanity should either appear in its full form or not at all; words should never be bowdlerized by replacing letters in the word with dashes, asterisks, or other symbols." Therefore I have removed the dashes and asterisks in the article.--Nemissimo (talk) 21:23, 11 June 2009 (UTC)

Well done! For those who prefer arbitrarily censored "facts" there's always Conservapedia. Rursus dixit. (^mbork³!) 07:51, 15 April 2010 (UTC)

Split proposal

As currently written, this article treats several phenomena whose main similarity is their name. While this would be appropriate for a dictionary, it is not the way Wikipedia articles are arranged.

Arguably what this article calls "expletive attributives" and what it calls "bad language" are the same or closely-related topics. I do not think one could seriously argue, though, that "syntactic expletives" are the same phenomenon. Furthermore, the current lead section provides an etymology and list of definitions of the word rather than an overview of the various phenomena, offering further evidence of the article's problematic arrangement.

I would recommend that a new article, possibly called "Syntactic expletive", be created, and that "Expletive" be re-written to treat just expletive attributives and possibly profanity (though the page Profanity already exists). Hatnotes should be added to each page directing readers to the other page.

Another option would be to create three new pages, treating these three meanings, and to turn this page into a DAB. Would anyone like to argue for this option or to suggest another one? Cnilep (talk) 03:44, 27 September 2011 (UTC)

Actually, "expletive attributives" are entirely different from "bad language". Here is two examples:

It was around like 200 meters high.

"Like" in this sentence is expletive attributive. (No, it is not redundancy, because it is meaningless.) But it is not bad language.

If you are listening to this, Miss Newman, bugger off.

"Bugger off" here is an example of bad language, but it is not meaningless.

But on the whole, I agree with split. 80.191.138.163 (talk) 19:01, 9 October 2011 (UTC)

In light of 80.191.138.163's suggestion, I have made Syntactic expletive and Expletive attributive separate pages, and included Profanity as a third disambiguated link on this page. Cnilep (talk) 12:04, 4 November 2011 (UTC)