I maintain that profanity harms our children. Teaching a child that one's proper response to [ pick anyone's worst word ] is to overreact into rage or grief installs that easy push-button into the child's mind for anyone's mindless, effortless future use. While any child treated so can grow up and out of it, discarding the deliberately-installed weakness, all too often the damage is embraced for life.
It is a terrible act of childrearing. I wasn't raised that way. It's possible I got missed in all the shuffle, but I was raised to be polite.
Politeness is not much.
It is to seek not to cause offense.
A kid is liable to need more "why" than that, of course. I was given way better "why" than "just don't" or "it upsets people." In the course of many parental questionings before I was a teenager, the specific reason I was given for abstention from profanity* boiled down to compassion: for those less fortunate.
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*not blasphemy, mind you.
Whole different set of reasons available for that one, yet in the final analysis (even a fair preliminary analysis run-up), it reduces to the same basic pity motive: compassion for those less fortunate.
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Terms note. Important.
Mercy is the act or strong inner drive to spare another from harm. Mercy can only exist where the other is within our power, to spare or not to spare.
Pity is only the mercy that lacks the power to spare. Impotent mercy. One of the worst feelings on earth, and no surprise that pitiless cultures (in the United States and elsewhere) find so much aversion to pity that the mere suggestion of a pity motive is insulting to so many.
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It's because they are fucking assholes.
That's why. Pity and charity! Insulting only to those who don't or can't sing or mouth "...a wretch like me," whenever the original English anti-slavery anthem "Amazing Grace" comes on.
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