I’ve been having a conversation with someone on my website. He claims that swear words are meaningless because the words are “arbitrary” and “they have no meaning,” but are just emotional expressions. I disagree, and by the end of a long conversation I was claiming that words have a lot of meaning, which is why we distort them to mean what we want them to mean, because we can change values, worldviews, and even ideologies if we can redefine words.
I mentioned to him, in conclusion, that it’s what I would call the blasphemization of America. Let’s take everything that is perverse and make it so commonplace that we diminish virtue and nobility to its lowest common denominator, thus reducing our culture to “anything goes,” absence of rules and restraints, sacrilege, and total secularity. With enough pressure and the consistent tearing down of religious ideals and practices, we can make our culture to be a place of unchallenged “I do what I want to do.”
We see it in our verbiage (as our discussion), in the sexualization of everything, in the total removal of anything religious from the public square, in the incessant push for rights without responsibility, in the tearing down of Judea-Christian values, in the relativity of truth, the relativity of morals, and the focus of business on “the bottom line” while ignoring any moral responsibility. I believe the language is one small part (though an obvious one) of the blasphemization of America.