Is Profanity a Necessity?

I’m a very loyal Facebook netizen and I visit the site very frequently. Thus, although I don’t converse with people that much, I get to see all sorts of status updates in my news feed displaying a variety of dispositions, opinions and some other difficult-to-categorize posts. What I’m trying to highlight here is the choice of words people use to properly present their frame of mind. Just so we're clear about this, I'm not trying to judge anyone by posting this. I have no right to judge, I'm aware of that, because we all have our own flaws. I'm just merely stating my opinion. We are, in fact, entitled to have one, right?

I took this picture from here.
(Quite an informative article if you care to read)

As much as I hate to admit it, countless times words such as ‘sh*t’ and ‘d*mn’ slips from my mouth, either unconsciously or involuntarily. It seems like those two words formed a permanent habitation on my tongue when they were first introduced to my limited vocabulary sometime during my misspent youth. In fact, there were more of those kind of words introduced to me in all sorts of languages and I had no problem uttering them audibly. I thought using those words will make me sound like I’m a really cool teenager, so I used them to impress my equally clueless friends. Eventually, those words became a habit, despite the warnings I got from my parents saying that the next time they hear me say those foul languages again, they’ll rub chillies on my mouth. I guess I was too smart to know those were just empty threats.


As I grow older (well not that old), I gather that it is not the use of cuss words or calling people with vulgar terms that makes you cool. It’s your personality. Your attitude. Not that I’m saying the most important thing in life is to be impressed by others, no…but you get my point, right? Slowly, I was able to shed those dirty words off of my phraseology one by one, although I'm still struggling to get rid of the two words mentioned earlier from emanating from me. As the saying goes, old habits die hard. Darn it, I think I'm making up excuses again.  I’m not proud of it okay, I’m just saying. Anyways, I managed to replace them with some less profane words whenever I'm at a conscious state of mind and able to stop myself from using the originally profane terms.

The question is, do I still feel the anger or astonishment (unexplainably, we like to use indecent words to express our stupefaction) in my being even after I choose to remove profanity from my vocabulary? Frankly, I do. So what's the point of uttering a morally-acceptable sentence when I still feel the same feeling I felt? Well, maybe because dirty words are just not nice to be heard or read by the ears or eyes of  the society. Maybe because I'm a Christian, and I have been taught to never ever use my mouth to articulate curse or swearing words (been taught about this since I was 5 yet it took me more than 10 years to finally obey the Lord's teaching). Or maybe because I found that the thing printed on the T-shirt below is quite true.

Picture taken from here,
just in case  you're interested to buy the t-shirt. ;-)

You see, of course we live in a free country, so we get to choose what word we want to use to form a perfectly understandable sentence. But the thing is, is it really necessary to use lewd words in one’s figure of speech? Hmm. I’ll just leave that for you to decide.