#the subtitle of The Windhover is | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

abotl · 1 year ago

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It really doesn’t. Insofar as the Bible has any opinions about swearing, it’s about the oath-taking kind - “god as my witness” e.g. And it’s less concerned with the speaking than with the gravitas and truth content of the oath. (Depending on how you count, the 2nd/3rd commandment is not to take god name in vain. God is meant to be a big deal so like take god seriously. )

The upshot is that, for most of history, the least problematic word in the phrase Jesus fucking Christ was fucking.

(We can get into the ways that the obsession with antiquity in the renaissance brought back Roman attitudes towards obscenity where fucking was insulting, but where “you fucker” is like mildly offensive but “get fucked” is one of the worst things you could say because Romans cared about as much as invasive straight people who was getting penetrated. But also…)

Anyway, I have absolutely NO patience for people who won’t say shit, but will use derogatory language and slurs. Fuck them in particular.

remember how profanity was made out to be the worst thing in the world when you were a kid and then when you grew up everyone was like "just kidding, nobody actually cares, we were just doing that so we could yell at you"

#my favorite fact about fuck #is that it was a pretty normal English word for a long time #to the point that common names of plants and animals used it #when Gerard Manley hopkins wrote his poem about a kestrel #he titled it The Windhover #which was the polite adaptation for its older common name #the windfucker #it’s very easy to read that sonnet as a metaphor for sex #the seeing and foreplay and buildup and Oh right near the end #anyway Hopkins was both gay and catholic and so as you might expect #the subtitle of The Windhover is #to Christ our Lord

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