“Profanity shocks nobody anymore,” writes Brad Leithauser in a recent essay for The New Yorker, and still, there remain “unusable words,” words that cannot be used because they might also mean their opposites, or because they are overused, or when there’s confusion about its meaning.
“I sometimes regret the passing out of our lives of profanity,” Leithauser writes, “not the four-letter words themselves… but the instinctual belief that some terms should be considered unfit for public use.”
Leithauser finds a strange comfort in the notion that mere syllables might hold the power to “shock and outrage,” a testament to the “power of language.”
