Expletive

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Dr. Goodword
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Expletive

Postby Dr. Goodword » Sun Mar 29, 2015 11:05 pm

• expletive •

Pronunciation: eks-plê-tiv • Hear it!

Part of Speech: Adjective, Noun

Meaning: 1. (Adjective) Serving only to fill out something, such as a word or sentence, or to make up a required number. 2. An obscene interjection. 3. A word that contributes nothing to the meaning of a sentence, but is needed to fill a grammatical position, as it's in the sentence, 'It's raining'.

Notes: Today's Good Word is used almost exclusively as a noun referring to profanity. It has a perfectly innocuous adjectival meaning that is in danger of being lost. Profanity has such a profound effect on language that as soon as a word takes on a profane meaning (e.g. ass), it becomes the dominant meaning, overwhelming the original one. It is based on the verb explete "to fill out, to complete", which has another noun, expletion.

In Play: The transcripts of the Nixon Whitehouse tapes were grammatically notable for the frequent occurrence of "expletive deleted". Expletives most frequently simply indicate the speaker's attitude toward the reference of this sentence. Here's an example with the nominal meaning: "If you removed expletives from English, Ivan Oder would have nothing to say." However, let's not let the adjective go quite yet: "Morris can't play bridge tonight; do you know an expletive player who could sit in for him?"

Word History: English captured this word from Middle French explétif, feminine explétive. French inherited its word from Late Latin expletivus "serving to fill out", based on Latin expletus, the past participle of explere "to fill out". Explere is built up of ex- "out" + plere "to fill". The Latin root goes back to Proto-Indo-European pel-/pol- "to fill", which came to be English fill and full. It also gave Latin its word plenus "full", which underlies the English borrowing plenty and plus, which is behind plural. In Russian it turned up as polny "full" and in Greek as polus "many" and the prefix poly-, which is now a prefix in all European Indo-European languages. (We owe Norman Neuberger III our gratitude for recommending yet another [expletive deleted] Good Word.)
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George Kovac

Re: Expletive

Postby George Kovac » Mon Mar 30, 2015 9:44 am

How to report the actual language used by people in the news is a dilemma for many respectable journals.

Matters of taste (and the imperatives of marketing to a public which is, superficially at least, prudish) collide with journalistic integrity and, well, with a realistic acceptance of how real people speak and think. When former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich was caught on recorded telephone calls using expletives in his attempts to sell the US Senate seat vacated by President-elect Obama, most newspapers sanitized the quotes.

Was that the right decision? The cheekiest, and most perceptive, commentary on that editorial decision was made in this letter to the editor of the Economist, a magazine which chose to accurately and fully report the governor's crude words:

<<Star reporting

SIR – Thank you for not “starring out” Rod Blagojevich's expletives when reporting his alleged exploits to sell Barack Obama's Senate seat (“The Chicago way”, December 13th). Apart from taking pleasure in being treated as a grown-up (many other newspapers deleted the swearing), I was struck by how much more powerfully the Illinois governor's seedy, cynical greed was communicated when the obscenities were printed in full. F***ing good decision.

Jonathan King
New York >>


http://www.economist.com/node/12884783

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David McWethy
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Re: Expletive

Postby David McWethy » Mon Mar 30, 2015 4:40 pm

Deleting forceful expletives removes one of the ways that a speaker's audience can capture the intensity of a forcefully-delivered ejaculation to a gasping audience, leaving the listener or reader dissatisfied with the resulting elephantine pregnancy that brought forth a mouse.
Last edited by David McWethy on Tue Mar 31, 2015 10:36 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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George Kovac

Re: Expletive

Postby George Kovac » Mon Mar 30, 2015 6:10 pm

For the most part, I agree with David McWethy.

But I don't have a hard and fast rule about whether expletives should be spelled out in quoted journalistic material. It is not always about a choice to honor or confront the prudery of milquetoast readers. Context and editorial judgment are what matter. The Blagojevich full quotes were condign, because they gave a sense of the man, the crudity and forcefulness of his unseemly schemes. Other times spelling out the expletives is perhaps less important, and there is the risk of being pretentious with a showy but unnecessary replication of profanity when the quote does not need it to demonstrate the speaker's meaning and intensity... Journalism does not require transcriptional accuracy in all cases. Reporters routinely edit out "uhm" "well" "ah, ah, ah" "I mean" "y'know" and other distracting and unimportant verbal tics. Unimportant, that is, unless the point of the article is to demonstrate that the quoted person is evasive, unprepared or unusually nervous, in which case the tics stay in. Or inconsequential errors of grammar by the speaker, which a reporter may fix to not distract from the flow. We routinely "quote" foreigners translated into English without noting (or providing the original words) that the speaker was not using English, and no one thinks that is wrong or pandering to readers unsophisticated in the other language.

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Re: Expletive

Postby call_copse » Tue Mar 31, 2015 9:23 am

I would not respect a newspaper that does not correctly report speech. There's no need to swear in newspapers otherwise, to be fair the papers that do bowdlerise text tend to be the ones that use a vocabulary limited to that of an 8 year old.

http://www.theguardian.com/media/mind-y ... swearwords

I liked this story of how authors have withdrawn permission for their work to be 'auto-bowdlerised' by the CleanReader app. Read the book as intended by the writer or do not read it at all seems perfectly sensible to me.

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/m ... -celebrate

Joanne Harris, Chocolat author:
“If a reader chooses to avoid reading my books, that’s fine. She has that right. If she hates it, that’s also fine. If she has opinions on how it could have been done better, that’s also fine, because she’s entitled to her opinion, whether I agree or not. BUT – her opinion does not extend to changing my work in any way. My book, my rules, and that includes my words. ALL of them.”
Iain

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Re: Expletive

Postby Perry Lassiter » Tue Mar 31, 2015 7:09 pm

I happen to be reading the letters of Hemingway, and back in the 20's and 30's he's contending for his publisher to let him sprinkle in a swear word or two. He repeatedly makes the point he is not trying to shock, but truly to represent the way these people talk. That battle, for better or worse, has apparently been won.
pl

George Kovac

Re: Expletive

Postby George Kovac » Wed Apr 01, 2015 10:08 am

Yes, that is a battle that Hemingway, and other authors of his generation (and the next) had to battle. The dialog--especially that of men in war novels--was stilted and unnatural under the prevailing rules. The word "muck" appears in several novels of the era. To a reader today, that euphemism is a distracting howler. A story, perhaps apocryphal, is that Hemingway called a meeting with his editor to discuss the publisher's insistence on sanitizing the offending word out of the author's impending novel. The editor's assistant, when checking the boss's appointments calendar, was shocked to read that the editor had penciled in "2:30--bother"

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Re: Expletive

Postby Philip Hudson » Thu Apr 09, 2015 8:04 pm

Hemingway - such talent, such a sad life. Love him or hate him, he was a great writer.

In the culture of my youth, expletives were not allowed. Heck, we couldn't even say Heck! The exception being the confusing sentence, "I haven't seen you since Heck was a pup." What the heck does that mean? (I have to use up the quota of mild expletives stored up from my childhood.) :)
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Re: Expletive

Postby Dr. Goodword » Thu Apr 09, 2015 10:27 pm

I would consider heck a euphemism for hell. In my childhood we were allowed euphemisms though not expletives. Darn and dang were popular euphemisms for damn.
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Re: Expletive

Postby Perry Lassiter » Sat Apr 11, 2015 4:08 pm

Isn't it also correct that "expletive" can be synonymous with "interjection" at time, in which case it can include innocuous words like "Hey!"
pl

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Re: Expletive

Postby Philip Hudson » Sat Apr 11, 2015 5:13 pm

In the hinterlands during my salad days, if a youth greeted an elder with the word, "Hey!" he/she might be grounded for a week if not knocked to the ground immediately. "Hey you kids!" was enough to get one put in solitary confinement, probably to the woodshed. And you know what happens in the woodshed. The elders use the board of education on you there. On the other hand, good old "Anglo-Saxon" words for bodily functions were spoken mater-of-factly, but never in a non-literal sense. E.g., the out-house was called the s**t-house with never a blush from anyone.

In the book,"The Egg and I" by Betty MacDonald, there is an almost ribald scene in which husband Bob meets Ma Kettle while she is sitting in the outhouse with no door. She greeted him with perfect aplomb. If you haven't read this delightful little book, I recommend it. It is not deep but it is amusing. In the 1947 film, Betty was played by Claudette Colbert. The spin off was a series of comedy movies featuring Ma and Pa Kettle. I must admit their hinterlands were more hinter than my hinterlands.

Expletives are in the eye of the beholder, or at least in the mores of the community. In the mores of Dr. Goodword's youth, mild swear words were used as euphemisms for harsher swear words.
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Re: Expletive

Postby Slava » Sat Apr 11, 2015 10:19 pm

I can't remember the whole saying/retort, but there was something from my youth that went something like this: "'Hey' is for horses, grass is cheaper, {something else} is free. If you're a farmer, you get all three."

Anyone know the third bit?
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Re: Expletive

Postby Philip Hudson » Sun Apr 12, 2015 6:08 pm

A familiar phrase Slava. "Hey is for horses, grass is cheaper, equine defecant is free. If you're a farmer, you get all three."
It is dark at night, but the Sun will come up and then we can see.


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