Jasper County Democrat, Volume 18, Number 94, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 23 February 1916 — What Is Profanity? [ARTICLE]

What Is Profanity?

Burgess Johnson, author, has been lecturing to the students of a feminist seminary, ahd chose for his topic ’The Profanity b'f Our Best People.” ITofanity is .a word which itself has been ou tra gebu sly profaned, as is drolly made evident by Mr, Johnson when he calls such expressions ••gosh.” ‘godly,” “jiminy,” “geewhiz,”. "by jove - ' and many others profane which are merely expletives or explosives to relieve the surcharged mind, both profound and superficial. They are slangy, they are vulgar, they are really derivations from the larger oaths which have a harsh savor of irreverence and sacrilege, and in. that sense they are profane. Any degradation of a language may properly be called a profanation of It. But what would ordinary and exI tiaordinary. humans have been if they had not possessed the “gosh,” the “golly,” the “geewhiz - ’ and the rest of an almost infinite vocabulary? With the masses and the classes they have been safety valves, and lacking them the “profanity” might have leaped all limititations to revel in “good round mouth-fill-ing oaths” instead of those of the gingerbread flavor. In the elder days the French called the English the “bygods,” for a very evident reason. At the same time the “mon dieu” was on every French tongue, feminine and masculine. Ancient Latins swore i>y the head of Jove, and the Greeks by a dozen gods and goddesses. The Mohammedan swears more often “by Allah” than by any other conception. i The Chinese swear by the bones of Confucius, and millions of Orientals swear by the beards of their prophets. « They do not think of this as profanity, and it is a fact that most who indulge in supreme irreverence attach no sacrilegious meaning to their explosives. Of course, it is coarse, silly and vain, but it is an immemorial habit, hard to eradicate —Pittsburg Dispatch.