Long before Netflix gave us a history of swear words, also called dirty words, sexually fascinating words, colorful language, Richard Crasta, who grew up in an innocent South Indian town, had to grapple with swear words or sexual words in writing and speech. In this playful short book arguing against censorship of language and recollecting his own transformation from repressed prude to freewheeling slinger of juicy-Lucy words, the author suggests that sexual words, slang, and wordplay be “celebrated as joyous, vital, funny, juicy, the very essence of life. Man is a neutered animal without them; polite language is effete, artificial, and an unspoken admission of one’s total and abject submission to the System.”
Still, in the large and growing-ever-larger vocabulary of naughty words, there is a hierarchy, which is explained in the book’s central essay, “What Do You Call It? A Gentleman’s Opinionated Guide to the Basic Words.”
This hierarchy is personal, and has nothing to do with political correctness. The only truly “bad” words, the author suggests, are monstrous neologisms such as “birthing,” “interfacing,” and “modalities.”
