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As four-letter words become an ever more popular form of communication, it's hardly surprising that athletes might use them, or that one might slip out in a TV interview. NBC's Matt Yocum had just asked Dale Earnhardt Jr. how it felt to win a race at the Talladega Superspeedway for the fifth time, and he replied modestly that his famous dad, Dale Earnhardt Sr, had won there ten times. "It don't mean s---," he said.

The sky fell in. Earnhardt was fined $10,000 and docked points, knocking him out of first place in the Nextel Cup series. But what's interesting is Earnhardt's defense of his naughty word.

"It was in jubilation," he said. "When you're happy and joyous about something and it happens, it's different than being angry and cursing in anger. Of course, we don't want to promote that. But if a guy's in Victory Lane, jumping up and down, and lets a 's---' slip out, I don't think that's something we need to go hammering down on."

Is he right? Does it make a difference whether the word is used in anger or exuberance? Does it matter whether it's literal or figurative? Is there a distinction among different types: obscenity, profanity, cursing, and blasphemy?

A word is just a bunch of letters collected into a sound, of course, and can't be inherently bad. Some people, most famously the '60s comedian Lenny Bruce, insisted that no words should be off-limits. "I want to take the covers off. Whatever you do, you should say the words," Bruce said.

That's a little disingenuous, though; Bruce is implying that whenever we use a dirty word, we're using it literally and sincerely, talking about what we "do." When that's the case, a short Anglo-Saxon term obviously isn't more evil than the fancier import, though there may be community consensus that in some settings the topic itself is impolite. In an old joke, the hostess at a formal dinner takes aside the wife of a wealthy rancher and says, "You really must teach your husband not to say 'manure.'" The wife responds, "You have no idea how long it has taken me to teach him to say 'manure.'"

Unlike the rancher, Bruce was intentionally impolite. His satiric brand of comedy aimed at expressing frustration and anger, and he knew that listeners would register the antagonism in his choice of words. An expert witness at his 1964 obscenity trial stated that Bruce's language should be considered acceptable, since it was already in common use to express anger or accusation.

That's what makes a word "dirty." It's anger that turns a word into a "curse word," expressing a hope that someone come to harm. It's ironic that in our sex-obsessed culture so many of these insults are couched as a wish that the person will have a sexual experience. While the topic is a little personal, it's not necessarily an insult to hope somebody will have sex, and you might expect the recipient of such an epithet to respond, "Gee, thanks! I was thinking about doing that!" But of course the deciphered meaning of the insult is "I hope you have an unpleasant sexual experience." This is still not guaranteed to be an effective insult these days, because even the most unpleasant sexual experiences seem to be somebody's favorite.

That thread of anger helps us separate the different effects of "dirty words." It's why a seemingly unrelated category, profanity, has historically been lumped together with obscenity. There was a time when saying damn meant literally "I wish that you would be damned to hell." In a superstitious environment, it might be thought that such wishes had actual power, and that speaking these words aloud would consign a person to hell. If that's thought possible, it would be a matter of public health and safety to teach people to refrain from unintentionally laying real curses on each other in the course of an argument.

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October (Web-only) 2004, Vol. 48