Simran Narang/ Period 8
Grade 11 AP Language and Composition
Mrs. Houseman
30 March 2017
Argument Essay
As the class bully swaggered towards his victim, heads began to turn, following his direction. The room slowly grew to a deafening silence. His prey had no idea what was coming for him. When the bully reached his target, he snarled, “You are a stupid butthead.” An unanimous gasp is heard from the audience as the victim’s face turns red as he bites his lip to keep from crying. In the first grade, this was quite a common scene. The second a “bad word” was spoken, eyes would widen, gasps could be audibly heard, and apologies were immediately uttered. Now, years later, words like "stupid" have obviously been replaced with more serious curse …show more content…
Whether it is technologically or intellectually, our generation has been one step ahead. With the influence of new media, TV, and movies, society has become accustomed to using curse words on a day to day basis. Once upon a time, people would be more than surprised to hear a swear word escape the mouth of a friend, but in today’s society swear words are used more commonly than not. However, instead of cursing being used to offend someone, swear words have now been assigned to everything, and are even used as space fillers in sentences. TIME Magazine states, “About 0.7% of the words a person uses in the course of a day are swear words, which may not sound significant except that as they note, we use first-person plural pronouns — words like we, our and ourselves — at about the same rate.” As society moves progressively through the years, and with curse words becoming a regular part of our everyday language, curse words have lost almost complete shock value, and as a result, has stopped being viewed as offensive. You stub your toe, you cry out “Fuck” in pain. You get frustrated, you might give up and sigh, “Fuck it!” You’re friends are joking and making fun of you, you can retort in a jesting manner, “Fuck you.” The same word was used in all of these phrases in three different ways, but is never used at someone’s expense. The current generation’s ability to use these words without aiming it at a person demonstrates that curse words are more often than not, simply expressions of an individual’s current emotion, invalidating their
Grade 11 AP Language and Composition
Mrs. Houseman
30 March 2017
Argument Essay
As the class bully swaggered towards his victim, heads began to turn, following his direction. The room slowly grew to a deafening silence. His prey had no idea what was coming for him. When the bully reached his target, he snarled, “You are a stupid butthead.” An unanimous gasp is heard from the audience as the victim’s face turns red as he bites his lip to keep from crying. In the first grade, this was quite a common scene. The second a “bad word” was spoken, eyes would widen, gasps could be audibly heard, and apologies were immediately uttered. Now, years later, words like "stupid" have obviously been replaced with more serious curse …show more content…
Whether it is technologically or intellectually, our generation has been one step ahead. With the influence of new media, TV, and movies, society has become accustomed to using curse words on a day to day basis. Once upon a time, people would be more than surprised to hear a swear word escape the mouth of a friend, but in today’s society swear words are used more commonly than not. However, instead of cursing being used to offend someone, swear words have now been assigned to everything, and are even used as space fillers in sentences. TIME Magazine states, “About 0.7% of the words a person uses in the course of a day are swear words, which may not sound significant except that as they note, we use first-person plural pronouns — words like we, our and ourselves — at about the same rate.” As society moves progressively through the years, and with curse words becoming a regular part of our everyday language, curse words have lost almost complete shock value, and as a result, has stopped being viewed as offensive. You stub your toe, you cry out “Fuck” in pain. You get frustrated, you might give up and sigh, “Fuck it!” You’re friends are joking and making fun of you, you can retort in a jesting manner, “Fuck you.” The same word was used in all of these phrases in three different ways, but is never used at someone’s expense. The current generation’s ability to use these words without aiming it at a person demonstrates that curse words are more often than not, simply expressions of an individual’s current emotion, invalidating their