Profanity

Profanity is a word choice or usage which its audience considers to be offensive. The original meaning of the term was restricted to blasphemy, sacrilege or speaking God's name in vain (profane speech, or swear word), especially expressions such as "God damn it", "go to Hell", and "damn you". The word bloody may belong in this category. They are sometimes made mild, resulting in less recognizable forms, such as the minced oaths.

Japan

Japanese is occasionally cited as an example of a language with little or no profanity, but this myth is mostly due to a misunderstanding of the complex system of politeness levels in the language. Common verbs, like "to do" or "to give", have multiple forms conveying various levels of respect, and depending on the context the choice of verb can be offensive: for example, the condescending verb yaru for "to give" is perfectly acceptable when giving food to a dog or watering a plant, but cannot be used towards an equal or superior without serious offense. Similar levels of politeness apply to pronouns, with some pronouns for "you", including kisama (貴様, lit. "my Lord"), temae (手前, "in front") and otaku (お宅, "honorable house") having gone through the euphemism treadmill and become extremely offensive.

Related Topics:
Japanese - Otaku - Euphemism treadmill

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These make it entirely possible to unintentionally gravely insult someone without using any profane words in the Western sense.

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However, Japanese does have a number of patently offensive expressions which are banned in all broadcast media and frequently censored in text: examples include manko (???;, "vagina") and chinpo (???;, "penis"). If used, these and other offensive expressions are commonly printed with the central character replaced by the placeholder sign maru (〇), so manko becomes ma-ko (マ〇コ). This is directly equivalent to writing "fuck" as "f**k". For most parts, these terms carry only their literal meanings and cannot be used as insults per se, but some words like kusottare (糞っ垂れ, "shit-drip") and yariman (やり万, "whore") are strong invective on par with anything found in English. Milder exclamations allowed on TV include baka (??, "stupid"), bakayarō (バカヤロー, "idiot") and chikushō (畜生, a Buddhist realm of the beasts, roughly analogous to hell).

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One possible reason offered for the supposed paucity of profanity is of the belief of Kotodama (言霊), lit. word spirits. Kotodama appear when spoken, written, or even thought and they can easily be "tainted" with ill intentions and evil spirits. Even today, Japanese avoid mentioning directly or with words that imply harm to keep away tainted evil Kotodama. This, of course, can be reversed to bring about harm to someone or something, and common everyday words are used profanely in this case.

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