Frack.

Frack. It's certainly been a while since I updated this blog. I thought that going to Japan and studying another language while teaching English would have inspired me to write on this blog more, but in fact it's done the opposite, with my brain drawing linguistic tidbit blanks as my lack of using much higher level English makes my own English ability slowly degrade as it gets worse and worser.

But fortunately, I started reading another linguistics book I got for my birthday Which has inspired me to start writing again. But what to write about? Frack. I don't know.

Just in case you couldn't work out by the title of this blog, my slight obsession with tv has led me to find my new favourite swear word at the moment; frack. Originally from Battlestar Galactica (a show that I have yet to see as well), supposedly, it's the sweat word of the future, though in reality, it's really just a word that the producers of the show made up so they could find some alternative to the f word that could be uttered and not censored on tv. And its got it's following, even popping up on other tv shows, which is how I caught wind of it.

But anyway, why does frack seem to have legs as a cool new profanity alternative, and not like, dudgemuffin?

Well, when we try to communicate, even if what we come up with may not be a proper word or have even been used before on that context, since we like to assume that people are talking with the purpose of communication (and not to babble on mindlessly, unlike this blog post). We tend to fill in the gaps and make the associations ourselves. Kind of like an "Oh! He's using the word frack, and in that context of him being angry and when we would normally be swearing" moment. That's why we can all read that ubiquitous email forward that went around and understand it; if we read of trying to make sense of it we can.

Frack also made me wonder if it really does become the preferred profanity of the future, would future Tourettes sufferers (seeing there wasn't a cure developed by then) be shouting frack and not previously ye-olde profanity words like ragamuffin and zounds? Well, I just found out that swear words are actually stored in a different part of the brain than other words, so assuming Tourettes affects that part of the brain (and you still wouldn't find zounds as offensive as Shakespeare may have) then I guess you wouldn't, despite how odd it may have sounded. Drats. I mean frack.