Talk:Expletive

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I've revised the syntax half of this page rather radically because it struck me as wrongheaded. One example: I can imagine that there do exist recent grammar books that claim that expletive "it" is not a pronoun, but I haven't seen them. For a recent theoretical approach, see Andrew Radford, Syntactic Theory and the Structure of English; for a recent descriptive work, see Huddleston and Pullum, The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. -- Hoary 10:44, 2 Dec 2004 (UTC)

I wasn't going to touch the non-syntactic stuff, but the earlier statement that "bad-language" expletives "often share the characteristics of lacking meaning and grammatical function" was so blatantly wrong that I had to fiddle with it and I ended up revising it quite a lot. (If you're lost, syntactic expletives definitely do have a grammatical function -- that's precisely why English requires them.) -- Hoary 08:35, 3 Dec 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Darned strange revision

While I do think Wikipedia should include examples with swear words wherever that's necessary or helpful, I don't think the section on expletive attributives needs so many of the examples to be swear words (especially ones as offensive as "bloody," which as I recall, is supposed to be very offensive in the U.K.); and indeed, I think the current set-up suggests (incorrectly) that an inoffensive word like "wretched" is only sort-of an expletive attributive. So, I'm changing it. (Just in case anyone was concerned I was trying to clean Wikipedia of swear words, or anything.) Ruakh 18:44, 10 Mar 2005 (UTC)

I'm British, and I bloodied up the article before Ruakh changed it. Yes, "bloody" is offensive; here, it needs to be. Meanwhile, "darned" makes me think of a somewhat mandarin American politician of the old school (George notdubya Bush, say), attempting to sound jus' plain folks while expressing irritation, admiration or whatever. And I said, I still believe correctly, that "wretched" works very much as an expletive attributive does, but is not called an expletive simply because it's not offensive. See Huddleston and Pullum, The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language p. 558; note how H and P distinguish between two kinds of "expressive attributives", the being inoffensive (dear, poor, wretched) and the second potentially offensive (bleeding, bloody, fucking). They point out that the the two kinds are actually used in the same way, and use "expletive" for the second. Thus the distinction is one of (potential) offensiveness, and this is obscured by the use of the milquetoasty darned. It's for this reason that I've reverted Ruakh's revision. However, I'm sure that the revision was made in good faith -- and I did notice, and have adopted, some of the tweaks to internal links. -- Hoary 07:21, 2005 Mar 11 (UTC)

I notice that you reverted much more than the change from "bloody" to "darned." I also made changes that did not hinge on whether "expletive attributive" could describe certain uses of inoffensive words, and you reverted those as well. May I ask why?

Also, if it is indeed the case that only offensive words qualify as "expletive attributives," then the word "expletive" actually only has two uses: syntactic expletives, and bad language (with an "expletive attributive" being a use of bad language in an expressive attributive). If that is so, then the article needs to be changed significantly: the second section and all other references to expletive attributives need to be deleted, and a short note needs to be added to the third section explaining how bad language earned the name "expletive." Ruakh 19:03, 11 Mar 2005 (UTC)

P.S. I should also note that some sources (e.g., WordNet r2.0; see http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=darned) do describe "darned" as an expletive when used in this sense. I don't have access to H&P, but perhaps the reason they don't call "wretched" an expletive is that it can only be used as an adjective? (For example, you can say "You'd damned well better [...]," but you can't say "You'd wretched well better [...]," because "damned" is a full expletive, while "wretched" is not?) Ruakh 21:53, 11 Mar 2005 (UTC)

No, Huddleston and Pullum don't distinguish between the group including wretched and that including bloody on the grounds that the former are only adjectival. Instead, it's a matter of (potential) offensiveness.

To me, darned is only adjectival, and "I hope he darned chokes on his pretzels" is unidiomatic. I can imagine that this differs among idiolects: to you, it may be idiomatic. This is one reason why I'm dissatisfied by the use of darned here. If bloody is gratuitously offensive even for use here (and to me it is not, but to others it might be), I thought for a moment that we could compromise with damned; however, this for me has the same drawback: "I hope he damned chokes on his pretzels" again isn't idiomatic.

Like the great majority of words in natural languages, expletive has a long history; since first introduced, its meanings have changed. The core meaning has surely been something like "meaningless verbal filler" (MVF). But to explain it as such would be to ignore its much commoner use these days to mean "bad language" (BL), and this would be perverse and unhelpful. True, if expletive covers both MVF and BL, there at first seems no reason to point out that it also means MVF-used-as-BL. However, some people use the term in just this way. Moreover, explaining the term as (i) MVF, (ii) MVF used as BL, (iii) BL in general makes the result easier to understand. Or anyway, I hoped that it would, although my attempt at this may well have been incompetent.

If wretched and similar inoffensive words are not "expletive", why discuss them? What I hoped to do was to comment on an idé reçue about the "expletive" use of bloody and the like: that they are bad not (only) because they're offensive but also because they're meaningless filler. This seems a reasonable position; but if you hold it you should also oppose the use of the similarly meaningless wretched, and I don't think that anybody does. Strictly speaking, this does indeed seem beyond the normal scope of an article on expletive and it certainly wouldn't merit a long section. I hoped that a short paragraph would be justifiable.

"That was a bloody good meal" seems entirely idiomatic to me. (I don't think I'd say it myself, and I'd have been startled if my mother had said it, but various friends would say it.) I'm not aware here of any oddness about the "bad" word bloody being used for something good. Thus I think it's better to say that the word "suggests the anger, irritation, admiration, etc. of the speaker" than that it "suggests the strength of feeling (usually anger or irritation) of the speaker", though I'm not happy with my phrasing either and will change it in the next few minutes. -- Hoary 03:27, 2005 Mar 12 (UTC)

Re: "True, if expletive covers both MVF ['meaningless verbal filler'] and BL ['bad language'], there at first seems no reason to point out that it also means MVF-used-as-BL.": But you're not saying that it covers both MVF and BL. You're saying that it covers one type of MVF (syntactic expletives), and that it covers BL. There's a whole type of MVF (expletive attributives) that you say is only expletive if it is also BL; that is, the qualifying criterion is not that the word in question is MVF, but that it is BL. If you want to say that BL is especially expletive when it's also MVF, then that merits a mention within the section on BL, but it doesn't merit a separate, MVF-seeming section before we even get to the BL section.

Re: the strength-of-feeling change: How it is now (after your most recent change) looks good. :-) Ruakh 04:03, 12 Mar 2005 (UTC)

I don't quite follow, I'm afraid. But I think that the problem may be either in the second paragraph or in the way that the order (A, B, C) of present-day uses in the second paragraph differs from that (A, C, B) in what follows. Without fixing the order discrepancy, I've done a little work on that second paragraph and hope that I've slightly improved it. -- Hoary 04:25, 2005 Mar 12 (UTC)

[edit] Yet another meaning

The sense of 'bad language' seems to have extended to another class of words sometimes called expletives - interjections of anger or frustration, even those that aren't swear words, such as "sugar" or "bother". -- Smjg 16:34, 28 Apr 2005 (UTC)

>> needs so many of the examples to be swear words >>

In my humble opinion, bloody is not offensive at all in England, in fact its considered to be rather old fashioned. For example, its not a word you'd hear at my local skate park, where I can assure you that the use of expletives has increased to the point that not only is there at least one expletive between each word in the intended sentence, but indeed many of the words also contain expletives between syllables. Use of the word bloody is more likely to be found in distinguished gentlemens clubs in London than in the conversations of young people. So I would be inclined to leave the phrase "as is" as it achieves its goal and is not offensive to the degree required to justify removal from this site (some of us quite like the human imperfections of wikipedia (even though it should have been spelt wikipaedia !!). Cheers.