Why were curse words concidered bad?

Its interesting, I never thought of this until I read the title of your question.

“Curse” words. Sounds like a likely correlation? Especially since almost everything considered bad in the United States has some long lost ignorant Christian based origin.

Well alot of the words were from the anglo saxon influence on the English language that was considered more brutish than other languages that influenced English.

Quote “Well, my educated guess would be:

SHIT- originated in Northern Germany, and then was brought over by the Angles, Saxons, etc. in the 5th-7th centuries AD. A common trend among Low German words from their High German-speaking neighbours is that the Low German words tend to end in a “t” whereas the High German words end in an “s.” For example:

English = Low German/Dutch = High German
what = wat = was
that = dat = das
shit = ? = scheisse”

taken from a post on here

I just saw a great lecture on this topic by Steven Pinker. Basically, swearing performs some important social functions (for example, intimidating others). Here’s a quote from an interview with Pinker:

“As it turns out, people swear in five different ways. That’s why it took me a while to figure this out,” he says.
...
“The subject matter of swearing is something that people don’t like to have taken lightly. Sex is a big deal. An atmosphere in which you bring up sex at the drop of a hat seems to many people to remove some of the inhibitions about thinking about sex. Casual speech about sex occurs in an atmosphere that would tolerate casual sex itself and there are a lot of reasons why people get upset about casual sex.”

Using sexual terms in swearing, something like motherf——er, evokes revulsion over the implied depravity.

In addition to sex, Pinker lists four taboo subjects that dominate swearing: religion, excretion, despised groups, and disease and infirmity.

These change over time and differ from one society to another.

Here’s a brief review of his new book, The Stuff of Thought, which discusses this topic:

You can also hear Pinker talk about it here. I recommend listening to him talk. He’s great.

You can also read a review/synopsis here

Even though I think the big topics (sex, religion etc.) are the same from language to language, swear words are also amusingly language- and culture-specific. I will never forget my disappointment when I asked some French-Canadians to teach me Quebecois swear words and they told me that “communion wafer” and “tabernacle” (in French) are considered pretty bad. “Communion wafer”??