Why do people use profanity?

Answer 1

Over time and through use some words have had emotional connotations attached to them. When people want to evoke an emotional response in conversation they often resort to using these charged words. When words are commonly used in negative emotionally charged settings the emotional attachment to them grows.

So the short of it is: Profanity is profane because it's used that way and it's used that way because it's profane.

The same sort of emotional pairing with words works for good words too, like love, smile, chocolate and so on.

because they express their feelings in an angry way.

I guess there are bad words because sometimes we want to communicate bad things. We want to yell at someone, or offend them, or tell them that we hate them. Most bad words are about emphasis, but they aren't used in polite society because we are emphasizing something negative. We make up rude words for other races or groups of people because we don't relate to them, and we don't like them because they are different. We call people we know rude things because we're angry or we are trying to build our own egos by stepping on others. Maybe if we were all really good all the time, we wouldn't have a use for bad words anymore. ... But for now, people still want to emphasize negative things, mock, scorn, and offend... and so there are words that accomodate those desires.

Usually because they think it

a. makes them cool

b. makes them funny

c. makes them machure

d. is not morally harmful and there is pretty much no good reason why they SHOULDN'T be saying those words

e. all of the above or a combination of all of the above