Q: Why do people believe there are bad words?

Advocacy mode = 1

This topic is close to my heart. I've done a significant amount of community work in my past, and inoculating members of it against offense, promoting mutual understanding works wonders, and there are greater implications on our speech and how it may come to be regulated should more of us continue to fail to get along well enough to make it all productive.

Just want to share some hard won insights here, that's all and I am taking you seriously for a moment to highlight something important about "bad" words that your question leads to and that may be of value to others.

In the US, the First Amendment is being questioned. There are lots of reasons for this, and they aren't all appropriate here. But, it's being questioned.

The right to not be offended is coming up a lot too. Some of this is cultural imports / clashes as the globe continues to communicate across basically one Internet ...from other parts of the world where speech is considerably more regulated. And some of it boils down to people lacking the tools needed to handle a dialog properly.

These two things aren't an inclusive treatment on this topic, they just stick right out.

You are quite right. Words are just words. People are just people too, so let's explore that just a bit:

Fact is, we are as offended as we think we are. Offensive, or bad, or profane words, are generally offensive in some fashion or other. Norms largely dictate which words fall into these buckets.

Sometimes law differentiates words too.

From Lessig:

Human behavior is regulated by 4 basic forces, and they are physics, money, law, norms.

Physics and money actually prevent actions. If the universe doesn't allow something, it's not gonna happen, or at least won't happen until our understanding of the rules improves enough to engineer it to happen. Fair enough, right? Money presents a cost barrier in a similar fashion. No money, no act, given a sufficient cost to inhibit said act. Similar work arounds, such as using other people's money are in play that parallel our understanding.

The point being physics and money (or markets) actually inhibit actions.

Law is a post fact force. Law doesn't actually prevent anything as much as it can bring a remedy, or civil cost to having done a thing, and having been caught doing it.

Norms work like laws do, minus the courtroom in the vast majority of cases, however one may still experience significant personal costs when violating norms and having been called out, caught doing it.

Back to being offended.

It's all very subjective. A combination of words spoken to one person may be seen as ordinary, benign, laughable, and so forth, but not necessarily offensive, and for sure not criminal. Another person receives those words, and it's definitely offensive, and may be criminal in both the law and norm sense.

(I'm using criminal as a parallel to violating a norm in a particular egregious manner such that there may be a public debate about having done it, and a sort of conviction related to the outcome of that debate, and it's for simplicity, not actually implying norms are in any way criminalized, nor should be, though in some parts of the world they are anyway, but I very seriously digress.)

Given this subjectivity, it's both very hard to understand what might offend someone, and equally hard to understand whether someone is gaming the idea of being offended to gain advantage, position or leverage, or even standing somehow!

Before I continue, there is weighting too.

Truth is, some stranger we don't know, who may or may not know something about us, just doesn't garner much in the way of weight or credence. Context plays a big role here too, but I'm going to keep it simple. (sort of, this topic is hard)

Boiled down, what can we do when someone online calls us an ass, or speaks of the profane, or vulgar?

Go the other way, and say someone we know well, we value, that knows us does that? Ouch! And maybe that needs to hurt a little. The weight is more significant. Worth consideration, but still not worth righteous indignation any more than the other extreme is.

Weigh that speech, first and foremost!

And realize we all have options too:

The most common is righteous indignation. It is by far the number one response, and in my view, a very significant contributor to the idea of free speech being of increasingly dubious value. It's also completely unnecessary!

If we don't want conversations to go bad, then it's on us to manage our end of the conversation, use the options we have, weigh speech we encounter, and communicate clearly enough for others to understand us better.

Where people don't do that, or expect someone else to do that for them, lots of problems crop up, and it's this dynamic that also puts speech under threat.

Other options include:

Humor --when a rando calls you an ass, laugh! That's about all it's worth. Other examples should follow easily.

Redirect --Back the conversation up, communicate, attempt to get past the matter with better, ideally mutual understanding.

End the dialog. Maybe it's just not worth continuing given someone is gaming being offended, or perhaps just has too many triggers for it to make meaningful conversation difficult, low value.

Seek clarity. Intent, particularly via text, is extremely difficult to discern. It's often not possible to do it with sufficient fidelity to warrant being offended. So don't be. Getting clear on something is powerful, and it's often going to result in a greater bond between participants too. Mutual understanding is a powerful basis for trust and trust is a powerful vaccine against offense and conversations going badly that just don't have to go badly.

Sidebar: On the topic of intent, a while back some people ran an experiment on Slashdot. The idea was simple, and it was for people to write out what various exchanges in a discussion thread meant to them. In other words, their "take" on the whole thing.

These varied considerably from what people thought the real intent was! I participated in this and was stunned to learn most intent is implied, unless very directly stated in fairly formal terms. On your next few threads, consider this idea. Or better, review one as a non-participant. You will see errors in parsing intent run rampant, and may also understand more about why the burden to keep conversations good is a shared one, and why seeking to control others is often futile too.

Just know the intent you perceive is extremely likely to not be what the writer intended, and their context being very different from yours. Culture, norms, station in life, etc...

End Sidebar.

There really aren't "bad" words. Just differences. And there is a shared burden here, not some inherent right to not be offended. We have no way to handle that in a meaningful way without also watering down speech to the point where we will begin to also fail to understand one another and even accurately represent who we are individually. (which drives more failure to understand, and that's a very bad cycle)

Burden is on all of us here, both as speakers and as listeners. And there are options available to us and we should be using them long before we arrive at righteous indignation. If we do use them?

"bad" words become an academic discussion, not a painful, or expensive one.

Advocacy mode = 0