About Obscenitees
A Study of Taboo Language
Obscenitees examines the words we are taught not to use.
Profanity is often treated as linguistic debris — crude, disposable, or unworthy of serious attention. But obscene language can reveal an extraordinary amount about a culture: what it considers sacred, private, shameful, offensive, powerful, humorous, intimate, or forbidden.
A single word can function as an insult, an intensifier, a joke, an expression of pain, a term of affection, or a declaration of admiration. Its meaning can change across generations, regions, relationships, and contexts. Some words lose their force over time. Others become more charged. Some are reclaimed, transformed, or repurposed entirely.
Obscenitees approaches these words as objects of study.
Each entry examines a word’s meaning, origin, grammatical uses, classifications, cultural associations, and contemporary social force. The language may be vulgar. The examination is not.
Why Study Obscenity?
Taboo language sits at the intersection of language and social behavior.
The words a society restricts can tell us as much as the words it celebrates. Obscenities often emerge from recurring human preoccupations — sexuality, the body, religion, excrement, family, violence, status, and identity — but their force does not come from meaning alone.
Context matters.
• Who says the word?
• To whom?
• Where?
• When?
• With what intention?
A word considered deeply offensive in one setting may be ordinary in another. An insult can become affectionate. A vulgarity can become punctuation. A once-powerful taboo can become so commonplace that its original meaning is barely noticed.
Obscenitees documents those shifts rather than pretending profanity exists as a fixed list of “bad words.”
Our Process
01 — Identify
Each entry begins with a word that has acquired some degree of social, vulgar, profane, or obscene force in English.
Rather than treating every taboo expression as equivalent, we identify the particular linguistic and cultural features that make the word notable.
02 — Classify
Words are organized across several dimensions.
- Category identifies the primary source of the taboo, such as sexuality, the body, religion, excrement, or kinship.
- Classification describes the broad type of taboo language, ranging from mild vulgarity to strong profanity or obscenity.
- Function examines what the word actually does in use — whether it insults, intensifies, dismisses, emphasizes, describes, or expresses emotion.
Additional dimensions such as grammatical class, register, region, period, and linguistic status provide further context.
03 — Assess
Two five-point scales help describe characteristics that are difficult to communicate through classification alone.
- Severity considers the word’s general level of social offensiveness in contemporary English.
- Versatility considers how broadly the word functions across meanings, grammatical roles, emotions, expressions, and contexts.
These ratings are not presented as universal laws. Profanity is highly dependent on audience, region, culture, and circumstance. The scales are intended as analytical tools for comparison.
04 — Examine
Each word is then considered beyond its label.
We look at its meaning, etymology, historical development, modern usage, cultural significance, variations, and the reasons it acquired taboo force in the first place.
Where meanings or levels of offense differ substantially across regions or communities, those differences are treated as part of the word rather than exceptions to it.
05 — Interpret
The project extends beyond analysis into typography.
Each word is translated into a series of Typographic Studies — visual interpretations exploring how form, scale, typeface, composition, and context can alter the way a familiar obscenity feels.
The word remains the same. Its presentation does not.
The Project
Obscenitees is designed as a growing archive.
The initial collection focuses on familiar contemporary English obscenities, but the framework is intended to expand over time — into regional language, historical terms, obsolete expressions, semantic shifts, and other forms of taboo speech.
The objective is not to sanitize the language, celebrate it, or condemn it.