I object to C*NT and its new equivalent f-h because of what it means. I'm not so great at articulating this stuff, but I found someone who put it pretty well:Not to ban, but what one word drives you batshit?
One word for me. Just one. And it bugs me to even type it. Yes, for real. It BUGS me. But..I gotta tell y'all so you can make sure to use it to irritate me (which means iggie for you if you do )
Cum.
I LOATHE that word. It sounds gross. It is gross. Semen, juice, whatever you wanna call it..just don't say the one I typed up there ^. Yuck.
So....which word for you?
Ah feel your pain. That's just a stoopid stoopid spelling. Wasn't necessary.
For me it would be *****. There, didn't have to type it but it's what Donald Rump grabs women by. Just sounds so contemptuous, because it is. I'd rather use OL's word but if I typed that it would just come out ****.
Ain't it weird that all these disgraced words have to do with s*x, yet we can type "kill" and "shoot" and "maim" and "destroy" all we like.
Misogynists call women c*nts when they are trying...to put us back in our place, trying to remind us that what our identity boils down to is: our c*nt...so when a man calls me a c*nt, I know what he is saying: Know your worth — you are nothing. You are here for no other reason than for me to use. So lie down and shut up...
Glennon Doyle
One of the things about USMB I don't get is the silent, echoing halls when I float the idea of general respect for women. My f-h thread wasn't spurred by someone once again calling me a name. It was someone using a label to denigrate ALL women who have "stepped out of line" throughout history. Jesus.
Viewing women as sexual objects is so deeply embedded in our culture, so much part of our fabric, that even women can't see it.
In answer to Gracie's question, I can't think of a pet peeve word at the moment, although you come darned close with phlegm.
Much of this is in the launching and not the word itself. The tone of voice. We say "fuck you" when enraged, which makes no grammatical sense at all. Sounds like we're wishing the other person "go have good sex".
"Fr***hole" does sound abjectly childish but to me that reflects on the speaker as grossly inarticulate. Just sounds silly. The dreaded c-word has a long and well-traveled history in Olde Englisshe (related to the word queen and the name Gwen) and part of its status-lowering has to do with its being derived from Anglo-Saxon rather than the preferred Norman French version (e.g. piss vs. urine).
We go automatically to the (supposedly) earthier Anglo-Saxon for the crude terms as we code-switch our levels of speech (fuck, shit, piss, c***) and we dress it up in French when we want to go genteel and indirect (fornicate, defecate, urinate, vagina) even though they mean the same thing, so it's all about not the word but the attitude.
Again of course it always takes both the sender and receiver to create offense. When the receiver declines to accept the attitude, the sender then has no power and is disarmed.