More sentiments

Roger Green posted a great piece on swearing over on his blog, and linked to one of my posts from three weeks ago, My sentiments exactly, in which I posted the anti-bigotry video, “The Big Fat Gay Collab!”. Though the language is NSFW, the music changes it somewhat and, of course, the whole thing makes a point.

But that reminded me that I recently came across a French version of the same thing, “The GayClic Collab Against Homophobia (from France)” (video below, and the language is still NSFW, of course). It was put together by GayClic, who had more than 100 videos contributed to them. This version includes the anti-war verse of the song that was omitted from the original video I linked to before. It’s also kind of remarkable to see people whose first language is, I assume, not English lip synching in the language pretty well.

In this case, the song and the videos are using “swear words” to make a political point (as well as art). There are some people who say swearing can never, or seldom, be justified (such people had better not move to New Zealand!). As a long-time potty mouth, I obviously disagree. But considering that language is constantly evolving and changing, and swear words pass away, I wonder: Can there be anything that’s really forbidden? I @#$%& hope not! (and thanks to Roger, I now know that representation of swearing is called a grawlix. There really is a word for everything—seems to me that some clean words kinda don’t sound that way…