Mas que diabos?!: o significado do palavrão na sociedade brasileira

Abstract

The obscene lexical category of words, popularly known as "swearword", is part of the world vocabulary. It has been appearing more and more in our everyday social discourse (we are in a historic moment of great questions about behaviors previously summarily classified as bad/unfit for practice), although it still arouses reactions such as surprise and negative criticism from our interlocutors. The meanings of the phenomenon of 'spoken swearword' - whether in its subjective dimension or in its social dimension - to its adherents inserted in the Brazilian context were outlined above the content in the "Dictionary of the Swearword and Related Terms" and analyzed in the light of Vygotsky's theory and the field of Brazilian socio-historical psychology. It was possible to observe that naturalized ideologies hide under the label of "swearing" and are kept. The role of gender in the raised meanings is contrasting. The woman is passive and the man active. Homoaffective orientation is meant as being almost exclusively masculine. The woman is a sign of weakness and the man one of strength. It is suggested that a renewal of studies on swearwords is necessary and that more studies in psychology are done