Resourceful poets use a cornucopia of tools and methods at leisure to convey the feelings that they want to. They can invoke emotions and reactions from readers, as well as establish connections and relationships between the reader and themselves. Profanity is just another one of these tools and should not be excluded from poetry based solely on the fear of offending somebody. Swearing is most effective when it is used unexpectedly. This is because it invokes a sense of the original meaning of the response. This can, however, drive away certain audience members, so swearing should be used with caution. When used correctly and effectively, expletives can establish harsh moods and feelings in the reader's mind that only furthers the author's own thesis.

Let me first establish that swearing is completely natural and can be linked to several causes. Many philologists agree that swearing was likely one of the first methods of communication that was developed by man. Swearing can arise from sudden, unexpected events that occur to or about the vocalizer, and from the vocalizer becoming surprised. These can be classified as excited utterances. Also categorized are injured swearing, contemptuous swearing, efficacious swearing, and irrelevant swearing. These are all forms of negative reactions and are typical of human behavior.

As humans developed the need to articulate their negative responses though formal or informal language, they realized that there are certain universal sounds that our body produces that relate to different sensations. They utilized these sounds, and created languages that relied heavily on these tones that everybody understood. Just as the body responds to negative stimuli through negative responses, we verbally express our negative feelings through swearing. Even nonliterate and "primitive" peoples form local languages that include profanities. Along with that, we can all say that we have sworn at least one time in our lives. Our unarticulated cries of pain as children are not far off from what initiated the original swear words that constituted lingual communication.

Profanities are biologically and physiologically ingrained so deeply in our development that it would be impossible to erase them from our vocabulary, much like trying to stop an animal from crying when it is injured. They simply exist as a natural component of our speech, similar to shouts of joy or lamentations. They are also not a haecceity of humankind, for all other living organisms have some sort of negative responses, be it verbal or behavioral.

The modern use of expletives by people to gain societal status, however, is completely egregious from a philologist's point of view because they go entirely beyond the words' original denotative meaning. Although, maybe that is just a sign of evolution.

The fact the society as a whole shuns swearing only increases the effectiveness and feeling that is inflicted in the audience. These feelings are difficult to simulate using other methods of composition. Some say profanity is a necessary evil. That is only true if what is natural is evil.

Learn more about this author, Martin Rodriguez.
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