Certainly you can’t discuss everything in one interview, but please consider my previous comment an expression of interest in the areas I mentioned. On that, I suspect that cultures in which all mention of taboo words is strictly forbidden would tend to be cultures where scepticism doesn’t have much of a foothold and beliefs we might think of as superstitious are shared by practically everyone. My reasoning is that such a culture might well regard the taboo words as having a sort of magical power in their own right, as in the literal meaning of the word “curse”. But I’d be interested in hearing you talk about such things in more detail sometime.

I had the pleasure of introducing George to the word ‘root’ at TAM-6. It was a great moment

As for universals and cross-cultural perspectives, that’s for another interview entitely. Not everything can be treated in a short (but long) interview such as this…

On “smeg”, that is of course hardly an isolated case; you might say it’s a tradition for science fiction writers to invent a swear word for their fictional cultures. From an artistic POV I think there’s more to it than merely a way of circumventing censors.

On the definition of smut, I don’t think anyone could seriously deny that things like attitude and motivation are a big part of it – smut is not so much about what you say as why you say it – but those things are sort of hard to measure.

On the topic of swear words across cultures, in this interview Karen focuses on the literal meaning of taboo words, leaving largely untouched some more abstract questions about different cultures’ attitudes to swearing and what that says about our shared human psychology. Whether people see taboo words as words that should never be mentioned at all, or as potent tools that should be wielded sparingly, or whether people generally agree that mentioning a swear word is not tantamout to swearing — it might be interesting to look in more depth at how these things vary from one culture to another.

See also my comment on Karen’s post.

However, when we watched The Commitments movie, we were in fits at how many times “the F-word” cropped up. The second time we watched it, we decided to try and count them. We gave up. We still watch it occasionally and still find it amusing rather than offensive in that movie. In other movies however (eg: American teen movies or similar genre) I find it more annoying than offensive and rarely amusing. I also don’t generally enjoy stand up comedians who lace their routines with expletives. But in The Commitments…!

Maybe I just like Irish accents.