Author: Miss Cellania / Source: Neatorama
“Dagnabbit” is a hilarious word that you probably learned from Yosemite Sam. It’s a pseudo-swear word you can use in public when you don’t want to be technically blasphemous, like gosh, golly, gee, and other substitutes. But in even broader terms, it’s a “taboo deformation,” and the term applies to more words than you might think.
“Taboo deformation is one possible way for a word to change its meaning,” says Andrew Byrd, a professor of linguistics at the University of Kentucky who specializes in Indo-European languages. Basically, we are scared of the true names of certain…
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