When I was a child, I don’t remember exactly when, but a long time ago, I learned not to swear. Of course they didn’t explain to me what swear words were. Initially I thought they were complicated words to write, just like swab, abstinence or refrigerator. I only understood that I was mistaken when I said a tiny word, with just two syllables, and my grandfather Pedro punished me “brutally”, giving me his inseparable The Century from that day, doubled over, threatening: “The boy won’t say dirty things again, understand?” (If it were today I would have been arrested and accused of domestic violence).
I then realized that a swear word was not a complicated word, but a forbidden word. And, if I had known, at that time, what a synonym was, I would have concluded that it was synonymous with ordinariness.
I learned swear words throughout my childhood and early adolescence until swear words fell into disuse – vulgarity survived longer.
This comes from a point – everything has to come from something or the world stops making sense – from something I read in a newspaper. It was one of those letters from readers to the director that, without the “charm” of a children’s narrative and the limited and sketchy vocabulary of social media, no one reads, written by a climatologist (or would it be a climatologist? I never understood why some are psychologists or ethnologists, while others are cardiologists or criminologists. If I were still a child, I might think that these were store owners and the others weren’t).
The reader’s letter had as its subject the word climacteric, which he had heard on the news – on television, I suppose, which is where you best learn to break down the Portuguese language. The word had been used as a synonym for climatic, probably because whoever used it considered that adding a syllable was a sign of erudition.
The reader said, in a pedagogical and indignant style, that climacteric was not synonymous with climatic, rather it meant “climacteric, a biological transition associated with menopause”.
I’m not a linguist and I’m not interested in delving into the topic further.
My point is this: if climacteric were synonymous with climatic, what is its reason for being?
In a brief investigation I did recently, I found, in court decisions, the words dodging, filing and injury (among others). If they exist, they will be synonymous, respectively, with avoidance, judgment and injury. They will have no other use than to make it difficult to understand the text.
And I found two others, even more interesting: quite and quite. Those don’t really exist. In fact, adding the ending “-mente” to an adjective produces an adverb: effective, effectively; sharply, clearly, etc. Adding the ending “-mente” to a word that is already an adverb produces foolishness (which can only be forgiven to Mayor Odorico Paraguaçu, with his famous “just”). Or, if you prefer to recover a word with a past tense, this will be the new swear word: an unnecessary, useless and complicating word.
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