Terms of abuse

Lewis describes the process by which words that once expressed and aroused emotions by appealing to the imagination have been emptied of image-content and become purely emotional. “Damn you” used to be a real curse, because people believed in damnation. Now that fewer do, it’s a more or less purely emotional expression, hardly a word at all.

Lewis sums up: “as words become exclusively emotional they cease to be words and therefore of course cease to perform any strictly linguistic function. They operate as growls or barks or tears. ‘Exclusively’ is an important adverb here. They die as words not because they have too much emotion in them but because there is too little – and finally nothing at all – of anything else.”