Verbatim quote · from the corpus

“The sharpest distinction between religious and anthropological ontology is that the former makes a fundamental distinction between what is sacred and what is not, the sacred and the “profane,” whereas if we take significance as the secular equivalent of sacrality , everything we use signs for thinking/speaking about is somewhat significant. Or in other terms, all signs/words may be said to possess a certain degree of sacrality, the fact of using a sign implying that its object in conceived on a scene of representation, and that we defer for the moment seeking to appropriate its physical being. In particular, the Jewish refusal to name the divinity, to “signify” him, is a way of distinguishing the One God absolutely from the universe of his nameable creations. A closer look at our attitudes toward language complicates the categorical distinction between the sacred and the significant. Certain words, for example, constitute “profanity,” which is a negative form of sacrality, and despite the recent blurring of this distinction that has led to the inclusion of such language even in the margins of public discourse, it certainly remains recognizable. (And we cannot fail to note that “swear words” or “oaths” borrow these categories directly from the sacred, as does the French sacrer, which means “to swear” in the sense of using profanity.) Mistakes in grammar and usage also bear a stigma—relative of course to the expected “level” of language in a given context, where a term or turn of phrase “higher” than expected may seem as inappropriate as a more vulgar one.”

— Eric Gans, Religion, God, and the Sacred · Saturday, February 22nd, 2025 · Chronicles of Love & Resentment