PSAT Reading Practice Test 31: Words-in-Context Questions

Questions 1-8 refer to the following information.

"Profanity," written in 2013

Profanity is a curious phenomenon in human speech—it exists in most every language,
and consists of a small subset of words that carry inside them some incredible social power.
Distinct from pejoratives and slurs—which are derived from traditions of racism, jingoism,
homophobia, and gross, general ignorance—true profanity only encompasses those precious
05few lexemes that might be applied to and by any individual within a given linguistic culture.
They are, in a sense, universals, and by and large they derive from elemental human experiences;
none more so than those concerning sexuality, and egesta.*
In the sense of Ferdinand Saussure's theory of Semiotics, one might suggest that the use
of literal profanity—as opposed to figurative, which only possesses social sway based on its
10proximity to the literal—garners part of its power by being the closest available union of
signifier and signified in subjects that, as a culture, we tend to avoid in polite and formal
conversations. That is, the word is rude because the thing itself—in a general context—is also
considered rude. In English, we tend to use either circumlocution or euphemisms to avoid
the literal forms of our profanity in informal settings where swearing would be inappropriate,
15while in formal conversations, we turn to the Latin derivatives—words like "intercourse" and
excrement, which are tolerated socially, albeit with some reluctance because they represent
the mother language of both medical science, and the Christian church. Our infamous "four
letter words," meanwhile, are almost exclusively descended from the Germanic components
of English. Even without an expertise in linguistics, one might sense this simply by the way
20they sound—phonically, most profanity in English is composed of short, terse syllables, and
rounds off abruptly with a hard consonant.
Many accounts from people immersed in a language that is not their own have, throughout
several centuries, pointed to profanity as by far the most difficult aspect of a novel language
to master. There is, in our profanity, a high cultural learning curve that demands intimate
25knowledge and sensitivity to the subtleties of social interactions. Swearing is, in its own way,
a kind of national art—one shared and apprehended almost exclusively by the members of a
particular language community. Ernest Hemingway speaks of the artistry of another culture's
profanity with admiration in his celebrated novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls, wherein the narrator
bears witness as obscenities and insults build to a high formalism, and eventually collapse
30upon themselves, leaving the profanities implied rather than stated.
At least for the Western languages, it is impossible to ignore an additional—albeit wholly
separate—source of profanity; and that is the Christian church. The word "profane" itself is
a classical Latin derivative meaning "outside the temple". In early use, it referred to anything
belonging to the secular world, but by the Middle Ages it had come to represent anything
35that demonstrated an active or passive indifference to the "religious" and the "sacred"—no
longer was a thing profane if it did not belong to the Church, but also if it did not belong in
the Church. This included, as we have noted, the age-old obscenities of sex and excrement—
whose profane statuses predate the church by several thousand years—as well as a kind of
profanity that, while certainly not invented by the church, is preserved more or less intact
40within our languages to this day.

*"Egesta" refers to matter excreted from the body.