the.com/curse
a wish with teeth, hurled by people who can't afford swords.
means A spoken wish or invocation meant to bring harm, bad luck, or supernatural punishment upon someone — or, more loosely, any swear word or persistent misfortune.
from From Old English 'curs,' a noun meaning a prayer or wish for evil to befall someone, with the matching verb 'cursian.' Its deeper roots are murky — etymologists genuinely don't know where 'curs' came from. One suggestion ties it possibly to Latin 'cursus' (a course, hence a set form of words, like a liturgy run in reverse), but this is far from certain. What's clear is the long shadow of its meaning: for centuries a curse was deadly serious religious business, and only later did it slacken into the everyday sense of merely swearing.
- King Tut
- Tomb curse legend was largely press hype, not parchment
- word origin
- Older meaning was a formal religious anathema
- swearing helps
- Cursing aloud measurably raises pain tolerance
- Bambino
- Boston blamed 86 years of failure on a curse
- voodoo dolls
- Pins-and-cloth ritual is mostly Hollywood invention