On "Not Giving a Damn"

I've always been one to be quite interested in song lyrics, especially if they are clever and thoughtful. The other day I was in the car and at least three of the songs had something in them about "giving a damn," "not giving a damn" or something else of that sort.

Now I'm not one who is often given to using curse words except in the most appropriate of situations. I find most of them to be vastly inefficient, especially when used as an adjective, and I'm reluctant to casually invoke the name of God in any profane way, but hearing this usage in several different contexts made me begin to ponder a bit, and if you have the time, I'd like you to join me on a voyage of the "damn."

The word in this context is used as a a noun, that is something that is not being bestowed or given. The first use of the word as a verb in English is recorded around 1300 by the Oxford English Dictionary and was apparently taken from the Latin legal term which means "to condemn." As the word evolved in English, it took on four particular meanings:

1) As a verb with religious overtones it is often the act of judgment (or predisposition, depending upon your theology), particularly by God against a human. God then can "damn" or condemn humanity as God chooses.

2) As a plural noun with a form that is actually that of a past-tense verb, it can mean those who are condemned, often set apart from those who are saved or, in other cases, from those who are innocent. Hence "the damned" go to Hell or suffer in some other fashion.

3) As an expletive it can mean many different things. It can be an expression of pain. It can be an expression of sadness. It can be an expression of admiration. It can actually mean just about anything depending upon the context and the method of enunciation.

4) As is the case here, it can be used as a noun, but it is never really used in a positive sense. One hardly ever hears or reads of someone "giving a damn" except in the sense of the normal usage where someone "does not give a damn."

It is this last formulation that I find so interesting because our culture as a whole is actually very critical of people who are, or who appear to be, self-righteous and judgmental, but, at least in a merely linguistic sense, by using this phrase in a negative sense, we seem to be saying the exact opposite of what we intend to say, and I wonder how that came to be.

To illustrate further. In one of these songs, the singer asks "does anyone give a damn?" What he intends to say given the context of the song is "does anyone care?" But, if one takes the words exactly as they are in this phrase, what he is actually saying is "does anyone give condemnation?" That certainly doesn't make any sense, so we can argue that in common parlance in English, when the word "damn" is used as a noun, it actually means exactly the opposite of what it means as a verb. "Damning" someone is negative, but "giving a damn" is positive. That is quite odd.

As a personal application, I've decided to not give damnation to those around me. I have dedicated my life to promoting the best in humanity by pointing them to the source of salvation, so what I want to do is to go beyond "giving a damn" and instead give a blessing to everyone I encounter. I will treat them as worthy of the consideration of salvation, and in that sense, I choose not only to "give a damn" but to try to break the power of damnation by damning less and loving more. And that, I guess, is my whole un-damned point.