Vulgarism

A vulgarism is a coarse, crude or abusive word or expression that lies beyond the literary norm and violates established notions of the propriety of speech. In everyday communication vulgarisms testify to a low culture of language, yet in literature they may fulfil a stylistic function: they individualise a personage's speech, attest to their social milieu, psychological state or emotional excitement, create a lowered, comic or exposing effect. The introduction of a vulgarism must always be artistically motivated, for its unwarranted use destroys the aesthetic quality of the text. Vulgarisms border on colloquialism, jargon and abusive vocabulary and are studied by stylistics in the aspect of the correlation of the normative and the non-normative, the "high" and the "low" in the language of a literary work.