What the F***? Why We Curse

This article from The New Republic comments on a very interesting aspect of language: obscenities. It describes the history of cursing, as well as the psychological aspects of why linguistic taboos (fuck, shit, cunt, etc.) can provoke such an intense emotional response.

In English, cursing mostly can be traced back to religious swearing (e.g., “What the hell?”, “Damn you”, “Holy Mary!”) and its modern day equivalent (e.g., “What the fuck?” “Fuck you”, “Holy fuck!”).

Other curse words stem from bodily waste excretion and their related parts (shit, asshole, piss) also became taboo. The article hypothesize that this has to do with the fact that there is a correlation between the vulgarity of the word and its relative dangerousness as a “vector for disease”.

The theory on why words related to sexuality is also expounded: sexual intercourse is often associated with a lot of negativity, disease, unanticipated pregnancy, etc.

The “Stroop Test” is also described in the article, in which subjects were presented multicolored words asked to name the color of neutral words (e.g. chair). Next they were asked to name the color of emotionally charged words (profanity). It took longer for the participants to name the color of the emotionally charged words because the participant first had to suppress their automatic reaction to the word, proving that our reaction to the words is something very automatic.

The article also goes in depth into the reason why, although the meanings of most curse words can be expressed without graphic/explicit language. The words “poop” and “making love” is rarely censored. This is because the area of the brain, which deals with connotation and denotation of a word, is different. In other words, one part of your brain recalls a word’s meaning, and the other recalls an emotional response or situation associated with that word.

A different article from the New York Times gave examples of other interesting research on the subject.

One example of this was the reaction that cursing elicits. In a study done by Kate Burridge, a professor of linguistics at Monash University in Melbourne, found that profanity actually has a physiological effect on people. This effect is comparable to the effect felt by “university students who pride themselves on being educated when they listen to bad grammar or slang expressions that they regard as irritating, illiterate or déclassé.”

Furthermore, even chimps seem to have a system of communication which could be the ape equivalent of cursing, used to display aggression before the animals resort to physical violence.

I had trouble finding research on the disparity between the profanity within different languages, however, from my own experience with Japanese, I found that tone plays a greater role in the offensiveness of a statement than it does in English.

This article made me very interested in cursing however, and I am interested in pursuing line of research further.

Almost Before We Spoke, We Swore:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/20/science/20curs.html?pagewanted=1

What the F***? Why We Curse:
http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20071008&s=pinker100807