Swearing off

I've been fascinated with words ever since I can remember.  It's no real mystery why I became a writer, and (later) got my master's degree in historical linguistics; I've lived in the magical realm of language ever since I first learned how to use it.

Languages are full of curiosities, which is my impetus for doing my popular daily bit called #AskLinguisticsGuy on TikTok.  And one of the posts I've done that got the most views was a piece on "folk etymology" -- stories invented (with little or no evidence) to explain word origins -- specifically, that the word "fuck" does not come from the acronym for "Fornication Under Consent of the King."

The story goes that in bygone years, when a couple got married, if the king liked the bride's appearance, he could claim the right of "prima nocta" (also called "droit de seigneur"), wherein he got to spend the first night of the marriage with the bride.  (Apparently this did occasionally happen, but wasn't especially common.)  Afterward -- and now we're in the realm of folk etymology -- the king gave his official permission for the bride and groom to go off and amuse themselves as they wished, at which point he stamped the couple's marriage documents "Fornication Under Consent of the King," meaning it was now legal for the couple to have sex with each other.

This bit, of course, is pure fiction.  The truth is that the word "fuck" probably comes from a reconstructed Proto-Germanic root *fug meaning "to strike."  There are cognates (same meaning, different spelling) in just about every Germanic language there is.  The acronym explanation is one hundred percent false, but you'll still see it claimed (which is why I did a TikTok video on it).

The whole subject of taboo words is pretty fascinating, and every language has 'em.  Most cultures have some levels of taboo surrounding sex and other private bodily functions, but there are some odd ones.  In Québecois French, for example, the swear word that will get your face slapped by your prudish aunt is tabernacle!, which is the emotional equivalent of the f-bomb, but comes (obviously) from religious practice, not sex.  Interestingly, in Québecois French, the English f-word has been adopted in the phrase j'ai fucké ça, which is considered pretty mild -- an English equivalent would be "I screwed up."  (The latter phrase, of course, derives from the sexual definition of "to screw," so maybe they're not so different after all.)

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Juliescribbles, Money being put in swear jar, CC BY-SA 4.0]

Linguists are not above studying such matters.  I found this out when I was in graduate school and was assigned the brilliant 1982 paper by John McCarthy called "Prosodic Structure and Expletive Infixation," which considers the morphological rules governing the placement of the word "fucking" into other words -- why, for example, we say "abso-fucking-lutely" but never "ab-fucking-solutely."  (The rule has to do with stress -- you put "fucking" before the primary stressed syllable, as long as there is a secondary stressed syllable that comes somewhere before it.)  I was (and am) delighted by this paper.  It might be the only academic paper I ever read in grad school from which I simultaneously learned something and had several honest guffaws.

The reason this whole sweary subject comes up is because of a paper by Shiri Lev-Ari and Ryan McKay that came out just yesterday in the journal Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, called, "The Sound of Swearing: Are There Universal Patterns in Profanity?"  Needless to say, I also thought this paper was just fan-fucking-tastic.  And the answer is: yes, across languages, there are some significant patterns.  The authors write:

Why do swear words sound the way they do?  Swear words are often thought to have sounds that render them especially fit for purpose, facilitating the expression of emotion and attitude.  To date, however, there has been no systematic cross-linguistic investigation of phonetic patterns in profanity.  In an initial, pilot study we explored statistical regularities in the sounds of swear words across a range of typologically distant languages.  The best candidate for a cross-linguistic phonemic pattern in profanity was the absence of approximants (sonorous sounds like l, r, w and y).  In Study 1, native speakers of various languages judged foreign words less likely to be swear words if they contained an approximant.  In Study 2 we found that sanitized versions of English swear words – like darn instead of damn – contain significantly more approximants than the original swear words.  Our findings reveal that not all sounds are equally suitable for profanity, and demonstrate that sound symbolism – wherein certain sounds are intrinsically associated with certain meanings – is more pervasive than has previously been appreciated, extending beyond denoting single concepts to serving pragmatic functions.

The whole thing put me in mind of my dad, who (as befits a man who spent 29 years in the Marine Corps) had a rather pungent vocabulary.  Unfortunately, my mom was a tightly-wound prude who wrinkled her nose if someone said "hell" (and who couldn't even bring herself to utter the word "sex;" the Good Lord alone knows how my sister and I were conceived).  Needless to say, this difference in attitude caused some friction between them.  My dad solved the problem of my mother's anti-profanity harangues by making up swear words, often by repurposing other words that sounded like they could be vulgar.  His favorite was "fop."  When my mom would give him a hard time for yelling "fop!" if he smashed his thumb with a hammer, he would patiently explain that it actually meant "a dandified gentleman," and after all, there was nothing wrong with yelling that.  My mom, in desperate frustration not to lose the battle, would snarl back something like, "It doesn't mean that the way you say it!", but in the end my dad's insistence that he'd said nothing inappropriate was pretty unassailable.

Interesting that "fop" fits into the Lev-Ari/McKay phonetic pattern like a hand in a glove.

Anyhow, as regular readers of Skeptophilia already know, I definitely inherited my dad's salty vocabulary.  But -- as one of my former principals pointed out -- all they are is words, and what really matters is the intent behind them.  And like any linguistic phenomenon, it's an interesting point of study, if you can get issues of prudishness well out of the damn way.

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The language of morality

If we needed any more indication that our moral judgments aren't as solid as we'd like to think, take a look at some research by Janet Geipel and Constantinos Hadjichristidis of the University of Trento (Italy), working with Luca Surian of Leeds University (UK).

The study, entitled "How Foreign Language Shapes Moral Judgment," appeared in the Journal of Social Psychology.  What Geipel et al. did was to present multilingual individuals with situations which most people consider morally reprehensible, but where no one (not even an animal) was deliberately hurt -- such as two siblings engaging in consensual and safe sex, and a man cooking and eating his dog after it was struck by a car and killed.  These types of situations make the vast majority of us go "Ewwwww" -- but it's sometimes hard to pinpoint exactly why that is.

"It's just horrible," is the usual fallback answer.

So did the test subjects in the study find such behavior immoral or unethical?  The unsettling answer is: it depends on what language the situation was presented in.

Across the board, if the situation was presented in the subject's first language, the judgments regarding the situation were harsher and more negative.  Presented in languages learned later in life, the subjects were much more forgiving.

The researchers controlled for which languages were being spoken; they tested (for example) native speakers of Italian who had learned English, and native speakers of English who had learned Italian.  It didn't matter what the language was; what mattered was when you learned it.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

The explanation they offer is that the effort of speaking a non-native language "ties up" the cognitive centers, making us focus more on the acts of speaking and understanding and less on the act of passing moral judgment.  I wonder, however, if it's more that we expect better behavior in the way of obeying social mores from our own tribe -- we subconsciously expect people speaking other languages to act differently than we do, and therefore are more likely to give a pass to them if they break the rules that we consider proper behavior.

A related study by Catherine L. Harris, Ayşe Ayçiçeĝi, and Jean Berko Gleason appeared in Applied Psycholinguistics.  Entitled "Taboo Words and Reprimands Elicit a Greater Autonomic Reactivity in a First Language Than in a Second Language," the study showed that our emotional reaction (as measured by skin conductivity) to swear words and harsh judgments (such as "Shame on you!") is much stronger if we hear them in our native tongue.  Even if we're fluent in the second language, we just don't take its taboo expressions and reprimands as seriously.  (Which explains why my mother, whose first language was French, smacked me in the head when I was five years old and asked her -- on my uncle's prompting -- what "va t'faire foutre" meant.)

All of which, as both a linguistics geek and someone who is interested in ethics and morality, I find fascinating.  Our moral judgments aren't as rock-solid as we think they are, and how we communicate alters our brain, sometimes in completely subconscious ways.  Once again, the neurological underpinnings of our morality turns out to be strongly dependent on context -- which is simultaneously cool and a little disturbing.

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If, like me, you love birds, I have a book for you.

It's about a bird I'd never heard of, which makes it even cooler.  Turns out that Charles Darwin, on his epic voyage around the world on the HMS Beagle, came across a species of predatory bird -- the Striated Caracara -- in the remote Falkland Islands, off the coast of Argentina.  They had some fascinating qualities; Darwin said they were "tame and inquisitive... quarrelsome and passionate," and so curious about the odd interlopers who'd showed up in their cold, windswept habitat that they kept stealing things from the ship and generally making fascinating nuisances of themselves.

In A Most Remarkable Creature: The Hidden Life and Epic Journey of the World's Smartest Birds of Prey, by Jonathan Meiberg, we find out not only about Darwin's observations of them, but observations by British naturalist William Henry Hudson, who brought some caracaras back with him to England.  His inquiries into the birds' behavior showed that they were capable of stupendous feats of problem solving, putting them up there with crows and parrots in contention for the title of World's Most Intelligent Bird.

This book is thoroughly entertaining, and in its pages we're brought through remote areas in South America that most of us will never get to visit.  Along the way we learn about some fascinating creatures that will make you reconsider ever using the epithet of "birdbrain" again.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

&$*%^#*@*(

I'm kind of notorious for my inappropriate vocabulary, a habit I can at least in part blame on my dad, who spent 29 years in the Marine Corps.  My dad was a connoisseur of the creative swear word, but my mom (who had many fine qualities but was a bit of a prude) forbade him to use vulgar language when she was around.  My dad's solution was to invent new inappropriate interjections by using innocent English words that (when said with the proper inflection) sounded like swear words.  His favorites were "schist" and "fop."

"Watch your mouth!" my mom would say, after my dad snarled out "Fop!" after bending a nail for the fourth time.

My dad would then, in his Patient Voice, explain that "fop" was not a vulgarity, but meant "a prissy and dandified gentleman."

"Nothing wrong with that, is there, Marguerite?" he'd conclude with an innocent smile.

All of which probably left my mom feeling like swearing herself, not that she ever would have.

So I grew up in a house where swearing was definitely frowned upon.  You can imagine my delight, then, when I read a piece of research supporting the claim that swearing improves your muscular strength, pain tolerance, and stamina.

In an experiment that must have been a riot to conduct, Richard Stephens of the University of Keele led a team that studied two groups of people, each trying to accomplish a task that took power and perseverance.  Some were asked to pedal an exercise bike on a hard uphill setting; others had their grip strength tested.  Half of the test subjects were instructed to utter neutral words, and the other half were told to turn the air blue.

The results were unequivocal.  The individuals who were allowed to swear performed significantly better -- their peak power on the exercise bike exceeded that of the control group by 24 watts, and their grip strength increased by almost five pounds.

"Quite why it is that swearing has these effects on strength and pain tolerance remains to be discovered," Stephens said.  "We have yet to understand the power of swearing fully...  A possible reason... is that it stimulates the body's sympathetic nervous system.  That's the system that makes your heart pound when you are in danger.  If that is the reason, we would expect swearing to make people stronger too, and that is just what we found in these experiments."

Earlier experiments involving keeping your hand submerged in ice water, also run by Keele's team, support the contention that swearing also improves pain tolerance.

"Swearing has been around for centuries and is an almost universal human linguistic phenomenon," Stephens said.  "It taps into emotional brain centers and appears to arise in the right brain, whereas most language production occurs in the left cerebral hemisphere of the brain.  Our research shows one potential reason why swearing developed and why it persists."

So there you have it.  Bad language as a way of increasing your strength and decreasing your discomfort.  My first 5K race of the season is a week from today, and I'm gonna try it out. 

Next Saturday, if you see a tall skinny blond guy running along, muttering, "Fuck, fuck, fuck this, fuck it all" under his breath, you'll know it's just me running an experiment.

Honest vulgarity

*Note to the more sensitive members of the studio audience: as the subject of this post is profanity, there's gonna be some profane language herein.  Be thou forewarned.*

My dad had a rather ripe vocabulary, probably largely due to the 29 years he spent in the Marine Corps.  My mother, on the other hand, was strait-laced to the point that even saying the word "sex" in her presence resulted in a raised eyebrow and the Fear-Inducing Stare of Disapproval.  My dad solved this problem by inventing new swear words (such as "crudbug") or repurposing actual words for swearing (such as "fop").  When my mom would get on my dad's case about it, he would respond, completely deadpan,"Those aren't vulgar words, Marguerite," which was true in detail if not in spirit.

It's probably obvious by this juncture that I take after my dad a lot more than my mom.  I tend to have a pretty bad mouth, a habit I have to be careful about because my job involves guiding Tender Young Minds (although I think I could make a pretty good case that most of those Tender Young Minds have a worse vocabulary than I do).  But by this point in my life, my mom's litany of "the only people who need to use vulgar language are the ones who don't have any better words in their vocabulary to say" is ringing pretty hollow.  I may have a lot of faults, but I'm damn sure that a poor vocabulary is not amongst them.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

I tend to use swear words on two occasions -- for the humor value, and when I'm mad.  And to me, those are two very valid instances in which to let fly.  I still recall the great jubilation I felt when as a graduate student I first ran across John J. McCarthy's seminal paper on the linguistics of swearing, "Prosodic Structure and Expletive Infixation," in which we find out the rules governing inserting the word "fucking" into another word, and thus why it's okay to say "abso-fucking-lutely" but no one says "ab-fucking-solutely."

Even more cheering was the paper I just read yesterday by Gilad Feldman, Huiwen Lian, Michal Kosinski, and David Stillwell called "Frankly, We Do Give a Damn: The Relationship Between Profanity and Honesty" in which we find out that habitual swearers tend to be more honest, and which also should be the winner of the 2017 Clever Academic Paper Title Award.  The authors write:

There are two conflicting perspectives regarding the relationship between profanity and dishonesty.  These two forms of norm-violating behavior share common causes and are often considered to be positively related.  On the other hand, however, profanity is often used to express one’s genuine feelings and could therefore be negatively related to dishonesty.  In three studies, we explored the relationship between profanity and honesty. We examined profanity and honesty first with profanity behavior and lying on a scale in the lab, then with a linguistic analysis of real-life social interactions on Facebook, and finally with profanity and integrity indexes for the aggregate level of U.S. states.  We found a consistent positive relationship between profanity and honesty; profanity was associated with less lying and deception at the individual level and with higher integrity at the society level.

Besides the general finding that profanity is positively correlated with honesty, I thought the variation in profanity use state-by-state was absolutely fascinating.  Connecticut had the highest levels of swearing, followed by Delaware, New Jersey, Nevada, and New York (not too goddamn shabby, fellow New Yorkers, and I'm proud to have done my part in our state's fifth-place finish).  Utah came in dead last, followed by Arkansas, Idaho, South Carolina, and Tennessee.  One has to wonder if religiosity has something to do with this, given the bible-belt status of most of the states at the bottom of the pile, but establishing any sort of causation was beyond the scope of this study.

Okay, so I'm coming across as self-congratulatory here, but I still think this research is awesome.  Given the amount of grief I got from my mom about my inappropriate vocabulary when I was a teenager, I think I'm to be allowed a moment of unalloyed pleasure at finding out that I and other habitual swearers are more likely to be honest.  So while I'll still have to watch my mouth at school, it's nice to know that my turning the air blue at home when I wallop my shin on the coffee table is just my way of honestly expressing that bone bruises hurt like a motherfucker.

&%$#@*&!

Note:  because this post is about swearing, it contains some swear words.  Be thou forewarned.

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I sometimes use some "strong language" in this blog, and every once in a while someone will comment on it.  I try not to make it gratuitous, but there are times when the only intensifier that seems appropriate is one that is... inappropriate.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

For example, I ended my post on the people using Robin Williams's suicide to score philosophical points with the phrase "shut the fuck up."  Could I have phrased it another way?  Sure.  But my opinion (and opinion it is) is that writing is an art form, for which language is the tool.  A writer uses his/her words to effect a response in the reader -- curiosity, anger, understanding, sadness, laughter, or any of a thousand other possibilities.  A careful writer therefore has to choose words that have punch and clarity.  And I would argue that there is no phrase that could be substituted for "shut the fuck up" that has the same dagger-like stab at the heartless individuals who were the subject of that post.

It's a fine line, though.  Swearing can become a habit.  When I was at the University of Washington, I fell in amongst a group of graduate students for whom swearing and obscenity peppered every conversation.  Simple statements were laden with all manner of bad language; you didn't "have to go to class," you "fuckin' had to go to class."  It was all too easy to fall in with that habit to fit in, and for a time I hardly uttered a phrase that didn't have some kind of inappropriate word in it.

And in this context, the word "inappropriate" is exactly the right descriptor.  It was gratuitous, unnecessary, used only to show how Tough and Modern and Rebellious the speaker was.  It added nothing, gave no emotional zing to the language.  It was a filler, no more laden with meaning than "uh" and "um" and "know what I mean?"

It's significant, of course, that so many swear words have sexual connotations, because let's face it: Americans have a hangup about sex.  But I think that labeling of words as "appropriate" or "inappropriate," "clean" or "obscene" goes far deeper than that.

The reality is, whether any language use is appropriate or inappropriate is contextual.  I discuss this at length in my Critical Thinking classes, starting with an example a little like my use of the f-bomb in my post two days ago.  I play for the class the song "Some Nights" by the band Fun, in which there is no "bad language" until the very end:

Five minutes in and I'm bored again
Ten years of this, I'm not sure if anybody understands
This one is not for the folks at home;
Sorry to leave, mom, I had to go,
Who the fuck wants to die alone all dried up in the desert sun?

The song is about war -- something that is not completely apparent unless you watch the music video.  But I would argue that that single use of a swear word turns that last line into a sucker punch, and the lyrics would have less emotional impact by the use of any other word.

As an illustration of how "inappropriateness" is completely contextual, another thing we discuss is the episode from Seinfeld called "The Bet."  In this famous episode, which may be the best-known one in the entire series, Jerry, Elaine, Kramer, and George make a bet over which of them can go the longest without masturbating.  Throughout the entire show, not once does any character use the word "masturbate" or any of its synonyms.  Although the whole show is about a topic that people like the eminent prude Brent Bozell would find distasteful and obscene, the censors couldn't find any legitimate reason to stop it from airing, or even anything to bleep out.

Was "The Bet," in fact, obscene?  The difficulty of answering that question was summed up in 1964 in the case Jacobellis vs. Ohio, which was about whether the movie The Lovers was obscene and deserved to be banned.  The case went all the way to the Supreme Court, and in the majority opinion, Justice Potter Stewart said:

I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description ["hard-core pornography"]; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.

We like everything to fit in neat little boxes with labels.  Words are either appropriate, or they're not; movies, television shows, books, and music are either obscene, or they're not.  Predictably, the reality is much more complex than that.  The impact that any media has on the person consuming it is always contextual, depending on the intent and skill of the person who created the media, and the background, attitudes, intelligence, and sensitivity of the person consuming it.  There are people who have been offended by my occasional use of a "bad word" here on Skeptophilia, and others who have applauded it; only to be expected, when every reader brings a different perspective to a piece of writing.

But I'm not going to apologize for occasionally offending.  As a writer both of essays and fiction, I try to use language with what skill I have, and am careful when choosing words that I know carry a lot of weight.  Sometimes what I intend is for the reader to have a visceral reaction -- whether that reaction is outrage, or a belly laugh from surprise.  If I've achieved that end, I've succeeded, even if I sometimes use a word that would have gotten my mouth washed out with soap when I was ten years old.