Why do we swear? More importantly, why does it upset some people? How has swearing changed over the years, and do rules (legal or social) about it make any sense?
When it comes to political speech, we are living in a free-speech utopia. Late-night comedians can say rude things about their nation’s leaders that, in previous centuries, would have led to their tongues being cut out or worse. Yet, when it comes to certain words for copulation and excretion, we still allow the might of the government to bear down on what people can say in public. Swearing raises many other puzzles — linguistic, neurobiological, literary, political.
Very interesting article by Steve Pinker. (Warning: contains dirty words)
(via GeekPress)
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This article was really cool! I sometimes use profanity in class to wake everyone up a little bit. This is a great explanation of why it’s effective, but it raises a couple of interesting questions for me. First, if blood is one of the biologically dangerous substances that gives rise to profanity, why isn’t there the same prohibition on words referring to blood that there is on words referring to the excreta? Second, why did we choose one of the many synonyms to be the profane one, allowing the others to be non-profane? So for example, why is “intercourse” not profane? Or “manure”?
Well, the author talks about a hierarchy of fluids — and blood *does* have (or has had) a profane aspect — the term “bloody” for the Brits was for a long time not much different from “fucking,” and references to God’s blood — such as “zounds” (from “God’s wounds”), and we still use as a mild intensifier “bleeding” and “bloody” (“It’s a bloody nightmare, I tell you”).
As to which synonyms become the bad ones — well, in English, at least, we’re usually talking good ol’ “Anglo-Saxon four letter words,” which probably means we inherited a hierarchy of propriety from the Norman nobility in England, which ended up introducing many synonyms that were considered far more cultured than the terms the “peasants” used.
I hadn’t realized that the British regarded the word “bloody” as profane. That’s very … British. I noticed the bit about the hierarchy of nastiness, and I guess society is slowly making the less profane ones acceptable as time goes by. Perhaps someday they will all be regarded as acceptable.
Naturally as a historian, you’d see the choice of the profane synonyms in historical terms! But I think Your explanation is pretty plausible. And of course Pinker’s article might help to explain why people got so riled up by the profane editorial in the CSU Collegian student newspaper.
My understanding (not definitive) is that it charts a course alongside “damn” in the US — once something that marked one as uncouth and profane, now hardly noticed except by very sensitive individuals.
The question is, what will fill that linguistic ecological gap? Clearly profanity serves an emotional and cultural need. That sort of need will always need service, and something will be found to do it.