Swearing: a curse or a blessing?
Have you ever thought
why a tiny chain of sounds such as “ba***rd” can trigger a whole chain of
events, which can even end to the hospital or to a police station? Today I will tackle a “taboo topic”, namely taboo words or swearwords and the paradox they entail. This paradox is linked to the
fact that swearing is a linguistic function, but at the same time differs in
significant ways from the rest of our linguistic faculty. Like all other words,
swearwords are conventional, that is their meaning results from a tacit
agreement between members of the same lexical community. Yet, swearwords
constitute a very specific word category and it is exactly this that in my view
generates the paradox. Why although linguistic communication is generally
thought to be highly cooperative (Grice, 1975), the swearwords largely irritate
and offend people. The paradox, thus, consists in that we seem to have signed some
sort of “social contract” dictating that instructing someone to get engaged in
sexual intercourse (paraphrased in a two-word expression consisting of the f-word
followed by the second person personal pronoun “you”) is something very
negative and highly offensive. But isn’t
it strange that people have agreed upon which words are to be used as shocking
and offensive? Why don’t we rather agree to not use these words at all? I think
that part of the answer lies in the fact that these words are connected to a
primitive aspect of humanity: swearing seems to constitute a more primitive
function than our more civilized capacity to engage in normal decent conversations.
If
you think about it, swearwords are merely a combination of specific sounds
–which when combined
to form other words are totally
innocent– and yet they are so powerful. They can end relationships of people
that till the “fatal” moment of utterance have been very close to each other. Or
they can strangely bound strangers by having them share the same bench in a
police station. They can even provoke a whole public discussion if uttered by
the mouth of a public figure, as was the case when Greece’s Prime Minister proclaimed
himself “malaka” (i.e. “j**k) thinking being “off the record”, while all the
country’s media were broadcasting a long awaited official statement concerning the
country’s economical situation. But what is it that makes these words so
powerful?
Although we cannot go back to the first swearword on earth to see
how and why it emerged, we can tell from our everyday experience that
swearwords are very strongly connected to emotion. The prototypical situation
where a swearword will be used is one where the speaker undergoes a strong
emotional experience. Traditionally, swearwords are uttered when the speaker is
angry with another person (or in the case of the Greek prime minster with oneself),
a situation or even an object. How many times haven’t you sworn –even if only
mentally– your own destiny while an unexpected traffic jam makes you run late
for a very important meeting; or an innocent hammer because you accidentally
hit your finger with it instead of the nail? On the opposite side of the
communicative channel, one can be really offended and, as noted above proceed
to extreme reactions, if he or any of his beloved ones is the recipient of the
characterization “as**ole”. It seems, thus, that what makes swearwords so
powerful compared to the rest of our vocabulary is the fact that they are
intrinsically arousing and linked to an extreme negative valence.
As a matter of fact, along with this theoretical observation,
evidence from how our brain processes swearwords consents to their “high
emotionality”. First of all, contrary to our general linguistic faculty and our
mental lexicon that is mainly controlled by our left hemisphere, it seems to be
the right hemisphere that is mostly responsible for the processing of swearwords.
Although we should be really careful when we make claims of brain lateralization
(i.e. claims that the right or the left hemisphere of our brain is exclusively
responsible for different cognitive functions), there is a general consensus
that the right hemisphere is somewhat more implicated in emotional reactions. With
this in mind, it is worth noting that aphasic patients, people who after an
accident or stroke have lesions on their left hemisphere and have, thus, lost
their capacity to speak, still preserve their ability to swear (Landis, 2006; Pinker, 2008; Van Lancker & Cummings,
1999). This fact highly suggests that it is the right hemisphere to
control our capacity to swear, and, thus partly provides evidence for their
emotional nature.
Another line of research also reflects the high
emotionality of swearwords as compared to other word categories. A study by
Bowers & Pleydell-Pearce (2011) showed that our body itself reacts differently
to swearwords as compared to other word categories. These researchers measured
people’s electrodermal activity, that is the electrical conductance of their skin,
while they were reading aloud swearwords (e.g. “f**k”), euphemisms of
swearwords (e.g. “f-word”) neutral words (e.g. “glue”) and euphemisms of the
neutral words (e.g. “g-word”). What they found is that people’s skin
conductance was higher when they uttered the swearwords as compared to all
three other word categories. Previous research has shown that electrodermal
activity increases with activation of the amygdala, a part of the brain shown
to be particularly implicated in emotional reactions. This finding is, thus,
interesting for two reasons: on the one hand it corroborates the view that
swearwords are especially emotional; on the other hand, it suggests that it’s
not the concept denoted by swearwords that is responsible for their special affective
value. The researchers rather suggest that our affective reactions linked to
swearwords result from a process of verbal
conditioning. In their view, our reaction to swearwords is developed in an
analogous way that salivation of Pavlov’s dogs increased upon hearing of a
specific sound, because the dogs had previously associated this sound with
eating (as Pavlov had made sure that they had had many previous experiences
where food was presented together with this specific sound). Similarly, we
have learned to automatically react emotionally to the hearing of swearwords, merely due to their sound, and
without really thinking of the concept their acoustic form redirects us to. But
if in the case of Pavlov’s dogs it was Pavlov himself who was responsible for
the association the dogs had made between the sound and the food, in our case
how are the associations between swearwords and specific emotional reactions
made? In other words, how come these words are set apart from the rest of our
vocabulary and stored and processed alone in our right hemisphere?
Evolution and societal factors seem to interact once
more in an interesting way. Generally, there seems to be a cross-linguistic
compatibility as to the semantic categories from which languages take their
“dirty” vocabulary. Researchers working on swearwords agree that there are roughly
five conceptual categories swearwords refer to: bodily effluvia, sexuality,
disease, religion, and disfavored social groups (Pinker, 2008; Jay, 2009). The
universality of the first two categories can be easily explained in
evolutionary terms, as the unease such topics can provoke can be seen as evolutionarily
adaptive. People from every country, religion or social group are quite likely
to feel disgusted when obliged to listen to a word referring to excrements. According
to Pinker (2008) this linguistic disgust might originate from an instinctual
attitude towards things that might jeopardize our health. Again, swearwords
referring to disease (not so common in English but common in other languages, e.g.
Dutch) are also easy to analyze as even in western societies so advanced in
terms of life expectancy, citizens are still faced with the ultimate disaster
expecting every human being: death. Finally, the unease related to sex seems to
be partially connected to biology, partially determined by social factors.
Roughly speaking we can say that sex implicates high medical stakes along with
socially undesired results, ranging from sexually transmitted infections and
unwanted pregnancies, to unpredicted reactions on behalf of cheated partners,
puritan relatives etc. (Pinker, 2008). But the strongly affective character of those
swearwords referring to religion or social classes seem to be socially
determined rather than in terms of evolution. For example, cursing a divine
entity might be perceived as more or less offensive, and thus trigger a higher
or lower affective reaction, according to how religious or irreverent someone
is. The same goes for swearwords drawing their power merely by denoting someone
as part of a specific social or racial category: it is clearly historical and
social factors that will determine whether it is offensive or not to refer to
someone as part of a specific social group, factors lost somewhere in
historical anecdotes. So some swearwords seem to accomplish their role for
evolutionary reasons while others due to social factors.
But coming back to our initial question, namely why we agree upon
which words should be highly taboo, instead of agreeing to eliminate such words
from our vocabulary altogether, we can say that it’s partly because swearwords
seem to be somewhat useful both from an individual and from a societal
perspective. Departing from the observation that people swear when they feel
pain, Stephens, Atkins, and Kingston (2009) conducted an experiment in order to
study tolerance to pain as a function of swearing. Two groups of participants
recited a word, while immersing their hands in cold water. In the first group
the word was a swearword, while in the second a neutral word. The researchers
compared participants’ pain resistance, heart rate and pain perception and they
found that “swearing participants” withstood pain significantly longer than participants
of the control group, while they perceived pain to a lesser degree. But apart
from the fact that swearing seems to produce a hypoalgesic effect, thus being
somehow useful at the individual level, one could even think that, despite its
aggressive nature, it is useful for society as well. If we take Damasio’s (2009) observation that
although incapable of controlling emotions themselves, people are still able to
control their emotional reactions, it could be hypothesized that, in the course
of evolution, the physically aggressive behavior which in primates appears as a
result of a painful stimulus, in humans it has been transformed into
linguistically aggressive behavior, for preserving the social order. Long story
short, better swear than hit…
Myrto
Pantazi is a Ph.D. student at the Université Libre de Bruxelles.
References
Bowers, J.
& Pleydell-Pearce, C. (2011). Swearing, Euphemisms, and Linguistic
Relativity. PLOS ONE, 6 (7).
doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0022341
Damasio, A.
(2009). This Time With Feeling. Talk at the Aspen Ideas Festival, Aspen
Institute, 07/04/2009. http://fora.tv/2009/07/04/Antonio_Damasio_This_Time_With_Feeling
Grice, H. P.
(1975). Logic and conversation. In P. Cole & J. L. Morgan (Eds.), Syntax
and semantics, Vol. 3: Speech acts (pp. 41–58). New York, NY: Academic
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Jay, T. (2009).
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Landis, T.
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Pinker, S.
(2008). The stuff of thought. London: Penguin Books.
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Atkins, J. & Kingston, A. (2009). Swearing as a Response to Pain.
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doi:10.1097/WNR.0b013e32832e64b1
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