The Blasphemous Ways of the Spoken Tongue.
According to Mr. George Washington, “The foolish and wicked practice of profane cursing and swearing is a vice so mean and low that every person of sense and character detests and despises it.” Indeed, instilled in the human beings of all cultures, there lies an uncanny trepidation regarding certain words defining certain concepts our society has deemed taboo.
But what is swearing? Why is it such a dreadful blemish on our language plates? And who the f*** cares?
According to Dr. Steven Pinker, a psychology professor and psycholinguist, swearing is sprouted from a much deeper and more primitive part of the brain than the quotidian mumbles of speech. For instance, aphasia, the loss of articulate language, tends to develop in those who undergo damage to the cortex or the Sylvian fissure of the brain’s left hemisphere. Surprisingly, those with aphasia almost always retain the ability to swear.
Dr. Pinker concludes that this proves that “taboo epithets,” or swear words, lounge as prefabricated formulas in the crooks of the brain’s right hemisphere, rather than mingling with the logic and language snobs of the left. The right hemisphere, besides for housing hosts of ready-made phrases such as profanity, is also heavily associated with emotion, and more particularly, negative emotion.
Why, then, do we swear? What prompts us to utter such egregious dandelion-heads? Scientists, upon days of brabbling and pacing and chewing their shoes, fabricated the following list: Catharsis; Insult, Abuse, & Exclusion; Group Solidarity; and Style & Emphasis.
Catharsis is the strained byproduct of hapless emotions such as frustration, fury, and sorrow (and, on the dandy occasion, of positive feelings as well, such as awe and gratitude). Interestingly enough, studies have shown that swearing augments the body’s ability to tolerate pain. In an experiment at Keele University, volunteers were to plunge their reluctant hands into a tub of icy water, and participants who recited the poetry of profanity over and over were able to keep their hands in for an average of forty seconds longer than those who didn’t.
The act of Insulting, Abusing, & Excluding refers to the shoutaling and poutaling one expresses to their foes and friends agone, and the sniveling and snoutaling one curses to those thereon. To shatter one’s friendship and shuffle into a drumpery debacle is an assurement of Insulting, Abusing & Excluding, and a swear word hurled at one’s neighbor requires a certain degree of Insulting, Abusing, & Excluding as well.
Group Solidarity refers to the act of swearing to fit snugly in with one’s compatriots and the instance of affixing one’s heart to another’s in a cheerful medley of fluffery fellowship by the use of certain shuddersome words. In this case, cursing is not a scurrilous pastime, but rather, endearing and a merrily happening happening. Indeed, it has been noted that people swear less in an actually fraught situation than in one of spontaneity and ease.
Style and Emphasis regards the use of profanities to paint an ambiance of urgency and haste to one’s speech, and to powder likewise the fripperies of flamboyance and pizzazz. Profanity begets personality, and personality begets flavor, which draws passerbys in.
Tellingly, swear words tend to be sculpted from a hackneyed puddle of traits: religion, bodily functions, bodily parts, death, and intimate relations. Although such concepts are enveloped in certain words we deem unbecoming, the concepts themselves are not necessarily taboo.
For instance, if a man were to stroll into a room and remark upon its odor of mice droppings or comment on another’s bowel movement-like behavior, they would either be regarded as a rubbery paleontologist or a rather pompous eccentric, but not, as they would have if they would have used a synonymous and quite prohibited word, as a dreadfully distressing humbug.
In great quantities, the bristle and brustle of bad words are seized and dissipated in the wind. Much like any other substance of any use, when normalized, the ‘bad’ of ‘bad words’ is swept and swirled away. Accordingly, the fateful twinge of profanities is, in certain communities throughout the globe, as little as the doubt one holds for their plumbing engineer.
Intriguingly, prolocuters do, in fact, recompense the fact that swear words are frowned upon with a muckle of peeling euphemisms. Dr. Pinker, as oft noted above, compiled a list: egad, gad, gadzooks, golly, good grief, goodness gracious, gosh, Great Caesar’s ghost, Great Scott – Gee, gee whiz, gee willikers, geez, jeepers creepers, Jiminy Cricket, Judas Priest, Jumpin’ Jehoshaphat – crikes, crikey, criminy, cripes, crumb – dang, darn, dash, dear, drat, tarnation (from eternal damnation) – consarn, dadburn, dadgum, doggone, goldarn – shame, sheesh, shivers, shoot, shucks, squat, sugar – fiddlesticks, fiddledeedee, foo, fudge, fug, fuzz – effing, flaming, flipping, freaking, frigging – bother, boy, brother – blanking, blasted, blazing, bleeding, bleeping, blessed, blighter, blinding, blinking, blooming, blow.
Somewhat ironically in a nation prided over the freedom of speech, the United States has scorned upon the use of indecency in mediums such as broadcast media.
In 2003, as NBC broadcasted the Golden Globe Awards, the lead singer of the Irish rock band U2, U2 having been receiving a reward of some sort, exclaimed, “This is really, really, &!*#-ing brilliant!” The Federal Communications Commission (FCC), to the nation’s tremulous stupefaction, allowed it to air without any brazen beeps and edits marching about.
In response to swarms of seething congressional members and ill-tempered nancies, the FCC insisted that its regulations defined “indecency” as “material that describes or depicts sexual or excretory organs or activities,” and Bono, the rock star, had done no such thing. He had merely applied the swear word to heighten the vigor and meaning of his statement (which lies under the category of Style and Emphasis, as a clever newspaper-reader would infer), and thusly had been a properly brought up lad with not an err to his head.
In response to such a response, a rankled California representative called Doug Ose scrawled what is known as the filthiest piece of law that Congress ever considered, though in the end, did not institute. The Clean Airwaves Act, as was the title, labeled eight, in total, swear words while additionally mentioning the unpleasantries of the “compound use (including hyphenated compounds) of such words and phrases with each other or with other words or phrases, and other grammatical forms of such words and phrases (including verb, adjective, gerund, participle, and infinitive forms).”
Though Mr. Ose meant well, he misspelled a number of the targeted words and misidentified their grammatical species (as phrases, for instance). He also woefully neglected the category of ‘adverb’, adverbs being, according to Dr. Pinker, the vehicle with which Bono of U2 had dispatched the swear word, and of which prompted the fabrication of such a decree in the first place.
The whatabouts of a lowly word irking us into a countenance of pestiferous nightmares has haunted the sages among our halfwitted minds for centuries of sundry amounts. Do swear words truly differ from other words? Are they not all a collection of clamors and grunts emitted from the mouth? Roses are roses and noises are noises so what makes a noise so distinct from a rose?
It has, as it happens, been noted that swear words are not actually words in the first place. Swear words, as it was pronounced, are naught but solidified emotions, dwelling abroad from their word-esque cousins in the aforesaid right hemisphere of the brain.
So whether wordisome or wearisome or all of the twain, swear words burrow deep in the minds, whether consciously or unconsciously, of all. Though profanity infers insanity, it is crucial to the functioning, and furthermore, the evolution, of mankind and all that this implies.
