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Tag Archives: The Guardian

Steven Pinker: What Are Cuss Words and Why Do We Use Them?

19 Thursday Feb 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Interview, Psychology, Science

≈ Comments Off on Steven Pinker: What Are Cuss Words and Why Do We Use Them?

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profanity, psychology, Steven Pinker, Swearing, The Guardian, The Stuff of Thought

Steven Pinker

Questioner: You say that most swear words are found in the following categories: sex, religion, excretion, death, infirmity, or disfavored groups. Can you give us an indication of why we find these particular things worthy of swearing about?

Steven Pinker: Each one of the categories from which we draw our taboo words involves negative emotion. In the case of sexual swearing, it’s the revulsion at sexual depravity, and just in general the high emotion that surrounds sexuality, even in the most liberated cultures. In the case of disfavored groups, say taboo terms for ethnic and racial minorities, it’s hatred and contempt for other peoples. In the case of religious swearing, it’s awe of the power of the divine. In the case of death and disease, it’s dread of infirmity and death.

So in each case, there’s a strong negative emotion. And I think the essence of swearing is the power to trigger a negative thought in the mind of your listener through the use of words. Now why would we want to do it?

There are a number of different ways in which people swear. Sometimes we do it in order to remind people how awful the objects or activities are. If we want people to not think about how terrible feces are, we use the word “feces.” If we want to remind them of how disgusting it all is, we use the word “shit.”

Likewise, if you’re talking about sex in a positive context, you’d be likely to use the phrase “make love,” but if you talk about someone who’s exploiting someone else, you might say, “Oh he’s fucking his secretary.” And the word is deliberately used to highlight that which is most offensive about the activity.

But we also use curse words cathartically. You hit your thumb with a hammer, and you start blurting out words having to do with theology (“damn”) or excretion (“shit”) or sexuality (“fuck”).

If you stub your toe and you yell out “oh shit!” it has nothing to do with feces, other than the fact that feces are unpleasant and stubbing your toe is unpleasant. […]

The swear words that you speak advertise to a real or sometimes virtual audience that you are currently in the throes of some extremely unpleasant emotion. And in that regard, swearing overlaps with other exclamations in the language, like “burrrr” if you’re cold, or “ah ha” or “mhmm” or “yuck”, which also have no syntax – you just blurt them out as individual words – but they still convey a particular emotion.

And in addition, as we’ve mentioned before, many sexual idioms have a rather unflattering image of sex as an act which damages or exploits a woman. Not only “we got screwed,” but “oh my printer is fucked up” – meaning broken, damaged.

So certainly over-use of sexual swearing can feel offensive to women. For that reason and many others, I avoid it. And as with any other aspect of language use, it’d be common sense and common courtesy to anticipate how the language will affect your audience, depending on whether it’s male or female, younger or older, in a formal setting or more casual setting. And whether it’s used with a straight face or ironically, swearing can be more or less offensive, and any careful speaker ought to anticipate these effects.

__________

From one of the best living communicators of science, Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, interviewed by The Guardian about his book The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature.

More from the mind of Pinker:

  • on feminism
  • on whether the mind’s system reflects Biblical morality
  • on the curious case of Sarah Palin, grizzly bears, and fruit flies
  • on the f-word
  • on Marxism and Nazism – how they’re the same
  • on the Boston bombing and the psychology of terrorism

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Stateless, But Not Voiceless

21 Saturday Dec 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Current Events, Journalism, Politics

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Brazil, Edward Snowden, ethics, National Security Administration, NSA, Open Letter to the Brazilian People, Person of the Year, spying, State Secrecy, surveillance, The Guardian, The United States

Edward Snowden

“Today, if you carry a cell phone in Sao Paolo, the NSA can and does keep track of your location: they do this 5 billion times a day to people around the world. When someone in Florianopolis visits a website, the NSA keeps a record of when it happened and what you did there. If a mother in Porto Alegre calls her son to wish him luck on his university exam, NSA can keep that call log for five years or more. They even keep track of who is having an affair or looking at pornography, in case they need to damage their target’s reputation.

American Senators tell us that Brazil should not worry, because this is not ‘surveillance,’ it’s ‘data collection.’ They say it is done to keep you safe. They’re wrong. There is a huge difference between legal programs, legitimate spying, legitimate law enforcement — where individuals are targeted based on a reasonable, individualized suspicion — and these programs of dragnet mass surveillance that put entire populations under an all-seeing eye and save copies forever. These programs were never about terrorism: they’re about economic spying, social control, and diplomatic manipulation. They’re about power…

[After leaking documents] I was told my government had made me stateless and wanted to imprison me. The price for my speech was my passport, but I would pay it again: I will not be the one to ignore criminality for the sake of political comfort. I would rather be without a state than without a voice.”

__________

From Edward Snowden’s Open Letter to the Brazilian People.

Although I like Francis, my nomination for person of the year is Mr. Snowden, the man who did something in 2013 which was not only fascinating, but brave.

Read on:

Lady Justice

Why the Obama Administration Is Wrong about Ed Snowden

Surveillance Cameras

In Today’s News: Bridling the Surveillance State

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F*ck

19 Friday Jul 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Psychology, Science

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Alok Jha, biology, cognitive science, curse words, evolution, experimental psychology, fuck, history of cursing, linguistics, profanity, psychology, sex, Steven Pinker, The Guardian, The Guardian Science Extra, the origins of profanity, The Stuff of Thought

Steven Pinker

Where does the word “fuck” come from?

The problem with tracing the origin of taboo words is that people don’t write them down, precisely because they’re taboo. So you have to do a lot of detective work.

In the case of “fuck,” for example, the earliest known usage in the English language was a bit of rude graffiti carved outside a monastery in a kind of pseudo-Latin. It’s the first written inscription of the word, and it’s from the fifteenth century. So it’s an old word.

But you can trace it back even further if you look for cognates in other languages. And there are similar words in Scandinavian tongues, and in German, Dutch, and so on.

By that means you can show that “fuck” comes from Scandinavian, and it originally means “to strike” or “to beat.” And that’s a little bit like some of our rude terms for sex, like “to bang.”

These call to mind a not very pleasing image of the sexual act — that of a man doing something violent to a woman, which we also see in some of the taboo phrases around sex: “they fucked him over,” “he got screwed.” These each allude to the underlying metaphor that to have sex is to exploit a woman.

That’s a conception that we all unconsciously recognize and acknowledge whenever we use an idiom like, “we got screwed,” but it’s something that we consider not fit for polite company.

And all of the acceptable terms for sex — like have sex, make love, go to bed with — hide that conceptualization…

And there’s something that feels misogynistic about swearing in general, curiously enough. Although women are swearing a lot more than they used to, swearing is still more of a guy thing. We have old notions like language that’s “appropriate for mixed company” – mixed meaning “men and women”; and expressions like “to swear like a sailor” or “locker room language,” all alluding to the fact that swearing is considered masculine, and that there’s something offensive to women about swearing.

And indeed many guidelines to sexual harassment include the telling of sexual jokes as a kind of harassment. Even though you’d think the topic of sex should be gender neutral… since it takes two.

And I believe this fact is rooted in a basic feature of human sexuality: that indiscriminate sex biologically works to the advantage of the male. And it’s because there’s a lot more at stake for women; she can get pregnant, and then she’s stuck with the child. Whereas the male can get away with just a few minutes of copulation, and in principle that can be the end of it.

So women in their behavior, in their emotions are more discriminating when it comes to sex. The casual use of sexual language, by connoting an atmosphere of licentiousness, is felt to work to the advantage of men more than women.

And in addition, as we’ve mentioned before, many sexual idioms have a rather unflattering image of sex as an act which damages or exploits a woman. Not only “we got screwed,” but “oh my printer is fucked up” – meaning broken, damaged.

So certainly over-use of sexual swearing can feel offensive to women. And as with any other aspect of language use, it’d be common sense and common courtesy to anticipate how the language will affect your audience, depending on whether it’s male or female, younger or older, and in a formal setting or more casual setting.

__________

From the writer that I consider to be the best living communicator of science, Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, as interviewed by The Guardian about his groundbreaking book The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature.

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