© Peter Opaskar
Cursing is cool. It just is. Ask anyone.
In his new book
What the F: What Swearing Reveals About Our Language, Our Brains, and Ourselves, Benjamin Bergen—a linguist in the Cognitive Science Department at UC San Diego—tries to explain exactly why cussing is so amazing. His self-described "book-length love letter to profanity" defines what makes a swearword and why using one feels so great.
Although
What the F has its share of silliness, it's full of cute tidbits you can drop at cocktail parties, like how all Samoan babies' first words are "eat s#!t" and how Japanese completely lacks curse words. Japanese people with Tourette's syndrome blurt out insults and childlike words for genitalia that are generally considered impolite and inappropriate, but not profane.
Across unrelated languages—Bergen mentions Cantonese, Russian, Finnish, American and British Sign Languages, Hebrew, Arabic, Italian, German, and Quebecois French in addition to English—curses largely fall into four categories. There are words that deal with prayer, the divine, and the supernatural (the word "profane," after all, is the counterpoint to the word "sacred"). There are also words that deal with sex, various sex acts, the people who perform them, and the body parts involved. Other words cover the act of excreting, as well as the excretions themselves.
Finally, there are slurs, which are the only swears that have been demonstrated to cause harm to those who use and hear them. The others, despite the protestations of the FCC and generations of conservative parents, have not been found to have ill effects on anyone.
Curse words are different from the rest of language, as evidenced by how they seem to be exempt from regular rules of grammar and instead can engender their own. But the most interesting aspect of their distinction is that they are
processed in the brain differently from regular speech.
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