The Power Of Profanity In Communication
Words have power. Apparently, profanity has even more power than the rest of our language. In fact, many scientists and linguists believe we process profanity differently. While our daily linguistic skills used to communicate and express ideas is linked to the Broca’s area, located in the left frontal lobe in our brains, our expression of profanity is connected to the limbic system and basal ganglia, located in the interior of the brain, which is associated with the person’s emotional and mnemonic response. Unfortunately, the etymology of profanity and why they are considered profane remains a mystery to this day. According to Benjamin K. Bergen’s book, “What the F: What Swearing Reveals About Our Language, Our Brains, and Ourselves,” he boiled the origin of profanity down to one simple theory, the “Holy, Fucking, Shit, Nigger Principle”. In which he argues that most profane words come from four places: religion, sexual acts, body parts or bodily functions, and slurs. Interestingly, language and their definition shift overtime. Certain words that used to mean a certain thing, in modern era, it no longer does. Consider the name Dick. There seems to be more people named Dick older than sixty than there are still in their twenties. There are young Richards and young Ricks, but no young Dicks, because once a word gains new meaning, it’s a lot more difficult to clarify the water than to poison the well. Yet plenty profane words remain profane throughout history, and our intentional avoidance, and the societal environment and expectations play some of the biggest roles of giving these words the power they hold today. As differently as we perceive profanity, we are conditioned into reacting negatively at them even though they’re just like the rest of our language that convey ideas and emotions, and, sometimes even more effectively.
Profanity relieves pain. As we stub our toes or get cut off on the freeway, the first thing that rolls off our tongues is often profanity since it uses parts of the brain that process emotion instead of the parts that process the rest of the language. Take the 2009 experiment conducted by Richard Stephens, John Atkins, and Andrew Kingston for example, the participants were separated into two groups as they were asked to submerge both their hands into ice water for as long as they could. Except one group of the participants were allowed to shout out any swear words they see fit, and the other group were only allowed to shout out neutral words. The catch is to see if profanity can help people ease pain. By monitoring the participants’ heart rate, cold-pressor latency, and ultimately, the time they withstood the coldness, the result was unexpected. An experiment that started with a hypothesis of “swearing, an assumed maladaptive pain response, would decrease pain tolerance and increase pain perception compared with not swearing,” ended up being the exact opposite. The study found that cussing accelerates heart rate, which, biologically, triggers an immediate alarm reaction that detects pain as an external threat. Participants who were allowed to cuss were able to keep their hands in the water for almost fifty percent longer than those who weren’t. Turns out, cussing lowers pain perception, reduces cold-pressor latency, and it somehow induces a “fight or flight” response that neutralize perceived pain.
Some aspects of how profane words sound makes us subconsciously think they are more vulgar as well. To demonstrate, why can a child say poop or dookie, but can’t say shit? Why is cock a dirty word, but penis isn’t? In other words, why are we only allowed to say the alternative words, but not the actual word itself, when they literally have the same definition in one way or the other? Again, referring back to Bergen’s book mentioned earlier, he points out that at least third of profane words are spelled with four letters (not including the words elongated from the foundation of a four-letter word), such as fuck, shit, cock, cunt, wank, and many others. By having this pattern and the nature of the English language, these profane words are a lot easier to roll off the tongue since most of them has only one syllable. Furthermore, most of the profane words also have exclusively a “closed-syllable”, meaning that it ends with a consonant, rather than an open one. Interestingly, this “rule of thumb” doesn’t just extent to the four-letter profane words, it also works regardless the number of letters, such as bitch, prick, or faggot. There are plenty of other four-letter words that are not considered profane like four or help, and there are plenty of four-letter words with two syllables such as city or evil, but somehow combining the two “rules”, it automatically makes the word sound more vulgar and hard-hitting. Thus, making these words a lot more suitable in certain scenarios where we feel a burst of emotion. To illuminate, in his book “What the F: What Swearing Reveals About Our Language, Our Brains, and Ourselves,” Bergen ran a study where he generated a bunch of opened-monosyllabic words that aren’t real English words, like skoo and stee, and paired them up with a closed-monosyllabic words, like skoom and steesh. Then, he asked sixty native English speakers to rank how profane these words sound. The results showed words with closed syllables are generally considered to be more vulgar than words with opened syllables by the factor of 4. Overall, it is illogical to bound these supposedly profane words within these constructs that no one created. Based on the peculiar way we perceive profanity; tens of thousands of other words should be profane as well. So, if fuck or suck is vulgar, why aren’t duck and sunk?
On that note, the line drawn that separate words between acceptable and unacceptable seems uncalled-for with no clear justification. The Broadcasting Standards Commission of Great Britain released a study in 2000, which it authored jointly with several other groups. The study asked 1,033 adults a series of questions about profanity, including whether each of a list of words was “Not Swearing,” “Quite Mild,” “Fairly Severe,” or “Very Severe.” Expectedly, words such as cunt, motherfucker, nigger, and fuck topped the chart. Now, the most interesting part about the study is when the New Zealand Broadcasting Standards Authority and an American cognitive psychologist, Kristin Janscheswitz, ran similar studies on both New Zealand English and American English, separately. Remarkably, the word cunt and motherfucker appeared in all three of the studies as top one and two. Yet, the words that are considered the most acceptable or the least vulgar varied. Namely, like the New Zealand study, the British study shows rampant disagreement. Half of respondents said that slag was either “fairly severe” or “very severe”, while the other half deemed it “quite mild” or “not swearing”. Wanker shows up at a prominent number four in the Great Britain list, just ahead of nigger, but on the New Zealand list, it falls in the middle of the pack at number fourteen, right before whore. Focusing on the part where words are perceived differently, how can there be so much disagreement about what’s acceptable? It’s quite safe to say that profane words are just like any other words, they’re fluid, they’re not fixed, they vary through cultures. In America, the word chips refers to potato chips. However, in Britain, it refers to French fries. Biscuit refers to buttery bread roll in the United States, while in Britain, it refers to none other than a cookie. Again, profane words are just as any other words, they obtain different meanings in different contexts. Words that are considered to be unacceptable are somehow acceptable for others. There are no societal agreement across cultures that deems certain words “bad”. So, when an English in America shouts out the word wanker, a word that’s considered to be more offensive than nigger for their specific culture, or when an American screams out the word slut in Britain, a word that technically didn’t even appear in the Great Britain study, do we rile up and make a big deal out of it, or just leave them be?
To sum it up, let’s go back to December 1965, when a 47-year-old man’s, pseudonymized as E.C., entire left brain was removed due to a substantial tumor. Now, the left hemisphere of our brain is more active in speech production than the right. So, when E.C.’s left brain was removed, unsurprisingly, his ability to speak was compromised. After the surgery, E.C. would attempt to form sentences, but only a bunch of unrelated words were uttered. Then, realizing his own inability to do so, he would well-articulately shout out “god dammit!” or other profanity. This behavior and discovery is astounding. Let’s be clear, E.C. had his entire left brain removed! Yet, he can still eloquently cuss out profanity. In other words, we don’t need our left brain to talk, as long as we’re swearing in frustration or anger, because they express emotions that we might not be able to express otherwise. By continuing to condition the youth and people in general to flinch at profanity, we’re pushing more and more towards censorship. In the case of Danielle Wolf, she was arrested for swearing in front of her children in public in the summer of 2014 in South Carolina. Which was, by the way, absolutely ludicrous. Profanity is a construct that conditioned us into shaping our perceptions of others, more negatively than positively. In his article, “Yes, Political Rhetoric Can Incite Violence”, Nathan Kalmoe states, “hateful language can inflame people who are already inclined toward violence and focus their rage” (par. 2). However, how can we know if it isn’t the other way around, where the people who are already violent are more inclined to use hateful language than the ones who are not? By censoring certain words, we are giving them the power that we desperately want them to not have. As Bergen put it - the “Profanity Paradox”, which describes how society programmed us to censor profanity, but our practice of doing so is the exact same practice that gives profanity the power it has. We can feel negatively towards certain words, but we cannot restrict others the usage of them solely based on the feelings we personally have. At the end of the day, everything is a choice. We can either choose to give certain words power and have them affect us, or strip their power away to create a much more fucking reasonable equilibrium.
