THE RECORD
BY INGA KIDERRA
Benjamin Bergen UC San Diego professor of cognitive science
Benjamin Bergen is a professor of cognitive science at UC San Diego and director of the Language and Cognition Lab , where he studies how our minds compute meaning and how talking interferes with safe driving — among many other things that don ’ t need to be bleeped . His latest book is What the F : What Swearing Reveals About Our Language , Our Brains , and
Ourselves . He calls it “ a book-length love letter to profanity .” You ’ ve been warned .
So , what the heck ? Why study profanity ? Language is changing . We ’ re exposed to a wider and wider swath of language than we might have been 20 years ago . That includes slang ; it includes new vocabulary embraced by young people , and it includes profanity . We would be doing ourselves a disservice if we didn ’ t consider all these different types of language as part of our research purview . What people do with language tells us things about how humans learn language , how their brains process language , how they use language for social purposes .
Your book identifies four broad categories into which profanity seems to fall . When you look across languages and cultures , the taboo words — the words people decide are inappropriate for formal contexts , or inappropriate around kids or inappropriate in general — tend to be drawn from four categories of human experience : from religious concepts ; from sexual activities and sexual relations ; from bodily functions and the body parts that perform those functions ; and then , finally , from terms for groups of other people . You find in language after language that these tend to be the sources of taboo language . It ’ s not surprising because these , of course , are domains of human experience that themselves are quite taboo .
How have taboo words changed over time ? If you look at surveys that have been conducted with native speakers of the various Englishes of the world , religious terminology has flipped pretty far down to the least offensive of those four categories . It wasn ’ t always . Three hundred years ago you would have found the strongest words in the language were names of deities and hell and so on : “ zounds ,” which comes from “ God ’ s wounds ,” and “ gadzooks ,” which comes from “ God ’ s eyes .” Those were replaced by sexual language , which came along with Victorian beliefs about sexuality . And nowadays , the strongest words of the language seem to have been replaced by this largely newer crop of slurs — terms of abuse for denigrating people based on their race , religion , ethnicity , sex and so on .
Is profanity becoming more acceptable then ? And why would you say this is ? We ’ re no longer subject to heavy censorship on the media that we ’ re exposed to . Most of the media we get pops up on our media device in our pocket , completely unfiltered . It ’ s straight from someone else ’ s thumbs . As a consequence of getting unfiltered language , the impact of the profanity lessens . We ’ re inured to it . It doesn ’ t seem as bad as it once was , and in large part that ’ s because there ’ s nothing intrinsically bad about it . It ’ s associated
18 TRITON | WINTER 2017