with taboos , social mores , but it ’ s not doing work to cause harm , unlike the slurs .
Let ’ s talk about the neuroscience of profanity . You ’ ve noted that in some people who ’ ve had half their brains removed , most language is wiped out but swearing stays . One of the most amazing things is that people can incur massive trauma to the parts of the brain that are responsible for producing and understanding language but can nevertheless still spontaneously swear . So a person who looks at a picture of a cat and can ’ t say “ cat ” can still swear out of frustration . It appears that spontaneous , automatic , reflexive swearing is actually driven by a different system of the brain than the rest of language . This is a part of the brain that ’ s housed deep below the cerebral cortex , that ’ s evolutionarily old and that we share with other primates and actually other vertebrates . Other animals use it for producing vocalizations that signal others about their emotional state — cries of fear or anger , for example .
So is swearing universal in every human language ? Just about , but not all . You almost always find that there are some taboos that cultures hold about particular words . But in some languages , there doesn ’ t appear to be anything quite like the idea that this particular word is a bad word that needs to be bleeped . The best studied example of that is in Japanese . There are certainly ways to insult people in Japanese , but you would be using run-of-the-mill words like “ fool ,” “ grandfather ,” “ pig ,” and so on — words that you could use in any context . So it doesn ’ t seem to be a cultural universal that there are certain words that are intrinsically bad themselves .
Is swearing good in any way ? I think of it like this : Swearing is a powerful tool . Like all powerful tools , you can use it for positive or negative goals . On the positive side , we know that producing profanity is a way to decrease the experience of pain . There are experiments showing that when people are asked to submerge an open palm into nearly freezing water , they can hold their hand in longer when they ’ re swearing than when they ’ re not — almost twice as long , in fact . They report that it hurts less . There ’ s also evidence that people are largely using profanity for positive social functions . The biggest study to date has found that the majority of the time swearing is used to be funny , to increase informality of an interaction and to demonstrate comfort .
Has studying profanity changed how you swear ? Are there any words left that shock you ? There is literally no word that shocks me anymore . There are still words that I prefer not to say , and lots of contexts that I don ’ t swear in . I ’ m not a proselytizer for swearing . If anything , my research has made me more cautious .
Well , you ’ ve made it this far without actually swearing , so when you ’ re utterly relaxed and around people who won ’ t be offended , do you have a favorite word ? Yes . Motherfuckr . .
For the uncensored , extended interview , visit tritonmag . com / profanity
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