Hey, Vsauce. Michael here.
When you call customer service
and hear this "to ensure quality service
your call may be monitored or recorded", they're not kidding.
Over the last year the Marchex Institute analysed more than 600,000
recorded phone conversations Americans made
to businesses in the United States.
Turns out, people from Ohio were the most likely
to use curse words - the 'A' word, the 'F' word and the 'S' word.
Washington state residents were the least likely to use bad words.
But what makes
a word bad?
Oh, be careful because etymologically speaking
even the word 'bad' can be considered a bad word.
It began in old English as a derogatory term
for an effeminate man. Eighty percent of swear words overheard
in public in 1986, 1997 and 2006
were essentially the same. One third of all counts included
the top two - the 'F' word and the 'S' word.
Slate's brilliant Lexicon Valley podcast purported that
these 10 words makeup about 0.7% of the average
English speakers daily vocabulary, which means
socially unacceptable words are used almost as often
as socially descriptive words. First person plural pronouns account for about
1% of the words we say everyday.
When a bad word is bleeped, it is covered with a 1
kilohertz sine wave, which sounds like this.
Son of a ...
By the way, the symbols and squiggles that are used to represent
a bad word have a name. They're called grawlixes.
They were named by Mort Walker in his seminal
"The Lexicon of Comicana." He names a lot of things but most of
them show stuff, they don't hide stuff.
Why the need to hide bad words, especially if we all
pretty much know what's being said? Well, there is no one single reason bad words
are bad.
Steven Pinker in his excellent lecture on the topic delineates
five types of swearing. First of all, some words are bad
on purpose. They are created and/or used with the intent
to hurt others. He calls this "abusive swearing."
Using words to insult, humiliate, objectify
or marginalise disfavoured people.
Now, if that this disfavoured person is
God, we're talking about supernatural swearing,
which was particularly taboo in Victorian times.
It was believed that casually or vainly referring
to God would physically injure God himself,
literally. So, at the time people were forced to come up with euphemisms,
like "Zounds!" and "Gadzooks!", which originally meant
"God's Wounds!" and "God's Hooks!",
referring to the nails driven through the hands of Jesus.
Historically, swear words often came from things we were
afraid of, things we perceived as dangerous,
stronger than us and mercurial. Such as
death, disease and infirmity, sex
and sexually transmitted diseases, as well as body fluids,
germy, gross effluvia. Words
for those gross things became gross and bad in and of themselves,
uncouth
to speak.
But not all words for gross things are
socially unacceptable, which brings us to Pinker's
second type of swearing - emphatic swearing.
Emphatic swearing is where the taboo-ness of bad words
becomes quite practical. You wouldn't usually use those words but when you
really want to convey that your current emotions matter more to you than proper
social conduct,
you can use them.
Dysphemism.
A euphemism is kind, acceptable word that allows you to talk about something
unpleasant
while simultaneously letting everyone know you totally
get that it's unpleasant and want to respect that.
For instance, if you want to be professional, you wouldn't say s***.
You might say 'defecate'. If, on the other hand, you really want to drive home just
how unpleasant
the experience was, dysphemisms can help out a lot.
It wasn't a bag of canine defecation you found on your
front porch, it was a s*** bag of hot
dog s***. Both of these words refer to pretty much the same thing
but they have different levels of social acceptability and that's
very helpful. It means word choice allows us to not only
refer to things in the real world but also
to how we feel about them.
If both these words had the same level of social acceptance
we might even have to find new, badder words so as not to lose the power
language currently has to express
emotion,
repulsion and disgust.
But when it comes to two words referring to the same thing, but
with different levels of social acceptance, who decides which one's
good and which one's bad? Well, historically, many of the bad words we
use today
are the result of class differences.
In medieval England, the lower-class Saxons
spoke a Germanic tongue while the upper-class
Normans spoke a language related to French and Latin.
English, as we know it today, contains many consequences
of their differences. The lower class worked with animals and
from them we get animal names. The upper class
only ate the animals, which is where the names of the meat
come from. Today's swear words
are similar. Defecation stems from fancy pants
Latin, whereas the less classy s***
is Germanic. There's also idiomatic swearing,
where nothing is being emphasized.
No dysphemism is meant; instead, it's an easygoing type of
swearing that shows an atmosphere is casual.
Bad words can be used, we're all close here. It's okay to swear,
we're all cool.
Cathartic swearing
is a bit different. It gives us "lalochezia,"
the medical term for the relief swearing provides
when you're in pain. In the brain, swearing
seems to involve different regions than regular language,
which may explain why people with aphasia caused by brain damage
struggle to comprehend or construct spoken words
but yet are fluent at swearing.
Or why people with coprolalia control
normal language just fine, but involuntarily utter
profanity, an obscene words.
It turns out
swearing may be centralized in the limbic system,
along with the motions. Many animals make automatic
noises when in pain or threat to startle or intimidate
attackers, or to let others know what's going on.
In humans, bad words are great for this purpose.
Their taboo-ness makes them special. People wouldn't use them otherwise,
so they are great alarms. Swearing
is changing. Some bad words are being used more and more
frequently. Of the seven words, George Carlin said you could never say on
television.
Today, every second
22 of them are sent out on Twitter.
So, what will swearing look like in the future?
It probably won't go away altogether, it's too useful.
But the words we don't like will likely change.
History has shown that as disease becomes less scary and sex and the
supernatural
more personal, words related to them become less taboo
and more common; whereas words that were common in the past
are increasingly unpleasant. Perhaps, in the future,
spurt not by runaway political correctness but by wider
knowledge, words like "schizo", "mental",
"aspy", or even "depressed" will take the square stage.
Or as John McWhorter ventured, words centered around class and the gap
between
opportunity and disadvantage will become more
taboo. Salt of the Earth, trash,
chav, pikey, urban as a pejorative.
When McKay Hatch started a "No Cussing Club"
at his school, his campaign became the target of so many online jokes and
insults for being lame or anti-free speech.
On his book, he literally subtitled his own name
"the most cyberbullied kid in the world."
People care about this stuff. Is it censorship
to tell us what we can and cannot say or
is it a safety seal, ensuring certain dysphemisms don't get worn down to a
quotidian
bluntness like every other word?
Or is that badness of bad words a
boundary, a moving boundary of we
reject - sometimes arbitrary,
sometimes irrational, but always moving in the direction of acceptance
moving forward?
Crime and inequality have existed ever since
they could. But when N.W.A released a reaction, in the form of a song with bad
word in the title,
"F*** the Police", the Federal Bureau of Investigations released
a statement against the song. It was the only time,
up until then and since, the FBI has ever issued an official statement
about a work of art.
Bad words have power.
If you wanna push for change you'll need something
to push. If everything's fine,
nothing's cool.
So, bad words are the precipitate of a larger
reaction - the process of us slowly becoming
what we want to become.
That's some deep s***.
And as always,
thanks for watching.