OPINION: The Secret Power of Swearing

[Tennesseer]

New York Times article.

The Secret Power of Swearing

Swearing can be so satisfying that it can help us withstand pain. It can shock, offend and entertain. It can release tension or increase it. It can foster intimacy.

What’s swearing’s secret? How do four-letter words move us in all the ways they do?

All languages have taboos, things that nice people don’t mention in polite company, and these taboos tend to cluster around themes like religion, defecation, disease and sex — in other words, things that can harm us physically or spiritually. As the linguists Keith Allan and Kate Burridge put it, the harmfulness of taboos “contaminates” certain words that refer to them, making those related words taboo, too. This is usually how a word becomes a swearword.

Which taboos are strongest tracks societal values. Something previously acceptable can become a taboo, or vice versa. In prudish Victorian Britain, extremely lewd street names that existed unproblematically throughout the country in the Middle Ages were bowdlerized. And in increasingly secular cultures the taboo around religious-themed words has waned. Take “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn,” Rhett Butler’s famous line in the film “Gone With the Wind”: It is far less shocking to modern ears than it was to the film’s audience in 1939.

But ghosts of once powerful taboos can continue to haunt us. Consider, as Professors Allan and Burridge do, spilling salt, which was once both expensive and spiritually significant. Throwing a pinch of spilled salt over one’s left shoulder, into the eyes of the devil that resided there, was supposed to ward off bad fortune. Lots of people still do this, but not, I suspect, to blind the devil. In a similar way, swear words, once contaminated with the disgust or power associated with a strong taboo, retain their power even as the shock value of those origins wanes.

These days we mostly cause offense by swearing because swearing is a behavior that causes offense. When we swear in a context in which we can assume those around us would prefer we didn’t, that choice is a sign of our disrespect.

Rest of article here: The Secret Power of Swearing

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