The Power of Profanity
As I was writing a post about the profanity I use in my novels I realized I never really talked about the power of profanity itself on my blog. For those that don’t know, profanity has a unique place in culture and people’s minds. It’s separate from the normal language areas we use, even in the brain.
When we speak we use an area on the front lobe of our brain, either in the left or right hemispheres depending upon a number of factors including whether we are right-handed or left-handed. This is why damage to the frontal lobe can result in people losing speech all together or sometimes ending up with one type of Aphasia that prevents them from speaking more than simple phrases or one or two words. Interestingly enough we know this area of the brain deals with the grammatical idea of language so the reason these people can’t produce their sentences well is because they stumble over recalling the correct grammar.
But the frontal lobe only covers speech and grammar as far as we know. The temporal lobe instead governs the understanding of speech from other people. Damage to this area often results in a type of Aphasia where you can have the most amazing grammatical sentences, but you often can’t understand other people, or you can understand but you can’t repeat anything anyone says. These people also have difficulties with words in general, especially naming things and will often use words close to what they are trying to mean. They could produce a sentence that is grammatical correct, but it is otherwise gibberish or not remotely connected to a discussion topic. This is sometimes called word salad, which is like the ugly cousin of word vomit.
There are a number of other areas of the brain that handle language, but the most important area with profanity is what has often received the nickname: The Reptile Brain. The brain stem is some of the most primitive of brain functions, in which almost every animal has it. It also happens to govern emotion, and strangely enough that is where the majority of profanity comes from. Even more interesting is that a word doesn’t have to be profane or a curse word to be a word you use from your emotional center of your brain. It can be any word as long as it is a word you have come to associate with saying when you feel a burst of a particular emotion.
Some people might say ‘FUCK YES’ when they get excited and happy to the point that they can’t control bursting out. But others might be more inclined to scream ‘WOOOOOO’ which has the same function as someone telling a chair they stubbed their toe on that it is a cunt. All of these are curse words or profanity or more appropriately words that help you express your emotion. The societal value or hatred of a word does not make it profanity, instead you assign it as profanity because you often hear other people around you exclaim it when they are caught in a time of pain, or excitement or venomous hate.
Because of this, profanity actually serves a strong purpose, both as emotional health for an individual and as a way to see into different societies. You can tell a lot about a society as a whole by what words they consider bad or profanity. The majority of English-speaking countries currently have a lot of bad words associated with sex and being foolish, incapable, or inane. In the same way some profanity has popped up as well such as when someone states ‘that’s so gay’ when they mean they didn’t like what happened. This tells us that the majority of English-speaking countries (short of Australia) actually have a lot of stigma around sex, being stupid, foolish or foolhardy, and being gay (in the sense of replacing the word queer).
Only a hundred years ago stating something being queer was often negative despite queer meaning unusual or different. Gay has replaced it now as a word in the same vein, despite gay meaning happy and then denoting a sexual orientation. In the same vein, words like Fuck and Shit have started to lose some of their value as societal curse words. The average child today may use the word Fuck and Shit regularly as a word of emotion, but does not believe it is a word they are not allowed to say. This could mean that inevitably we will end up with far different words in only fifty or another hundred years that are considered ‘curse words’ just as our current profanity of today was not what was used one-hundred or three-hundred years ago.
And that’s the true beauty of language in general. It’s always changing, growing and evolving based upon the people who are using it. As more and more people who used queer as a curse word dies off, we see more and more new generations taking on gay as a replacement in United States society. Just imagine what kind of curse words and profanity will exist a thousand years from now?
