What the F: What Swearing Reveals About Our Language, Our Brains, and Ourselves

by Benjamin K. Bergen

Damage to language-supporting brain regions doesn’t impair all language equally. In fact, a lot of the time, even when brain damage obliterates most language, swearing still remains. And people with brain damage do swear. A lot.

Words, in short, have the power, by their mere utterance, to affect how people feel and how they feel about you.

Name a feeling, and profanity can elicit it.

Taboos are social customs—norms or mores—that prohibit certain types of behavior.

The second place English profanity comes from is language relating to sex and sexual acts. This includes the acts themselves (fuck, for instance), sex organs involved in those acts (pussy and cock), people who perform those acts (cocksucker and motherfucker), and artifacts and effluvia related to those acts (spooge, dildo, and so on). So the second prong of our profanity principle is sex.

Third is language involving other bodily functions—things that come out of your body, the process of getting them out of your body, and the parts of your body that they come out of. This includes robust cohorts of words describing feces, urine, and vomit, among others, as well, of course, as the body parts associated with these substances and the artifacts used in those body parts’ upkeep, like douchebag, and so on.

And finally there are the slurs. Among the most offensive words on each of the lists (when the lists saw fit to ask about them) are terms lik...

Looking just at English, you’ll find that nearly all the most profane words in Great Britain, New Zealand, and the United States fall into one of these four categories: praying, fornicating, excreting, and slurring.

In English, fuck is everywhere. So is shit. You don’t have to be talking about copulation or defecation for these words to find a niche. But that’s not quite as true about nigger and chink.

In France, for instance, even the most profane words of the language, like foutre (“fuck”) and putain (“whore”) are so common that if no one told you they were bad words, or gros mots (“fat words”) as they’re called in French, you could be excused for not figuring it out yourself. There’s no concerted censorship of specific words in the media in France as there is in the United States, which is part of the reason these words are everywhere.

profanity isn’t as taboo in France as it is in, say, the United States.

Japanese does have specific ways of speaking that are thought to be stronger than others, and there are many ways to insult people. Beyond uttering potentially insulting words like bakayaro, you can offend someone by using the wrong grammatical form of a verb or noun—similar to how an English speaker might offend his surgeon by addressing her as Carla instead of Dr. Lee. Japanese even has a special way you’re supposed to talk to the emperor, with its own prescribed noun and verb forms, without which you could surely offend.

If you want to curse in Japanese, you literally have to do it in English or Spanish.

During the writing of this book, for instance, Russia banned a list of profane words from the arts—books, theater, films, music, everywhere.

Universal features found to hold in all languages reveal something about what it is to be human. If all humans do something—whether it’s art, music, math, or some aspect of language, that universal behavior must be due to either some shared common experience or some trait possessed by all humans, transcending cultural idiosyncrasies.

When you look for universal features of languages, you mostly find tendencies. This makes us think that the way a language will be structured isn’t merely random.

For example, people seem to want to talk about things and events, so it’s not surprising to find nouns and verbs in the world’s languages. Similarly, it can be useful to distinguish who did something from whom they did it to. As a result, languages evolve subjects and objects and ways to encode them. So if profanity is like other cross-linguistic tendencies—languages tend to have it, and it tends to be drawn from certain domains—then what pressures tending to produce similar-seeming profanity could the histories of the world’s languages share?

The answer probably lies in taboos not about language but about the world. Across cultures, people exhibit taboos about the very things that provide the vocabulary for profanity.

The fact that taboos like these erupt around the world, though not universally, suggests an explanation for how profanity comes about and how it comes to have similar contours. People around the world have taken these taboos and extended them from the world to the word. It’s not just defecation that’s taboo in many cultures; nor is it just talking about defecation. Rather, the words that describe defecation themselves are taboo, whether that’s how you happen to be using them in the moment or not.

The road from taboo things in the world to taboo words is nondeterministic. Even if excretion is culturally taboo, that doesn’t mean that all words describing it will be as well. Shit is more profane than poop. Fuck is profane, but copulate is not.

Of the eighty-four words, twenty-nine are spelled with four letters. By this count, then, just over a third of profane words are four-letter words.

for our present purposes, it’s enough to note that profanity in English is strikingly more likely to have four letters than other words. The take-away is that there’s some truth to the popular notion about four-letter words.

This is sometimes called the “sound-symbolic feeling”: the sounds of words in your language feel like they suit their meanings.

there’s a phenomenon known as word aversion, in which some people have particularly strong reactions to particular words, even though the words have totally anodyne (or inoffensive) meanings. The English word that appears to crawl most insidiously under people’s skin is moist. I can’t tell you how often, upon discovering that I’m interested in profanity, people declare their everlasting hatred for this word.

By following the four-letter road, we discovered a hidden pattern in how profane words sound in English. At their core are closed monosyllables. This isn’t just a descriptive fact about the words that are currently profane in English; it also affects what English speakers think about new words, whether inventing a science fiction language or participating in a behavioral experiment.

English nouns place stress on the first syllable and verbs on the second (compare a record and to record, a permit and to permit). But then sometimes they don’t—copy and double are pronounced with first-syllable stress as both verbs and nouns.

Across a room, across the world, across the lifespan, people silently convey information using visible movements of their bodies. Words tell only part of the story of how we communicate; gestures tell the rest.

Why would a manual representation of a phallus (or anus or clitoris) indicate derision and deprecation? Why would it be aggressive to show a manual facsimile of an organ? Anthropologists have argued, at least for the phallus case, that it’s just one of many examples where “the act of male erection or copulation becomes symbolic of male dominance and can be used as a dominance gesture in totally non-sexual situations.”

Gestures differ from words in several ways. The first is the modality: words create a predominantly auditory signal, but gestures are mostly visual. Maybe vision and movements of the body are better suited for iconicity than sound is.

aphasia—language impairment caused by damage to specific parts of the brain. Unfortunately, aphasia is common. Currently, about 1 million Americans suffer from some type of aphasia due to brain damage at the hands of stroke, as well as traumatic brain injuries, infections, and dementia.

A word, when used as an automatic expletive, is generated by one set of brain circuitry; but when crafted intentionally, that same word comes off a different assembly line.

In short, a sentence with profanity doesn’t follow the same rules as those without.

Certain types of profanity, from Fuck you onward, belong to their own class, or classes, of utterance. They’re not sentences by any normal definition; nor are they abbreviations of full sentences that omit little bits. They’re their own class of thing that you can utter. There’s a chasm between the grammar of profanity and that of the language as a whole.

25 percent of children were reported to have articulated a variant of mama (including mom and mommy) as their first word, but fully 38 percent started with some variant of dada (including dad and daddy).

Although we like to imagine that adult caregivers provide the bulk of the linguistic guidance to young children, the fact is that children quickly reach a stage where they’re learning more from other children than from adults.

Once they reach a certain age, kids actually learn most of their language from peers and older children, and they do a very good job of ignoring what they hear from their parents,

Profanity is different from mama and bottle and other words that kids learn from their parents in that children use it as a way to show who they are—to forge their own identity. And for most kids, a lot of their identity is wrapped up in their relations with their peers. As a result, while kids learn their earliest words from their caregivers, they tend to learn later words, including taboo ones, from other kids.

Children typically begin to understand a few words in their first year of life and utter their first words around their first birthday, as we saw in the last chapter. From there, they’ll typically acquire a few words per month until sometime around eighteen months (give or take six months), when their vocabularies begin to explode in a “word spurt.” By the time they start school, their vocabulary will have ballooned to something like 10,000 words, and by college, it will be five times larger.

the Fritz Pollard Alliance, an organization that promotes diversity in the NFL, has argued, “Whatever arguments people want to make about the ‘N-Word’ being benign, it reeks of hatred and oppression, and no matter the generation or the context, it simply cannot be cleansed of its taint.”

you have the legal right to say whatever you want, as long as it doesn’t cause harm to the next person. A society clearly has a right—and a duty—to outline norms for behavior so that individuals don’t hurt one another. Language is powerful, and it makes sense that some of its uses should be regulated.

swearing still shifts the way people perceive you. Over the last fifty years, several dozen studies have asked subjects to make judgments about people who swear compared to those who don’t.

swearing can also bring with it a host of negative perceptions. When asked directly and in the abstract what they think about those who swear, people regularly report that they find swearers untrustworthy, incompetent, and vulgar.