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?
