Studying profanity teaches us where language gets its power to shape minds and to shape the world, how our brains learn language, and how language must have evolved. Throughout its several-thousand-year history, the scientific study of language has, if anything, mostly tried to ignore profanity. But I’m prepared to make the argument that this has been to our disadvantage. In certain ways, you can learn more from four-letter words than from fifty-cent ones.
