The science of swearing......

[mzteris]

Almost Before We Spoke, We Swore
By NATALIE ANGIER
Published: September 20, 2005
Incensed by what it sees as a virtual pandemic of verbal vulgarity issuing from the diverse likes of Howard Stern, Bono of U2 and Robert Novak, the United States Senate is poised to consider a bill that would sharply increase the penalty for obscenity on the air.

. . . Yet researchers who study the evolution of language and the psychology of swearing say that they have no idea what mystic model of linguistic gentility the critics might have in mind. Cursing, they say, is a human universal. Every language, dialect or patois ever studied, living or dead, spoken by millions or by a small tribe, turns out to have its share of forbidden speech, some variant on comedian George Carlin's famous list of the seven dirty words that are not supposed to be uttered on radio or television.

-MORE-

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/20/science/20curs.html?pagewanted=1&th&emc=th

[SteppingRazor]

1. Shit!

These fuckin' Senate cocksuckers can't fuck us like this!

[TallahasseeGrannie]

2. heh

great link.

Personally I think the F word is WAY over used. Not because I think it is so horrible, but because I believe it is a powerful word and we should save it. Like your Sunday shoes. Don't wear it out.

other than that, I don't like fucking care, you know

[sam sarrha]

3. yea.. my wife has been saving it up for years...

:cry:

[unhappycamper]

8. The F word is quite a word, indeed.

http://www.slhacker.com/downloads/fword.wav

[hobbit709]

4. When George Washington relieved

Gen. Lee of command for being a fuck-up, Washington's aide wrote in his diary that "Washington's command of the invective was truly awe inspiring"

[TlalocW]

5. Like Lewis Black said...

They're a bunch of "cocky suckers" if they think they're going to cut down on swearing.

TlalocW

[Shine]

6. A "human universal"? So, basically they're saying...

We are, therefore, we curse. :evilgrin:

Wow, that's effing deep! I guess, once again, Science is proving the Obvious.

~Shine

[muriel_volestrangler]

7. A channel in the UK has done a series of short promo films

in which lots of the personalities on the channel give answers to questions, such as "what do you still want to do in your life?" or "what was your first car?"

The one for "what's your favourite swear word" could only run late at night; nothing, I think, was banned from it. It didn't seem surprising to me until they had a couple of newsreaders swear. That did make me sit up - hearing the sober, careful people who are always so correct swear at you was strange.

[Igel]

9. Making it worse, curse words tend not to behave themselves

like other parts of speech.

English has expletive insertion: abso-fuckin'-lutely. But it also fits into idiom chunks like 'no way'. "There's no real way I'm going to the store" has 'way' meaning something different from "There's no fuckin' way I'm going to the store."

And if you ever try to figure out the grammar of "fuck you", you realize there's an imperative with no agent, and the semantics are frequently a bit screwy. So to speak. And why we use the ones we do as we do is a bit of a mystery.

A classic in linguistics is Haj Ross's MIT dissertation, the first to point out the serious weirdness of the core expletives, at least in English. Weirdness shows up in a bunch of languages' expletive systems.