Comment by jasode | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jasode | Hacker News Reader

Instead of a history of evolving swear words (which implies a changing society), it's much more interesting to me that there's possibly a neurological or cognitive basis for swear words (which implies a stable source that's built into our DNA.)

When I was a kid and filtered the world as facts in black & white, it was baffling why certain words were "bad". Why is c_nt so bad? That doesn't make sense -- It's just a word! If you were to let a foreigner who didn't understand English listen to 100 random words with c_nt being one of them, he/she would not be able to identify which word was the nasty one. Listening to the phoneme is not enough. With that mindset, I laughed along with the George Carlin "7 Dirty Words" routine[1].

Later in life, I ran across across a thread discussing profanity and I saw an interesting sentence that finally made it click. Basically it said, "if c_nt wasn't the taboo word, it would be another word that was equally taboo."

In other words, we seem to always create this "space" in language reserved for taboo. It's not related to specific phonemes. If one says that humans have built in brain wiring for "grammar" (Chomsky[2]) to understand nouns, verbs, and recursive clauses... one might extend that to say we also have innate brain wiring to always create taboo swear words. It is unavoidable.

For example, the creator of Esperanto didn't put any cuss words in his language because he thought it was unnecessary. (It was a language designed to foster harmony so that's understandable.) Nevertheless, Esperanto evolved to eventually have swear words.

I notice that manufactured languages such as Klingon also has swear words/phrases. However, I'm not a trekkie so I don't know if they elicit any negative emotions or they are there simply as an exercise in "universe building".

[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbZhpf3sQxQ

[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_grammar

Indeed, cursing is considered a fine art among Klingons. One of their aphorisms, translated idiomatically as "Curse well!", literally translates as "Shoot curses forcefully!" They consider curses as weapons which must be propelled to their target, much like throwing knives.

At least one Klingon epithet, petaQ, seems to be used to refer to "someone who has no honor." It was used of Worf by other Klingons during the period of his discommendation.

You bring up an interesting point. There's some neurolinguistic research that points to profanity being more the domain of the amygdala, the so-called "reptilian brain". This is supported by both neuroimaging and studies of patients with aphasia, which show that people with damage to brain regions governing conventional speech can still retain the capacity to swear. Another study suggests that swearing helps the utterer better withstand pain, by stimulating the fight or flight response mechanism centered there.

http://harvardsciencereview.com/2014/01/23/the-science-of-sw... http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-do-we-swear/

> one might extend that to say we also have innate brain wiring to always create taboo swear words

That's arbitrary conjecture at best.

A better explanation is that vulgar people will find ways to be vulgar in whatever language they're using, and it will catch on among other vulgar people.

How is that not an equally arbitrary explanation?

Because we observe directly that many of our humans are distressingly vulgar, and seem to enjoy it. We do not observe, directly or indirectly, "innate brain wiring to always create taboo swear words".

Of course, that leaves unexplained why many (all?) humans enjoy being vulgar...

Because we are not rule-machines, and we enjoy breaking the rules, including "social decorum" and "taboo" from time to time?

That's also how comedy works, even without using any vulgar words.

It's not even an explanation, it's a tautology: vulgar people are vulgar.

>A better explanation is that vulgar people will find ways to be vulgar

I think you're not understanding my "conjecture."

If profanity was purely something propagated by vulgar people, there should be a significant percentage of people where it doesn't trigger any negative emotions at all. Sort of like being "color blind" to shades of green or red, or deaf to hearing "15kHz" sounds such as cymbals.

We humans don't seem to have a brain that treats all phonemes and spellings as equal & arbitrary with no emotions which would render any attempts to create vulgar swear words to be an impossible task. So far, every culture and every language (even new languages) has swear words so I think it is very debatable whether vulgar people create that taboo or our brains already carry a reserved space for offensive communication. If so, that space is receptive for certain words to serve the purpose of offending it. Even if the brain/person has no desire to utter offensive words and further propagate them, they are still offended.

An interesting case in point is the offense people take on swear words in languages acquired as an adult.

One might as well say we are hardwired to social stratification (which we almost certainly are) and our language reflects that.

Every human society has more-or-less arbitrary rules or fashions, and how closely our behaviour conforms to those rules reflects our social status. This is universal and almost certainly evolved over the course of our million-year-long dance of mate competition and selection.

Since social rules are fairly arbitrary (which we know because they vary so much) there are bound to be situations where it is useful to be able to signal we are moving outside them. Taboo words serve that function very efficiently.

This is a bit different from saying "We are hardwired to have taboo words", but it does show there are perfectly sensible ways to think about hardwiring in this regard, and it's a bit tricky to get away from.

One way of testing this hypothesis would be to look at the distribution of taboo words as a function of the strength and complexity of social hierarchies. I would predict that strongly hierarchical societies with more social restrictions would tend to have more taboo words and likely a finer grading of taboo words than more relaxed societies. On the other hand, if we are more directly hardwired to have taboo words, there would be no reason for the number or gradation to vary across different societies.

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