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When adverbs aren't adverbs, and swearing isn't language

WHY do we say "fuck you", and not "fuck yourself"? What exactly makes certain excretions more linguistically taboo (shit) than others (snot)? Is "fucking" really an adverb in the phrase "fucking brilliant"? Steven Pinker, a linguist and cognitive scientist and one of the most masterful popularisers of science writing today, answers all in a long article on profanity in the New Republic.

Swearing, it turns out, has its own part of the brain. Well, not exactly, but when you spill hot coffee on your crotch and expel a salty Anglo-Saxon term for sex or feces, the brain's limbic system--involved in instinctive raw emotions like fear and disgust--is activated in a way that it isn't when you proclaim your love for Rimbaud, using the main language engine seated chiefly in the brain's neocortex. This is probably why, no matter your mastery of and immersion in another language, when that coffee hits its mark you will almost always swear in your mother tongue. Swearing goes deep.

Serious writing about profanity is hardly new, but Mr Pinker manages to air a few fresh ideas. There are three universal sources for swear words--sex, religion and excretion--and Mr Pinker has hypotheses for all three. Religious swears cannot survive secularisation, he argues (quoting G.K. Chesterton: “try to blaspheme Odin”). But sex retains its taboo power: despite sexual liberation, the many serious things that can accompany sex (disease, pregnancy, rape, betrayal) mean that humans may never talk about it with the breeziness with which we discuss the weather or sports. The revulsion from certain excretions may seem obvious, but Mr Pinker explains their taboo with a bit of hard biology.

Alongside biology and neuroscience, Mr Pinker touches on politics and society too. He gleefully refers to the “filthiest piece of legislation ever considered by Congress”—the one that had to refer explicitly to “cock sucker” and “mother fucker” in order to ban them from the airwaves. He thinks it silly that the New York Times cannot review Harry Frankfurter’s book On Bullshit without asterisks. (So were the New Republic’s editors being clever, or squeamish themselves, when they titled this piece What the F***?) A good liberal (“libertarian”, in American parlance), Mr Pinker thinks it should be up to parents' and broadcasters’ good sense, not to government, to keep profanity away from the young and the sensitive.

The piece meanders a bit, and may function mainly as an advertisement for his new book, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window Into Human Nature. The Economist said that book had a "bitty, cobbled-together feel", and so does the article here. But our review also said that "Mr Pinker is incapable of being dull for very long." True enough, by God. I’m adding The Stuff of Thought to the reading list. Mr Pinker at his worst is still smarter, funnier and more provocative than most writers at their best.