GO PINKER YOURSELF

AND SHOVE THIS UP YOUR STEVEN

Robert Lane Greene admires Steven Pinker's new essay on swearing, tries on a few asterisks, recollects his great-grandmother, and decides that the things which make us cuss out loud are the things that make us human ...

Special to MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE

"People who swear do not have a good vocabulary," my great -grandmother, an English teacher, used to insist. Bless her, she really thought that was true. But a half-century of moral and societal decline later, I have to disagree. One reason is that removing words from your vocabulary can hardly enrich it--it's not as though the blue words crowd out the purple. A second reason follows from that: I could probably do without "peregrination" and "finial", but swear words are among the most powerful in the language. This is why most people dislike them, some people fear them and try to ban them. To give them up would feel like unilateral disarmament.

Why the power? After all, the most common taboo words refer to body parts, unavoidable daily functions, and the act Woody Allen called "most fun you can have without laughing". Others, referring to religion, should be losing their bite in an increasingly secular society. Steven Pinker, a talented scientific populariser, probes the question in an essay for the New Republic, drawn from his new book, "The Stuff of Thought". Why do we say "fuck you", and not "fuck yourself"? What exactly makes certain excretions more linguistically taboo (shit) than others (snot)?

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 faeces, 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 in your 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.

Profanity is an established field of serious research: Google Scholar finds 1,100 books and articles with the search terms "swearing" and "linguistics". But Mr Pinker comes up with some fresh thoughts, some more plausible than others, since he is a creative hypothesiser and loves a good controversy. There are three universal sources for swear words--sex, religion and excretion--and he has hypotheses for all three.

Religious swearings cannot survive secularisation, he argues (quoting G.K. Chesterton: "try to blaspheme Odin"). He has a nice, if hard to prove, theory of the strange syntax of "fuck you", which many languages render as "fuck yourself", or similar. As "damn" lost its bite, "damn you" needed reinforcement with a harder word.

But is it true that religious taboo-language is dead or dying? It is perhaps unsurprising that in religious America, though "damn" can be said on television, the first part of "goddamn" is bleeped out. But religious swear words survive in secular societies. A Dane could yell "for Satan!" on stubbing his toe; this in a country where 5% of people go to weekly church services. In Quebec, where Mr Pinker grew up, religion has declined sharply since the 1960s. Yet the province retains a famous register of swear words derived from Catholicism, including cÃ¢lice! (chalice), hostie! (host), and tabarnac! (tabernacle). These are stronger swears than merde (shit) and the like.

Maybe religious taboo words are on their slow way out, but they are taking their sweet time. Boris Johnson, an English journalist-turned-politician, was told by a New York Times editor that he could not write "gee" in an op-ed, because it derived from "Jesus", and could offend readers. (He insisted, and the editor reluctantly gave in.)

What about bodily wastes, another universal source of profanity? Pinker notes a range of runoffs--shit, piss, fart, snot, spit--and points out that their levels of profanity fall in the same order as the taboo of doing them in public. But why that order and not another? Pinker points out that they are also dangerous in that order, as vectors of disease. Shit really is worse than spit, and our linguistic limbic system knows why even if we could not explain it consciously.

As for sex-based swear-words, we might expect the sexual liberation of the past half-century in the West to have stripped them of their taboo power. Not so. Nothing, it seems, can reduce the power of the word "cunt"--not even its embrace by feminists, one of whom, Inga Muscio, wrote a book called "Cunt: a Declaration of Independence". (She follows in the footsteps of Elizabeth Wurtzel, author of "Bitch: In praise of difficult women".) The many serious things that can accompany sex--disease, pregnancy, rape, incest, betrayal--mean that humans may never talk about it with the breeziness with which we discuss the weather or sports.

But if we find a swear-word shocking, then, a touch perversely, we should take pleasure in our ability to be shocked. Just as violent storms remind us that Mother Nature is still in charge, so violent language also keeps us in touch with basic facts about our humanity. Swearing gives voice to our fear of the supernatural, our flawed physical shells, and our need for love from each other.