Cleansing the Palate

Thanskgiving dinner, November 26, 2009. I took the first steaming bite of my mother’s revered mashed potatos, and suddenly knew with fierce clarity that I would pick food over sex in a heartbeat if given the ultimatum. That spoonful—butter-rich and pure, wanting no gravy or cheese—was an excruciating testament to the banality of 99 percent of my life as a sensory being. My quivering lips loosened. “Mom, these potatoes are fucking amazing.”

Many of you with dirty mouths and even lightly conservative parents probably affect some sort of vocabulary cleanup at home or on the phone, and do a pretty good job of it, too, barring the occasional mid-potatogasm slip. Let’s not blame them for making us censor ourselves; we are all products of our peer groups. Your parents probably cursed less than you do at your age, given the continuing trends of increasing informality and secularism in the western world. I’d also wager that parenthood usually entails a certain amount of self-censorship, even if it only occurs around children. They may have sworn like sailors back in the day, but work and family probably forced them to cut down. Forgive me for trading in stereotypes. If your parents are the kind you can drink, cuss, and carouse with, then congratulations, you blow my mind.

I consider myself a light swearer, but even so, fuck, shit, and damn color my speech pretty frequently around people over fourteen and under thirty. This began a week into seventh grade, when I was made fifth chair behind Brendan Dunstin, the baddest of clarinet-playing bad boys. Under his tutelage, my mouth ran rampant until the spring, when I was forced to reign it in after Ms. McKinly heard me reciting the opening lines of Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back outside of the cafeteria and called down the administrative thunder. These formative experiences didn’t change anything at home though. On the rare occasions that Mom or Dad dropped the d-word, I knew immediately they meant business, and became accordingly sheepish. Still do.

In examining the relationship of humanity to taboo language, we can fruitfully begin with a well-known example. As with any offering of speech protection by a democracy, the U.S. version comes with a few stipulations. Our speech protection doesn’t cover fraud, libel, the advocacy of imminent violent or lawless behavior, and obscenity, all but the last of which are easily justifiable, as they subvert the very clarity and open criticism that free speech is meant to foster. But obscenity? To many liberal minds, such an arbitrary, seemingly pointless dictum looks indefensible; an ill-fitting vestige of the restrictions imposed by our prudish forbearers. We might side with Howard Stern, who left broadcast radio for satellite in 2006 after being fined repeatedly by the FCC. As Steve Earl sings in “F the CC,” “fuck the FCC.”

Tellingly, our most infamous legal disputes concerning free speech aren’t over controversial attempts at criticism of our administration, as one might expect, but focus largely on the censorship of obscene speech. It’s not as is if these cases involve a populace firmly united against their governing body; behind every lawmaker or FCC fine are thousands of enraged letter-writers. Frankly, it’s too easy to write off conservatives as unprogressive. This is something the Dec, with its counter-culture commitments, certainly struggles with. People have very strong feelings about profanity, and the dividing lines in opinion aren’t simply generational or even political. Getting to the heart of this issue involves more than just taking a side and arguing it.

The presence of taboo words is a near-universal phenomenon of the world’s 5000 to 8000 languages. (The inexact figure is due to the often unclear distinction between dialects, vernaculars, and languages.) I qualify universal because there are undoubtedly exceptions; suffice it to say that what we are looking at is an overwhelming trend in a huge pool of diverse communicatory systems. The ubiquity of swearing as a human act suggests a natural proclivity that we as a species have towards revering and avoiding certain words.

In The Stuff of Thought, Stephen Pinker identifies taboo language as part of what is often called “word magic,” writing that “most humans... treat the name for an entity as part of its essence, so that the mere act of uttering a name is seen as a way to impinge on its referent. Incantations, spells, prayers, and curses are ways that people try to effect the world through words, and taboos and euphemisms are ways that people try not to effect it.” The power of swearing, then, is in its transforming of words into curses. (Yes, curses in the Harry Potter sense.) Whether or not we know the classic schoolyard adage, it seems we have a hard time internalizing it: words can and do hurt us. We can’t hear words we know without understanding them; because of this, the swearer can cause nearby listeners to think thoughts best avoided; thoughts that, through protective, overriding systems, the brain usually protects itself against. Before those regulatory systems are discussed, though, more on the magic of profanity is in order.

If I tell you to get the hell out, what am I really saying? Certainly not to move hell out of somewhere. This usage denies any standard or simple metaphorical connection. In contrast, if I say you really fucked me over, or there you go, pissing away your life, there is clearly a metaphorical transfer of some of the unpleasant aspects of the vehicle (pissing, creating waste) onto the subject (you wasting your life). The literal actions described are analogues for the subject at hand. However, it would seem that there are many more idioms involving taboo language that (at least ostentatiously) lack such a connection: you bet your ass or get your shit together. Also, the meaning of a word doesn’t correspond to its taboo status. For example, there are plenty of non-taboo words for shit. I’m sure that referencing hell packed much more of a punch back when more people believed in it. Telling someone to go to hell in medieval England caused them to think about a prospect of something terribly unpleasant, an eternity of excruciating pain. Today though, most of us barely bat an eye at religious swears: damn, hell, Jesus Christ. However, these profanities stay offensive, regardless of our belief in the concepts behind them. Taboo language transcends its literality, becoming connotative powerhouses that touch something deep in our own cognitive machinery.

People do find ways around the unpleasant effects, though. Saying what the eff instead of what the fuck is akin to what my Mormon brother does when he says what the freak? and sugar!—it announces “this is a situation in which one would swear but I refuse to inflict this connotative damage on all of your psyches.” Clearly, much of the urgency, alertness, and reaction that come with taboo language are lost in such uses. They seem to still serve the user, in a seemingly primal function of profanity: allowing the speaker the cathartic, unburdening effect of speaking the taboo.

The topics of taboo, at least the French and English words I know, refer to sex, religion, death, bad health, excretion, and disfavored groups, possibly because of the inherent risks to health and community that come along with all of these subjects. We make them taboo to avoid controversy. I know what you’re thinking: I’m not phased by cursing, I do it all the time. Cursing can be used to great effect. It can convey urgency, purpose, rebellion, and strong emotion. But like other words, taboo words lose their effectiveness when overused. What does all of this imply for free speech in the United States? I am unsure. However, policy makers and airwave renegades alike should take account of the linguistic, emotional, and anthropological dimensions of taboo speech before acting. Differences in opinion are a given; emphasizing them without supporting science will only serve to polarize debate.