[wordup] Why we curse. What the F***?

[Adam Shand]

Source: http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20071008&s=pinker100807

Why we curse.  What the F***?
by Steven Pinker
Post date: 10.09.07

Fucking became the subject of congressional debate in 2003, after NBC  
broadcast the Golden Globe Awards. Bono, lead singer of the mega-band  
U2, was accepting a prize on behalf of the group and in his euphoria  
exclaimed, "This is really, really, fucking brilliant" on the air.  
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which is charged with  
monitoring the nation's airwaves for indecency, decided somewhat  
surprisingly not to sanction the network for failing to bleep out the  
word. Explaining its decision, the FCC noted that its guidelines  
define "indecency" as "material that describes or depicts sexual or  
excretory organs or activities" and Bono had used fucking as "an  
adjective or expletive to emphasize an exclamation."

Cultural conservatives were outraged. California Representative Doug  
Ose tried to close the loophole in the FCC's regulations with the  
filthiest piece of legislation ever considered by Congress. Had it  
passed, the Clean Airwaves Act would have forbade from broadcast

> the words "shit", "piss", "fuck", "cunt", "asshole", and the  
> phrases "cock sucker", "mother fucker", and "ass hole", compound  
> use (including hyphenated compounds) of such words and phrases with  
> each other or with other words or phrases, and other grammatical  
> forms of such words and phrases (including verb, adjective, gerund,  
> participle, and infinitive forms).

The episode highlights one of the many paradoxes that surround  
swearing. When it comes to political speech, we are living in a free- 
speech utopia. Late-night comedians can say rude things about their  
nation's leaders that, in previous centuries, would have led to their  
tongues being cut out or worse. Yet, when it comes to certain words  
for copulation and excretion, we still allow the might of the  
government to bear down on what people can say in public. Swearing  
raises many other puzzles--linguistic, neurobiological, literary,  
political.

The first is the bone of contention in the Bono brouhaha: the  
syntactic classification of curse words. Ose's grammatically  
illiterate bill not only misspelled cocksucker, motherfucker, and  
asshole, and misidentified them as "phrases," it didn't even close  
the loophole that it had targeted. The Clean Airwaves Act assumed  
that fucking is a participial adjective. But this is not correct.  
With a true adjective like lazy, you can alternate between Drown the  
lazy cat and Drown the cat which is lazy. But Drown the fucking cat  
is certainly not interchangeable with Drown the cat which is fucking.

If the fucking in fucking brilliant is to be assigned a traditional  
part of speech, it would be adverb, because it modifies an adjective  
and only adverbs can do that, as in truly bad, very nice, and really  
big. Yet "adverb" is the one grammatical category that Ose forgot to  
include in his list! As it happens, most expletives aren't genuine  
adverbs, either. One study notes that, while you can say That's too  
fucking bad, you can't say That's too very bad. Also, as linguist  
Geoffrey Nunberg pointed out, while you can imagine the dialogue How  
brilliant was it? Very, you would never hear the dialogue How  
brilliant was it? Fucking.

The FCC's decision raises another mystery about swearing: the bizarre  
number of different ways in which we swear. There is cathartic  
swearing, as when we slice our thumb along with the bagel. There are  
imprecations, as when we offer advice to someone who has cut us off  
in traffic. There are vulgar terms for everyday things and  
activities, as when Bess Truman was asked to get the president to say  
fertilizer instead of manure and she replied, "You have no idea how  
long it took me to get him to say manure." There are figures of  
speech that put obscene words to other uses, such as the barnyard  
epithet for insincerity, the army acronym snafu, and the  
gynecological-flagellative term for uxorial dominance. And then there  
are the adjective-like expletives that salt the speech and split the  
words of soldiers, teenagers, and Irish rock-stars.

But perhaps the greatest mystery is why politicians, editors, and  
much of the public care so much. Clearly, the fear and loathing are  
not triggered by the concepts themselves, because the organs and  
activities they name have hundreds of polite synonyms. Nor are they  
triggered by the words' sounds, since many of them have respectable  
homonyms in names for animals, actions, and even people. Many people  
feel that profanity is self-evidently corrupting, especially to the  
young. This claim is made despite the fact that everyone is familiar  
with the words, including most children, and that no one has ever  
spelled out how the mere hearing of a word could corrupt one's morals.

Progressive writers have pointed to this gap to argue that linguistic  
taboos are absurd. A true moralist, they say, should hold that  
violence and inequality are "obscene," not sex and excretion. And  
yet, since the 1970s, many progressives have imposed linguistic  
taboos of their own, such as the stigma surrounding the N-word and  
casual allusions to sexual desire or sexual attractiveness. So even  
people who revile the usual bluenoses can become gravely offended by  
their own conception of bad language. The question is, why?

The strange emotional power of swearing--as well as the presence of  
linguistic taboos in all cultures-- suggests that taboo words tap  
into deep and ancient parts of the brain. In general, words have not  
just a denotation but a connotation: an emotional coloring distinct  
from what the word literally refers to, as in principled versus  
stubborn and slender versus scrawny. The difference between a taboo  
word and its genteel synonyms, such as shit and feces, cunt and  
vagina, or fucking and making love, is an extreme example of the  
distinction. Curses provoke a different response than their synonyms  
in part because connotations and denotations are stored in different  
parts of the brain.

The mammalian brain contains, among other things, the limbic system,  
an ancient network that regulates motivation and emotion, and the  
neocortex, the crinkled surface of the brain that ballooned in human  
evolution and which is the seat of perception, knowledge, reason, and  
planning. The two systems are interconnected and work together, but  
it seems likely that words' denotations are concentrated in the  
neocortex, especially in the left hemisphere, whereas their  
connotations are spread across connections between the neocortex and  
the limbic system, especially in the right hemisphere.

A likely suspect within the limbic system is the amygdala, an almond- 
shaped organ buried at the front of the temporal lobe of the brain  
(one on each side) that helps invest memories with emotion. A monkey  
whose amygdalas have been removed can learn to recognize a new shape,  
like a striped triangle, but has trouble learning that the shape  
foreshadows an unpleasant event like an electric shock. In humans,  
the amygdala "lights up"--it shows greater metabolic activity in  
brain scans--when the person sees an angry face or an unpleasant  
word, especially a taboo word.

The response is not only emotional but involuntary. It's not just  
that we don't have earlids to shut out unwanted sounds. Once a word  
is seen or heard, we are incapable of treating it as a squiggle or  
noise; we reflexively look it up in memory and respond to its  
meaning, including its connotation. The classic demonstration is the  
Stroop effect, found in every introductory psychology textbook and  
the topic of more than four thousand scientific papers. People are  
asked to look through a list of letter strings and to say aloud the  
color of the ink in which each one is printed. Try it with this list,  
saying "red," "blue," or "green" for each item in turn from left to  
right:

> red blue green blue green red

Easy. But this is much, much, harder:

> red blue green blue green red

The reason is that, among literate adults, reading a word is such an  
over-learned skill that it has become mandatory: You can't will the  
process "off," even when you don't want to read the words but only  
pay attention to the ink. That's why you're helped along when the  
experimenters arrange the ink into a word that also names its color  
and slowed down when they arrange it into a name for a different  
color. A similar thing happens with spoken words as well.

Now try naming the color of the ink in each of these words:

> cunt shit fuck tits piss asshole

The psychologist Don MacKay has done the experiment and found that  
people are indeed slowed down by an involuntary boggle as soon as the  
eyes alight on each word. The upshot is that a speaker or writer can  
use a taboo word to evoke an emotional response in an audience quite  
against their wishes. Thanks to the automatic nature of speech  
perception, an expletive kidnaps our attention and forces us to  
consider its unpleasant connotations. That makes all of us vulnerable  
to a mental assault whenever we are in earshot of other speakers, as  
if we were strapped to a chair and could be given a punch or a shock  
at any time. And this, in turn, raises the question of what kinds of  
concepts have the sort of unpleasant emotional charge that can make  
words for them taboo.

The historical root of swearing in English and many other languages  
is, oddly enough, religion. We see this in the Third Commandment, in  
the popularity of hell, damn, God, and Jesus Christ as expletives,  
and in many of the terms for taboo language itself: profanity (that  
which is not sacred), blasphemy (literally "evil speech" but, in  
practice, disrespect toward a deity), and swearing, cursing, and  
oaths, which originally were secured by the invocation of a deity or  
one of his symbols.

In English-speaking countries today, religious swearing barely raises  
an eyebrow. Gone with the wind are the days when people could be  
titillated by a character in a movie saying "Frankly, my dear, I  
don't give a damn." If a character today is offended by such  
language, it's only to depict him as an old-fashioned prude. The  
defanging of religious taboo words is an obvious consequence of the  
secularization of Western culture. As G. K. Chesterton remarked,  
"Blasphemy itself could not survive religion; if anyone doubts that,  
let him try to blaspheme Odin." To understand religious vulgarity,  
then, we have to put ourselves in the shoes of our linguistic  
ancestors, to whom God and Hell were a real presence.

Say you need to make a promise. You may want to borrow money, and so  
must promise to return it. Why should the promisee believe you,  
knowing that it may be to your advantage to renege? The answer is  
that you should submit to a contingency that would impose a penalty  
on you if you did renege, ideally one so certain and severe that you  
would always do better to keep the promise than to back out. That  
way, your partner no longer has to take you at your word; he can rely  
on your self-interest. Nowadays, we secure our promises with legal  
contracts that make us liable if we back out. We mortgage our house,  
giving the bank permission to repossess it if we fail to repay the  
loan. But, before we could count on a commercial and legal apparatus  
to enforce our contracts, we had to do our own self-handicapping.  
Children still bind their oaths by saying, "I hope to die if I tell a  
lie." Adults used to do the same by invoking the wrath of God, as in  
May God strike me dead if I'm lying and variations like As God is my  
witness, Blow me down!, and God blind me!--the source of the British  
blimey.

Such oaths, of course, would have been more credible in an era in  
which people thought that God listened to their entreaties and had  
the power to carry them out. Even today, witnesses in U.S. court  
proceedings have to swear on the Bible, as if an act of perjury  
undetected by the legal system would be punished by an eavesdropping  
and easily offended God. But, even if these oaths aren't seen as  
literally having the power to bring down divine penalties for  
noncompliance, they signal a distinction between everyday assurances  
on minor favors and solemn pledges on weightier matters. Today, the  
emotional power of religious swearing may have dimmed, but the  
psychology behind it is still with us. Even a parent without an  
inkling of superstition would not say "I swear on the life of my  
child" lightly. The mere thought of murdering one's child for  
ulterior gain is not just unpleasant; it should be unthinkable if one  
is a true parent, and every neuron of one's brain should be  
programmed against it.

This literal unthinkability is the basis of the psychology of taboo  
in general, and it is the mindset that is tapped in swearing on  
something sacred, whether it be a religious trapping or a child's  
life. And, thanks to the automatic nature of speech processing, the  
same sacred words that consecrate promises--the oath-binding sense of  
"swearing"--may be used to attract attention, to shock, or to inflict  
psychic pain on a listener--the dirty-word sense of "swearing."

As secularization has rendered religious swear words less powerful,  
creative speakers have replaced them with words that have the same  
degree of affective clout according to the sensibilities of the day.  
This explains why taboo expressions can have such baffling syntax and  
semantics. To take just one example, why do people use the  
ungrammatical Fuck you? And why does no one have a clear sense of  
what, exactly, Fuck you means? (Some people guess "fuck yourself,"  
others "get fucked," and still others "I will fuck you," but none of  
these hunches is compelling.) The most likely explanation is that  
these grammatically baffling curses originated in more intelligible  
religious curses during the transition from religious to sexual and  
scatological swearing in English-speaking countries:

>     Who (in) the hell are you? >> Who the fuck are you?
>     I don't give a damn >> I don't give a fuck; I don't give a shit.
>     Holy Mary! >> Holy shit! Holy fuck!
>     For God's sake >> For fuck's sake; For shit's sake.
>     Damn you! >> Fuck you!

Of course, this transmutation raises the question of why words for  
these particular concepts stepped into the breach--why, for example,  
words for bodily effluvia and their orifices and acts of excretion  
became taboo. Shit, piss, and asshole, to name but a few, are still  
unspeakable on network television and unprintable in most newspapers.  
The New York Times, for example, identified a best-seller by the  
philosopher Harry Frankfurt as On Bull****.

On the whole, the acceptability of taboo words is only loosely tied  
to the acceptability of what they refer to, but, in the case of taboo  
terms for effluvia, the correlation is fairly good. The linguists  
Keith Allan and Kate Burridge have noted that shit is less acceptable  
than piss, which in turn is less acceptable than fart, which is less  
acceptable than snot, which is less acceptable than spit (which is  
not taboo at all). That's the same order as the acceptability of  
eliminating these substances from the body in public. Effluvia have  
such an emotional charge that they figure prominently in voodoo,  
sorcery, and other kinds of sympathetic magic in many of the world's  
cultures. The big deal that people ordinarily make out of effluvia-- 
both the words and the substances--has puzzled many observers. After  
all, we are incarnate beings, and excretion is an inescapable part of  
human life.

The biologists Valerie Curtis and Adam Biran identify the reason. It  
can't be a coincidence, they note, that the most disgusting  
substances are also the most dangerous vectors for disease. Feces is  
a route of transmission for the viruses, bacteria, and protozoans  
that cause at least 20 intestinal diseases, as well as ascariasis,  
hepatitis A and E, polio, ameobiasis, hookworm, pinworm, whipworm,  
cholera, and tetanus. Blood, vomit, mucus, pus, and sexual fluids are  
also good vehicles for pathogens to get from one body into another.  
Although the strongest component of the disgust reaction is a desire  
not to eat or touch the offending substance, it's also disgusting to  
think about effluvia, together with the body parts and activities  
that excrete them. And, because of the involuntariness of speech  
perception, it's unpleasant to hear the words for them.

Some people have been puzzled about why cunt should be taboo. It is  
not just an unprintable word for the vagina but the most offensive  
epithet for a woman in America. One might have thought that, in the  
male-dominated world of swearing, the vagina would be revered, not  
reviled. After all, it's been said that no sooner does a boy come out  
of it than he spends the rest of his life trying to get back in. This  
becomes less mysterious if one imagines the connotations in an age  
before tampons, toilet paper, regular bathing, and antifungal drugs.

The other major source of taboo words is sexuality. Since the 1960s,  
many progressive thinkers have found these taboos to be utterly  
risible. Sex is a source of mutual pleasure, they reason, and should  
be cleansed of stigma and shame. Prudery about sexual language could  
only be a superstition, an anachronism, perhaps a product of spite,  
as in H. L. Mencken's definition of puritanism as "the haunting fear  
that someone, somewhere, may be happy."

The comedian Lenny Bruce was puzzled by our most common sexual  
imprecation. In a monologue reproduced in the biopic Lenny, he riffs:

> What's the worst thing you can say to anybody? "Fuck you, Mister."  
> It's really weird, because, if I really wanted to hurt you, I  
> should say "Unfuck you, Mister." Because "Fuck you" is really nice!  
> "Hello, Ma, it's me. Yeah, I just got back. Aw, fuck you, Ma! Sure,  
> I mean it. Is Pop there? Aw, fuck you, Pop!"

Part of the puzzlement comes from the strange syntax of Fuck you  
(which, as we saw, does not in fact mean "Have sex"). But it also  
comes from a modern myopia for how incendiary sexuality can be in the  
full sweep of human experience.

Consider two consenting adults who have just had sex. Has everyone  
had fun? Not necessarily. One partner might see the act as the  
beginning of a lifelong relationship, the other as a one-night-stand.  
One may be infecting the other with a disease. A baby may have been  
conceived, whose welfare was not planned for in the heat of passion.  
If the couple is related, the baby may inherit two copies of a  
deleterious recessive gene and be susceptible to a genetic defect.  
There may be romantic rivals in the wings who would be enraged with  
jealousy if they found out, or a cuckolded husband in danger of  
raising another man's child, or a two-timed wife in danger of losing  
support for her own children. Parents may have marriage plans for one  
of the participants, involving large sums of money or an important  
alliance with another clan. And, on other occasions, the participants  
may not both be adults, or may not both be consenting.

Sex has high stakes, including exploitation, disease, illegitimacy,  
incest, jealousy, spousal abuse, cuckoldry, desertion, feuding, child  
abuse, and rape. These hazards have been around for a long time and  
have left their mark on our customs and our emotions. Thoughts about  
sex are likely to be fraught, and not entertained lightly. Words for  
sex can be even more touchy, because they not only evoke the charged  
thoughts but implicate a sharing of those thoughts between two  
people. The thoughts, moreover, are shared "on the record," each  
party knowing that the other knows that he or she has been thinking  
about the sex under discussion. This lack of plausible deniability  
embroils the dialogue in an extra layer of intrigue.

Evolutionary psychology has laid out the conflicts of interest that  
are inherent to human sexuality, and some of these conflicts play  
themselves out in the linguistic arena. Plain speaking about sex  
conveys an attitude that sex is a casual matter, like tennis or  
philately, and so it may seem to the partners at the time. But the  
long-term implications may be more keenly felt by a wider circle of  
interested parties. Parents and other senior kin may be concerned  
with the thwarting of their own plans for the family lineage, and the  
community may take an interest in the illegitimate children appearing  
in their midst and in the posturing and competition, sometimes  
violent, that can accompany sexual freedom. The ideal of sex as a  
sacred communion between a monogamous couple may be old-fashioned and  
even unrealistic, but it sure is convenient for the elders of a  
family and a society. It's not surprising to find tensions between  
individuals and guardians of the community over casual talk about sex  
(accompanied by hypocrisy among the guardians when it comes to their  
own casual sex).

Another sexual conflict of interest divides men from women. In every  
act of reproduction, females are committed to long stretches of  
pregnancy and lactation, while males can get away with a few minutes  
of copulation. A male can have more progeny if he mates with many  
females, whereas a female will not have more progeny if she mates  
with many males--though her offspring will do better if she has  
chosen a mate who is willing to invest in them or can endow them with  
good genes. Not surprisingly, in all cultures men pursue sex more  
eagerly, are more willing to have casual sex, and are more likely to  
seduce, deceive, or coerce to get sex. All things being equal, casual  
sex works to the advantage of men, both genetically and emotionally.  
We might expect casual talk about sex to show the same asymmetry, and  
so it does. Men swear more, on average, and many taboo sexual terms  
are felt to be especially demeaning to women-- hence the old  
prohibition of swearing "in mixed company."

A sex difference in tolerance for sexual language may seem like a  
throwback to Victorian daintiness. But an unanticipated consequence  
of the second wave of feminism in the 1970s was a revived sense of  
offense at swearing, the linguistic companion to the campaign against  
pornography. As a result, many universities and businesses have  
published guidelines on sexual harassment that ban telling sexual  
jokes, and, in 1993, veteran Boston Globe journalist David Nyhan was  
forced to apologize and donate $1,250 to a women's organization when  
a female staffer overheard him in the newsroom using the word pussy- 
whipped with a male colleague who declined his invitation to play  
basketball after work. The feminist writer Andrea Dworkin explicitly  
connected coarse sexual language to the oppression of women: "Fucking  
requires that the male act on one who has less power and this  
valuation is so deep, so completely implicit in the act, that the one  
who is fucked is stigmatized."

Though people are seeing, talking about, and having sex more readily  
today than they did in the past, the topic is still not free of  
taboo. Most people still don't copulate in public, swap spouses at  
the end of a dinner party, have sex with their siblings and children,  
or openly trade favors for sex. Even after the sexual revolution, we  
have a long way to go before "exploring our sexuality" to the  
fullest, and that means that people still set up barriers in their  
minds to block certain trains of thought. The language of sex can tug  
at those barriers.

Which brings us back to fucking--Bono's fucking, that is. Does a  
deeper understanding of the history, psychology, and neurobiology of  
swearing give us any basis for deciding among the prohibitions in the  
Clean Airwaves Act, the hairsplitting of the FCC, and the libertinism  
of a Lenny Bruce?

When it comes to policy and law, it seems to me that free speech is  
the bedrock of democracy and that it is not among the legitimate  
functions of government to punish people who use certain vocabulary  
items or allow others to use them. On the other hand, private media  
have the prerogative of enforcing a house style, driven by standards  
of taste and the demands of the market, that excludes words their  
audience doesn't enjoy hearing. In other words, if an entertainer  
says fucking brilliant, it's none of the government's business; but,  
if some people would rather not explain to their young children what  
a blow job is, there should be television channels that don't force  
them to.

What about decisions in the private sphere? Are there guidelines that  
can inform our personal and institutional judgments about when to  
discourage, tolerate, and even welcome profanity? Here are some  
thoughts.

Language has often been called a weapon, and people should be mindful  
about where to aim it and when to fire. The common denominator of  
taboo words is the act of forcing a disagreeable thought on someone,  
and it's worth considering how often one really wants one's audience  
to be reminded of excrement, urine, and exploitative sex. Even in its  
mildest form, intended only to keep the listener's attention, the  
lazy use of profanity can feel like a series of jabs in the ribs.  
They are annoying to the listener and a confession by the speaker  
that he can think of no other way to make his words worth attending  
to. It's all the more damning for writers, who have the luxury of  
choosing their words off-line from the half-million-word  
phantasmagoria of the English language.

Also calling for reflection is whether linguistic taboos are always a  
bad thing. Why are we offended--why should we be offended--when an  
outsider refers to an African American as a nigger, or a woman as a  
cunt, or a Jewish person as a fucking Jew? I suspect that the sense  
of offense comes from the nature of speech recognition and from what  
it means to understand the connotation of a word. If you're an  
English speaker, you can't hear the words nigger or cunt or fucking  
without calling to mind what they mean to an implicit community of  
speakers, including the emotions that cling to them. To hear nigger  
is to try on, however briefly, the thought that there is something  
contemptible about African Americans and thus to be complicit in a  
community that standardized that judgment into a word. Just hearing  
the words feels morally corrosive. None of this means that the words  
should be banned, only that their effects on listeners should be  
understood and anticipated.

Also deserving of reflection is why previous generations of speakers  
bequeathed us a language that treats certain topics with  
circumspection and restraint. The lexical libertines of the 1960s  
believed that taboos on sexual language were pointless and even  
harmful. They argued that removing the stigma from sexuality would  
eliminate shame and ignorance and thereby reduce venereal disease,  
illegitimate births, and other hazards of sex. But this turned out to  
be mistaken. Sexual language has become far more common since the  
early '60s, but so has illegitimacy, sexually transmitted disease,  
rape, and the fallout of sexual competition like anorexia in girls  
and swagger-culture in boys. Though no one can pin down cause and  
effect, the changes are of a piece with the weakening of the fear and  
awe that used to surround thoughts about sex and that charged sexual  
language with taboo.

Those are some of the reasons to think twice about giving carte  
blanche to swearing. But there is another reason. If an overuse of  
taboo words, whether by design or laziness, blunts their emotional  
edge, it will have deprived us of a linguistic instrument that we  
sometimes sorely need. And this brings me to the arguments on the pro- 
swearing side.

To begin with, it's a fact of life that people swear. The  
responsibility of writers is to give a "just and lively image of  
human nature," as poet John Dryden wrote, and that includes  
portraying a character's language realistically when their art calls  
for it. When Norman Mailer wrote his true-to-life novel about World  
War II, The Naked and the Dead, in 1948, his compromise with the  
sensibilities of the day was to have soldiers use the pseudo-epithet  
fug. (When Dorothy Parker met him, she said, "So you're the man who  
doesn't know how to spell fuck.") Sadly, this prissiness is not a  
thing of the past: Some public television stations today fear  
broadcasting Ken Burns' documentary on World War II because of the  
salty language in his interviews with veterans. The prohibition  
against swearing in broadcast media makes artists and historians into  
liars and subverts the responsibility of grown-ups to learn how life  
is lived in worlds distant from their own.

Even when their characters are not soldiers, writers must sometimes  
let them swear in order to render human passion compellingly. In the  
film adaptation of Isaac Bashevis Singer's Enemies: A Love Story, a  
sweet Polish peasant girl has hidden a Jewish man in a hayloft during  
the Nazi occupation and becomes his doting wife when the war is over.  
When she confronts him over an affair he has been having, he loses  
control and slaps her in the face. Fighting back tears of rage, she  
looks him in the eye and says slowly, "I saved your life. I took the  
last bite of food out of my mouth and gave it to you in the hayloft.  
I carried out your shit!" No other word could convey the depth of her  
fury at his ingratitude.

For language lovers, the joys of swearing are not confined to the  
works of famous writers. We should pause to applaud the poetic genius  
who gave us the soldiers' term for chipped beef on toast, shit on a  
shingle, and the male-to-male advisory for discretion in sexual  
matters, Keep your pecker in your pocket. Hats off, too, to the  
wordsmiths who thought up the indispensable pissing contest, crock of  
shit, pussy-whipped, and horse's ass. Among those in the historical  
record, Lyndon Johnson had a certain way with words when it came to  
summing up the people he distrusted, including a Kennedy aide ("He  
wouldn't know how to pour piss out of a boot if the instructions were  
printed on the heel"), Gerald Ford ("He can't fart and chew gum at  
the same time"), and J. Edgar Hoover ("I'd rather have him inside the  
tent pissing out than outside pissing in").

When used judiciously, swearing can be hilarious, poignant, and  
uncannily descriptive. More than any other form of language, it  
recruits our expressive faculties to the fullest: the combinatorial  
power of syntax; the evocativeness of metaphor; the pleasure of  
alliteration, meter, and rhyme; and the emotional charge of our  
attitudes, both thinkable and unthinkable. It engages the full  
expanse of the brain: left and right, high and low, ancient and  
modern. Shakespeare, no stranger to earthy language himself, had  
Caliban speak for the entire human race when he said, "You taught me  
language, and my profit on't is, I know how to curse."
Steven Pinker is Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard.  
His new book, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window Into Human  
Nature, was published by Viking in September.