So I'm currently reading Steven Pinker's The Stuff of Thought (which is fan-fucking-tastic and I highly recommend it to all y'all), and he's got a chapter on the linguistics of swearing. There's a lot of fascinating stuff about the etymology and neurophysiology and pragmatics of swearing, which I may talk about when I feel like writing a more boring entry that fewer of you care about at all. For now, I'd just like to quote a bit that I think is quite good about the actual costs and benefits of swearing. I particularly like his bringing up that words can truly hurt because we can't help understanding them, and so they can force listeners to think about certain things whether they want to or not (the bolded part is my own added emphasis, since I think it does a good job of explaining, on an emotional level rather than a political one, why even good liberals find certain exercises of speech objectionable):
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 lexicon. A journalist who, in writing about the cruelty of an East German Stasi guard, can do no better than to call him a fucker needs to get a good thesaurus.
Also calling for reflection is whether a linguistic taboo is alwyas 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? The terms have no real meaning, so the offense cannot come from their perpetuating a stereotype or endorsing oppression. Nor is it a reaction to learning that the speaker harbors an abominable attitude. These days someone who displayed the same attitude by simply saying "I hate African Americans, women, and Jews" would be stigmatizing himself far more than his targets, and would quickly be written of as a loathsome kook. I suspect that our 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 by putting it into a word. The same thing happens with other taboo imprecations: just hearing the words feels morally corrosive, so we consider them not just unpleasant to think but not to be thought at all--that is, taboo. None of this means that the words should be banned, only that their effects on listeners should be understood and anticipated.
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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," 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, he knew it would be a betrayal of his depiction of the soldiers to have them speak without swearing. His compromise with the sensibilities of the day was to have them 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 are afraid to broadcast Martin Scorsese's documentary on the history of the blues and Ken Burns's documentary on World War II because of the salty language in their interviews with musicians and soldiers. 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.
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When used judiciously, swearing can be hilarious, poignant, and uncannily descriptive. More than any other form of language, it recruits our 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 imprecations 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."
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