Steven Pinker on swearing.
Jun. 29th, 2008 01:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rhythmaningI saw Steven Pinker recently, lecturing on language; it was tied into the publication of “The Stuff of Thought”, which was also the name of the talk. Pinker is a psychologist who has written about linguistics, the brain, and evolutionary psychology. It was his reputation that attracted me to the talk.
It was a busy lecture – I only got to go because Edinburgh University decided to move the talk to a large hall – filled largely with students and academics, at a guess.
His main thesis was that language – the words we use and how we use them – gives us an insight into the way our brains work, and into human nature.
He was interesting and entertaining, but I am not sure if he really convinced me. This is partly down to his presentation – he was reading off slides a lot of the time – and it seemed a little like he wasn’t really bothered: it felt like a talk he had given many times before, he knew his stuff backward, and perhaps was no longer interested by it. He also came across as a little clever-clever, as if he was ignoring the assumptions he was making and hoped to steam-roller the audience into agreeing with him.
He started off by exploring some of the paradoxes and contradictions about language (he spoke only about English, although he said his points were equally valid to other languages; I can’t say whether he’s right about that), such as the way descriptive words represent incorrect situations (“underwater” is in the water, as “underground” is in the ground – not under it; “after dark” is actually after light, and so on).
He reckoned our language describes an intuitive physical understanding of the world, particularly how we perceive time: how there is a short-term present (measurable in terms of seconds only) – what we are experiencing; the past – factual, knowable, and unchangeable1 ; and the future – unknowable, hypothetical – and changeable.
He then talked about how language displays emotions – not the words we use to talk about emotions, but how the words we use convey emotions without referring to them.
He used the way we swear to explore this – and this represented most of the lecture. (As the academic who introduced Pinker said when he was wrapping up proceedings, such language had never been heard on the podium on the McEwan Hall before – although since the hall is also used for examinations, I’ll bet a lot of worse swearing has at least been imagined by generations of students. And as he also pointed out, the endowment to build the hall was funded by a brewing empire which thrived in the deeply profane world of the Scottish pub.)
He told some great stories – how Bono’s swearing on NBC led to the tabling of the Clean Airwaves Act in the USA. What Bono said was, apparently “really fucking brilliant” in response to a question about how he was feeling. The Act, in typical US fashion (using rules rather than principles), outlines words which are prohibited, and their
As Pinker pointed out to everyone’s amusement, the prohibited list of grammatical forms covers just about ever use conceivable – except their use as adverbs, which is how Bono used “fucking”.
Why are swear words so powerful that the US Congress feels the need to outlaw them? Why do we have taboos around language?
It was answering these questions that Pinker failed to take me with him: the explanations didn’t really work for me.
Pinker said that neuroscience – I think he mentioned MRI scans – had shown that swear words were processed in those parts of the brain that deal with negative emotions, and this is why the have the power to shock: they create negative emotions, which we use in language in different ways.
Pinker split swear words – taboo exclamations – into different categories: those that deal with the supernatural (God, hell, damn, Christ); those that deal with our bodies and their effluvia (shit, piss, arsehole; Pinker reckoned there were 34 euphemisms for faeces); those dealing with disease, death and infirmity (hard to think of many here – cripple, perhaps, spastic – rarely used in these more correct times); those regarding sex and sexuality (too many to list!); and lastly those about others, the outgroups and disfavoured (including nigger, which seems to have the deepest potency now).
One reason I think I was unconvinced is because of the crossover between a lot of these groups, particularly between sexuality and the outgroup.
There are several ways in which the negative emotions evoked by swearing are used in language: by forcing us to face the unpleasant – what Pinker called “dyseuphemism”; by being abusive – calling someone names to intimidate them; to grab the listeners’ attention (Pinker described this as “idiomatic”); to add emphasis – like Bono’s “fucking brilliant”; and lastly, as catharsis – as an involuntary response to pain, or in a conversation to release the tension.
Pinker reckoned that swearing was learnt: the way people swear in different languages is different: you can’t transliterate swearing, it has to be learnt for each language.
He then deviated from swearing to examine the way language acts as a window on social relations, using euphemisms as his example. He took the example of bribery, using game theory matrices to show why euphemisms have a value: in the event that the bribe isn’t accepted, euphemism allows plausible deniability, reducing the cost of rejection (such as jail). He had some interesting facts – in an experiment, all restaurant maitre d’hotel were bribeable; and all those who tried to bribe them used euphemism, to save face. Thus euphemism had become a social convention, despite mutual common knowledge of the act: euphemism or innuendo creates individual knowledge, allowing ambiguity.
It was an interesting talk, but I am not sure I was convinced. Thinking about it now, I feel more convinced than I was on leaving the lecture hall. I doubt I will read his books, though: there was something in the way he presented that jarred with me, and I doubt I would enjoy reading his work.
1 Clearly Pinker doesn’t watch Dr Who.
It was a busy lecture – I only got to go because Edinburgh University decided to move the talk to a large hall – filled largely with students and academics, at a guess.
His main thesis was that language – the words we use and how we use them – gives us an insight into the way our brains work, and into human nature.
He was interesting and entertaining, but I am not sure if he really convinced me. This is partly down to his presentation – he was reading off slides a lot of the time – and it seemed a little like he wasn’t really bothered: it felt like a talk he had given many times before, he knew his stuff backward, and perhaps was no longer interested by it. He also came across as a little clever-clever, as if he was ignoring the assumptions he was making and hoped to steam-roller the audience into agreeing with him.
He started off by exploring some of the paradoxes and contradictions about language (he spoke only about English, although he said his points were equally valid to other languages; I can’t say whether he’s right about that), such as the way descriptive words represent incorrect situations (“underwater” is in the water, as “underground” is in the ground – not under it; “after dark” is actually after light, and so on).
He reckoned our language describes an intuitive physical understanding of the world, particularly how we perceive time: how there is a short-term present (measurable in terms of seconds only) – what we are experiencing; the past – factual, knowable, and unchangeable
He then talked about how language displays emotions – not the words we use to talk about emotions, but how the words we use convey emotions without referring to them.
He used the way we swear to explore this – and this represented most of the lecture. (As the academic who introduced Pinker said when he was wrapping up proceedings, such language had never been heard on the podium on the McEwan Hall before – although since the hall is also used for examinations, I’ll bet a lot of worse swearing has at least been imagined by generations of students. And as he also pointed out, the endowment to build the hall was funded by a brewing empire which thrived in the deeply profane world of the Scottish pub.)
He told some great stories – how Bono’s swearing on NBC led to the tabling of the Clean Airwaves Act in the USA. What Bono said was, apparently “really fucking brilliant” in response to a question about how he was feeling. The Act, in typical US fashion (using rules rather than principles), outlines words which are prohibited, and their
...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).
As Pinker pointed out to everyone’s amusement, the prohibited list of grammatical forms covers just about ever use conceivable – except their use as adverbs, which is how Bono used “fucking”.
Why are swear words so powerful that the US Congress feels the need to outlaw them? Why do we have taboos around language?
It was answering these questions that Pinker failed to take me with him: the explanations didn’t really work for me.
Pinker said that neuroscience – I think he mentioned MRI scans – had shown that swear words were processed in those parts of the brain that deal with negative emotions, and this is why the have the power to shock: they create negative emotions, which we use in language in different ways.
Pinker split swear words – taboo exclamations – into different categories: those that deal with the supernatural (God, hell, damn, Christ); those that deal with our bodies and their effluvia (shit, piss, arsehole; Pinker reckoned there were 34 euphemisms for faeces); those dealing with disease, death and infirmity (hard to think of many here – cripple, perhaps, spastic – rarely used in these more correct times); those regarding sex and sexuality (too many to list!); and lastly those about others, the outgroups and disfavoured (including nigger, which seems to have the deepest potency now).
One reason I think I was unconvinced is because of the crossover between a lot of these groups, particularly between sexuality and the outgroup.
There are several ways in which the negative emotions evoked by swearing are used in language: by forcing us to face the unpleasant – what Pinker called “dyseuphemism”; by being abusive – calling someone names to intimidate them; to grab the listeners’ attention (Pinker described this as “idiomatic”); to add emphasis – like Bono’s “fucking brilliant”; and lastly, as catharsis – as an involuntary response to pain, or in a conversation to release the tension.
Pinker reckoned that swearing was learnt: the way people swear in different languages is different: you can’t transliterate swearing, it has to be learnt for each language.
He then deviated from swearing to examine the way language acts as a window on social relations, using euphemisms as his example. He took the example of bribery, using game theory matrices to show why euphemisms have a value: in the event that the bribe isn’t accepted, euphemism allows plausible deniability, reducing the cost of rejection (such as jail). He had some interesting facts – in an experiment, all restaurant maitre d’hotel were bribeable; and all those who tried to bribe them used euphemism, to save face. Thus euphemism had become a social convention, despite mutual common knowledge of the act: euphemism or innuendo creates individual knowledge, allowing ambiguity.
It was an interesting talk, but I am not sure I was convinced. Thinking about it now, I feel more convinced than I was on leaving the lecture hall. I doubt I will read his books, though: there was something in the way he presented that jarred with me, and I doubt I would enjoy reading his work.
1 Clearly Pinker doesn’t watch Dr Who.