Something You Should Know - Why Life is Better Than You Think & Why We Swear

Episode Date: March 19, 2018

Everyone has a blood type right? Well, not really. Some people have no blood type – not to be confused with people who have a universal blood type. Do you know if you are type A, B, AB or 0? Why do you have a blood type anyway? That’s the first topic of conversation today. (http://mosaicscience.com/story/why-do-we-have-blood-types) To hear tell, the world is going to hell. Watch the news and it seems as if we are on the road to self-destruction. But we are not. In fact we are living in an age of enlightenment according to Harvard Professor and bestselling author Stephen Pinker. In his new book, Enlightenment Now the Case for Reason, Science Humanism and Progress, (http://amzn.to/2FKuhNb), Stephen reveals that while many think the world is in decline, the opposite is true and he joins me to discuss. What he says will lift your spirits. (And remember, to get Stephen Pinker's audiobook version of Enlightenment Now for free from Audible, just go to www.audible.com/something and sign up for a 30-day trial and your first book is free!) If you use a handheld hair dryer, you may want to hold it a little differently than you probably do. That’s because hair dryers emit an electromagnetic force that may not be so good for your health. The same is true for other household appliances. I’ll explain which ones and what you should do differently. (https://www.prevention.com/health/healthy-living/electromagnetic-fields-and-your-health) Do you swear? Chances are you do. Most people do. But why? Melissa Mohr, author of the book Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing (http://amzn.to/2Dty0fM) explain why every language has swearing and what purpose it serves.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today on Something You Should Know, do you know your blood type? Do you know why you have a blood type? The answer may surprise you. Then, it may seem like the world is going to hell in a handbasket, but we're actually in an age of enlightenment. Diseases are being eradicated, smallpox no longer exists, polio is almost gone. Kids are going to school worldwide. 90% of people under the age of 25 can read or write. It's just unprecedented in human history. There are fewer wars. Also, if you use a hair dryer, you may want to adjust how you hold it for health reasons and swearing. Why do we swear? And why do younger women swear more than ever? As you go up in age, the proportion of men versus women is quite high. And As you go up in age, the proportion of men versus women is quite high. And as you go down

in age, women under 25 swear just as much as men. And don't even realize that there once was this idea that women didn't swear. All this today on Something You Should Know. As a listener to Something You Should Know,

I can only assume that you are someone who likes to learn about new and interesting things and bring more knowledge to work for you in your everyday life. I mean, that's kind of what Something You Should Know was all about. And so I want to invite you to listen to another podcast called TED Talks Daily. Now, you know about TED Talks, right? Many of the guests on Something You Should Know have done TED Talks Daily. Now, you know about TED Talks, right? Many of the guests on Something You Should Know have done TED Talks. Well, you see, TED Talks Daily is a podcast that brings you a new TED Talk every weekday

in less than 15 minutes. Join host Elise Hu. She goes beyond the headlines so you can hear about the big ideas shaping our future. Learn about things like sustainable fashion, embracing your entrepreneurial spirit, the future of robotics, and so much more. Like I said, if you like this podcast, Something You Should Know,

I'm pretty sure you're going to like TED Talks Daily. And you get TED Talks, wherever you get your podcasts. Something you should know. Fascinating intel. The world's top experts. And practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. Hi, welcome to what I think is a really interesting show today. In a few moments, we'll be talking with one of my favorite people to talk to, Steven Pinker, who is a researcher and professor at Harvard. And he'll be talking about how, despite all the doom and gloom you hear in the news today, we are living in an age of enlightenment, where some incredibly wonderful things are going on,

and he's going to tell you what. And we'll also be talking about swearing, where swear words come from, why people swear. And throughout the entire discussion, we will not utter a single swear word. Our first topic today is blood types. Do you know your blood type? It's either A, B, AB, or O. Blood types were discovered in 1900, and the person who discovered them won a Nobel Prize for it in 1930. Yet here we are over 100 years later,

and science still does not know why we have different blood types. However, knowing it allows for life-saving blood transfusions. Before the discovery, doctors had tried blood transfusions, but unless they just happened to match up a donor with a receiver by chance, or if the donor had universal type O, the patient would die. That's because your immune system knows your blood type and recognizes another blood type as an invader. In 1952, some people were discovered to have no blood type at all. It's called the Bombay phenotype, because Bombay was where the first people with this were discovered.

It is very rare, and people with no blood type must get transfusions from other people with no blood type. Even the universal type O can kill them. And that is something you should know. If you think there are a lot of problems and dangers and horrors in the world, you're right, of course, there are. There always are. But does that mean the world is falling apart as some people seem to think it is? If you watch cable news, you would think that things are getting worse and worse

and that we just go from one horrible thing to the next and we're on the road to self-destruction. And it creates this cynicism, this sense of dread. I know I've felt it. But then along comes Steven Pinker, one of my favorite writers. Steven is an experimental cognitive scientist. He's a professor of psychology at Harvard, and he has written some great books. His brand new one, which has already

zipped up the bestseller list, is called Enlightenment Now! The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress. And he brings a very different message. Hi, Stephen. So you have good news, which is always welcome. Where did this come from? This came from two sources. One was discovering, to my surprise, that many aspects of human well-being have been increasing. That is, we are living longer, healthier, diseases are being conquered, more children are going to school worldwide, higher levels of education, work weeks are shorter, we spend less time on housework. And coming across all of these graphs on improving life, not just in the West, but worldwide, made me realize that there's a story that most people don't appreciate

because the news covers what goes wrong. And they should be put between two covers and given an explanation. It was a similar process to the one that led me to write The Better Angels of Our Nature a few years ago. The subtitle of that book was Why Violence Has Declined, an idea that just shocks people because you would guess from the news that violence is increasing. But I wrote that one when I saw graph after graph showing declines in war and crime and

violence against women and violence against children. And I realized that a story needed to be told there and an explanation. And I wrote this book when I saw that the news was even better than I had thought. Also, the urge to write the book intensified with the events of the last couple of years, with the election of Donald Trump and the rise of authoritarian populism. A lot of people seemed very sure about what they didn't believe in, but it wasn't as clear what the alternative is to Trumpism and populism and religious fundamentalism and a reactionary search for a golden age. If you don't believe in those things, what do you believe in?

And I put together these two ideas with the thesis that the values of the Enlightenment of the beginning of the 18th century, namely that we can use reason and science to improve human well-being, that's the unifying idea that many people believe in, even though they can't put their finger on it, and it was the driver of all the progress that I documented in those graphs. So when you say Enlightenment, do you define that as what? The enlightenment refers to the movement, mainly in the beginning of the second half of the 18th century, to use reason as opposed to authority and tradition and dogma to understand the world

and to attempt to improve it, to improve people's lives. And we've been doing that pretty well. Yeah, with obvious setbacks. Progress isn't magic, so it's not that everything gets better for everyone everywhere all the time. That would be impossible. But, yeah, if you look at the, if you try to measure human well-being, how many of us get sick, how many of us get sick, how many of us get murdered, how many of us die in war, how long do we live, how educated are we,

how much free time do we have, then progress has occurred. It seems so counterintuitive, because when you hear people on television or just at a cocktail party talking about the world, no one talks about how great things are getting, and yet you have a whole list of things that are improving like crazy. Well, people are living longer. Extreme poverty has been in steep decline worldwide. So about 10% of the world's population meets the definition of extreme poverty.

Not so long ago, a few decades ago, it was 30%, so 40% even three decades ago. Diseases are being eradicated. Smallpox no longer exists. Polio is almost gone. Kids are going to school worldwide. 90% of people under the age of 25 can read or write. It's just unprecedented in human history. There are fewer wars. It's hard to appreciate because there is an awful one going on now, the Syrian civil war. But wars between countries where country A declares war on country

B and they line up their tanks and they bomb each other's cities and their naval ships have at each other. Those are the wars that kill the most people. They've been in steep decline. There are hardly any of them. And overall, the rate of death in war has gone down. The rate of death in crime, the American homicide rate has fallen by more than half just since the 1990s. So those are a few examples. Do you think that the decline in war, and really most of the things you just mentioned, are at least partly the result of just a different sensibility? That when you think about war, you think about, you know, two countries going at each other, killing each other's people, killing each other's people,

that maybe that seemed like a good idea at some point, but today it just seems so barbaric. I think there is something to that, even though it does sound a little vague and fuzzy, but I think there really is something to it. Partly it's because we do value human life more. The idea of sending tens of thousands of soldiers out of trenches so they could get machine gunned down for no reason, which is what happened during World War I. Generals are a little more squeamish about doing that. Human life is worth more, and the idea of kind of sending your 18-year-old men to get slaughtered for national glory

or to fight over a plot of land is not as appealing as it used to be. But the fact that it used to be, like, it did used to be, like, that's what we did, that was a good thing to do. It does, because I'll watch, you know, old movies and newsreels and documentaries about World War I or World War II, and I sometimes sit there and go, this is the stupidest thing in the world. I totally, I completely agree. And that is part of enlightenment. That is, you scrutinize ways of doing things that your fathers did and your grandfathers,

your great-grandfathers. You say, hey, do we have to keep doing it this way? Maybe we should give it a fresh think. And it was that kind of thinking that abolished slavery, which is as old as civilization. I mean, the Greeks, the Romans, every ancient civilization had slaves. But it was only starting in the 18th century that people thought, hey, these are human beings too. And just because it's a great labor-saving device for us, but what about their lives?

Or another example is profligate capital punishment, executing people for poaching or shoplifting, counterfeiting, and doing it in grisly torture executions where you disembowel someone in front of a cheering audience. Starting in the Enlightenment, they had second thoughts about whether that was such a great idea. That's why we have our prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment in the American Bill of Rights, which is, and the American Declaration of Independence and Constitution Bill of Rights, those are like the quintessential gifts of the Enlightenment. The framers were Enlightenment thinkers, and they had a lot of correspondence with their counterparts in Europe. And it was that kind of thinking that led to institutions like democracy and bills of rights and the first hints of organizations of international cooperation.

And we owed a lot of these ideas to the thinkers of the late 18th century. Is enlightenment just a natural progression of something? Is it impossible to stop? Does it always happen? I don't think so. It's actually, you know, it took thousands of years for it to really flourish in the late 18th century. And a number of things happened to light the spark. Partly it was the scientific revolution of the 17th century that just showed that a lot of intuitions that people had had for a long time were flat wrong when you did the science, such as that the sun went around the earth. It was partly the wars of religion. The Catholics and Protestants were slaughtering each other over

points of theological doctrine, and people thought, geez, maybe this isn't really about anything. Maybe we should just get along and have people live good lives on Earth. And partly it was the age of exploration. All the new continents were being discovered, and people realized, my God, there's a whole world out there that we didn't even dream of. So all of these things, I think, pushed the Enlightenment. And pushing back are features of human nature that the Enlightenment had to overcome, like our tribalism, the idea that it isn't all of humanity that should be flourishing,

but just our tribe in combat with other tribes. Or authoritarianism, the idea that we need a strong leader, a king, and that the king or leader or dictator kind of embodies the goodness and virtue of the people, so we don't need laws to constrain him because he just embodies what's best in us, as opposed to democracy. And these things are continuing to push back. There's always been a tug-of-war between the Enlightenment and various counter-Enlightenment ideologies. My guest is best-selling author Steven Pinker.

His book is Enlightenment Now! The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress. And I have a really great idea. I'd like you to get the audiobook version of Stephen's book, Enlightenment Now, for free. This is like a $38 audiobook, and it's yours free. You see, Audible is offering you, a listener to Something You Should Know, a free audiobook with a 30-day trial membership.

Just go to audible.com slash something and browse their unmatched selection of audio programs and audiobooks, then download a title for free and start listening. It's that easy. Go to audible.com slash something or text the word something to 500-500 to get started today. Audible members get a credit every month, good for any audiobook in the store,

regardless of price, and unused credits roll over to the next month. Start a 30-day trial, and your first audiobook is free. Go to audible.com slash something or text the word something to 500-500. If you're enjoying this discussion with Steven Pinker, I know you're going to like his book.

It's a bestseller, and it can be yours for free right now. Go to audible.com slash something or text the word something to 500-500 and get started today. Since I host a podcast, it's pretty common for me to be asked to recommend a podcast. And I tell people, if you like something you should know, you're going to like The Jordan Harbinger Show.

Every episode is a conversation with a fascinating guest. Of course, a lot of podcasts are conversations with guests, but Jordan does it better than most. Recently, he had a fascinating conversation with a British woman who was recruited and radicalized by ISIS and went to prison for three years. She now works to raise awareness on this issue. It's a great conversation. And he spoke with Dr. Sarah Hill about how taking birth control not only prevents pregnancy, it can influence a woman's partner preferences, career choices, and overall behavior due to the hormonal changes it causes. Apple named The Jordan Harbinger Show one of the best podcasts a few years back, and in a nutshell, the show is aimed at making you a better, more informed, critical thinker.

Check out The Jordan Harbinger Show. There's so much for you in this podcast. The Jordan Harbinger Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. People who listen to Something You Should Know are curious about the world, looking to hear new ideas and perspectives. So I want to tell you about a podcast that is full of new ideas and perspectives, and one I've started listening to called Intelligence Squared. It's the podcast where great minds meet. Listen in for some great talks

on science, tech, politics, creativity, wellness, and a lot more. A couple of recent examples, Mustafa Suleiman, the CEO of Microsoft AI, discussing the future of technology. That's pretty cool. And writer, podcaster, and filmmaker John Ronson, discussing the rise of conspiracies and culture wars.

Intelligence Squared is the kind of podcast that gets you thinking a little more openly about the important conversations going on today. Being curious, you're probably just the type of person Intelligence Squared is meant for. Check out Intelligence Squared wherever you get your podcasts. So, Stephen, isn't it interesting that we have this enlightenment, and you've mentioned so many things that have happened,

that, you know, fewer people are dying, we're living longer, all these things, and yet, it's not the perception of many people, because it's not that we celebrate it much, and in fact, what we do see when we turn on the television is how horrible everything is. You would think that as we become more enlightened, we would, like all, like, pat each other on the back and say that, instead of saying, yeah, but look how horrible everything is. That's right. We pocket our good fortune.

We kind of take it for granted. I mean, how many of us ever think the thought, wow, I can turn on a tap and clean water comes out and I can drink it and I won't get cholera? These are amazing accomplishments. And in poor parts of the world, they can't take them for granted. They get poisoned by their water and they drink their own waste. But we have been so fortunate that these have been around and they work so well that we don't think, hey, these are great human accomplishments. And instead, I think we do a lot of moaning about what's going wrong. And of course, things will always go wrong and it's good to be aware of them.

But we don't realize what the accomplishments that are responsible for our so many good things in life. Even something like little pleasures of everyday life. When I was a student, if I wanted to see a great classic film, The Seventh Seal or Casablanca or Hitchcock film, you'd have to wait years for it to show up in a local repertory theater or maybe on late-night TV in a little black- black and white set. Now you can stream it on demand. So even access to culture. And we all complain about how horrible social media are and the internet and what it's doing to us, the filter bubbles and the bullying. But we never stop,

pause to think about why we adopt these technologies in the first place. Namely, there are all these ways in which they do make our lives better. So what's the takeaway here? What's the big so what? I mean, it's nice to take a moment to realize that things aren't as bad as maybe we are led to believe, but so what? The takeaway is that we should realize what we're in danger of losing, namely the institutions of democracy and regulated markets and organizations of international cooperation that have prevented World War III from happening

and that have given us the benefits we take for granted. But also to keep in mind that the problems that are unsolved, and that there are plenty of them, are solvable if we remember that by applying reason and science to our problems, we can gradually succeed. Our ancestors did before us. That's why we live the good life, or at least why the good things that we enjoy came into being. And although there are plenty of problems, and some of them are really severe, the mindset should be, these are our problems that we can solve. Even if the solutions themselves bring new problems, which then have to be solved in their turn, but we have to take a constructive problem-solving mindset to the dilemmas that we continue to face.

As you look at this enlightenment from the late 1800s going forward, is there any reason to think it will stop, or does it just keep going? Do we become more and more enlightened and do more and more great things? Well, I think some of the positive developments could keep going. There are amazing breakthroughs possible in the pipeline in biomedical research, therapies for cancer, treatments for Alzheimer's, ways of fixing horrible inherited diseases. There may be fantastic breakthroughs in the energy pipeline.

Just the day before yesterday, there was a breakthrough announced at MIT in nuclear fusion, which had always seemed a dream. You know, 30 years away, and it always will be. But it may be just 15 years away. But is it the concern, the complaining, the worry, this administration or that group or whatever, that that's what fuels some of this? Because as you look back through this Age of Enlightenment from the late 1800s, I imagine that all during that, people were complaining then and up until now about all the things that are wrong. And does that complaining and worry about all the things that are wrong fuel the Enlightenment? Well, yes, to some extent it does.

There is a danger of complacency, and if we're not aware of a problem, then we'll never try to solve it. I just argue in Enlightenment now that it can go way too far in the direction of fatalism and doom-mongering and radicalism. That if too much pessimism, everything's a crisis, everything's an existential threat, everything is the end of this and the dawn of a post-something era, that people can say, oh, these are just intractable, we'll never solve them. Let's just have a good time day to day. So where does that come from? That's the optimal amount of pessimism. Where does this come from?

I mean, you could argue that we're already there, that a lot of people believe that it's too late. We've gone to hell in a handbasket, that our president is an idiot. And, you know, you never used to say things like, our president is an idiot because he was the president. And people of opposing political parties could still be respectful of each other. And it seems like a lot of that is just gone and not coming back. Yes, there is.

And you mentioned President Trump. He, above all, wrote to office on a narrative of gloom and decline and decadence. He wrote that pessimism into office. And part of the problem was that the people on the liberals, the centrists, didn't have a counter-narrative. They weren't willing to say, actually, things aren't that bad. People are moving back into cities. Unemployment is pretty low.

The crime rate is low. There was so much pessimism on both sides that Trump had the field to himself. Certainly, the general pessimism about society is not new. In the 19th century, there were plenty of philosophers and artists who were saying the country is doomed, it's decadent, any day now it'll collapse. And it became very popular among a lot of intellectuals and professors and artists and writers. There was a moment in the post-war years, after World War II, where there was a great deal of American optimism.

We were going to fight poverty. The United Nations was going to bring world peace. And then a lot of cynicism came in in the 60s with the war in Vietnam, the discovery of so much poverty and racism in the United States. And it turned into the pendulum swung so that most intellectuals and academics started to kind of hate the United States, to say that, and the West more generally. Well, in this atmosphere of cynicism and doom and gloom, where everybody thinks that, you know, we're all going to hell in a handbasket, and, you know, there's no hope for humanity,

that you've come out and proven that that's just not the way it is. That may be where the focus is, but it's not the reality, that we are in the way it is. That may be where the focus is, but it's not the reality that we are in this Enlightenment period. There are so many great things going on, and it's great that you especially have come out and said this, because you have such a big following, and it's such a great message to hear. It is amazing when you step back and you not only look at graphs and data, which I've tried to do, but even if you think back not so long ago about our recent history,

in the 1970s, which a lot of people are nostalgic for, we had double-digit inflation, rates of inflation of 15%, 18%, and double-digit unemployment. The so-called misery index is what you get when you add them together. We had to line up around the block to get gasoline. People worried whether there was going to be enough heating oil to last the winter. So part of the problem is just not to be nostalgic for the good old days. As Franklin Pierce Adams said, the best explanation for the good old days is a bad memory.

Well, that's human nature is to remember the good and forget the bad. That's literally true, and that there are studies of memory that show that as events fade into more distant memory, a lot of their negative emotional colorings tend to fade. So we forget how awful it was. Well, it's a good message you bring, and I appreciate you spending some time talking about it. Stephen Pinker has been my guest, and his new book is called Enlightenment Now! The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress.

There's a link to his book in the show notes. Thanks, Steven. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me on. Do you love Disney? Then you are going to love our hit podcast, Disney Countdown. I'm Megan, the Magical Millennial. And I'm the Dapper Danielle. On every episode of our fun and family-friendly show, we count down our top 10 lists of all things Disney.

There is nothing we don't cover. We are famous for rabbit holes, Disney-themed games, and fun facts you didn't know you needed, but you definitely need in your life. So if you're looking for a healthy dose of Disney magic, check out Disney Countdown wherever you get your podcasts. limits with hilariously honest advice. Then we have a but am I wrong, which is for the listeners that didn't take our advice. Plus, we share our hot takes on current events. Then tune in to see you next Tuesday for our listener poll results from but am I wrong. And finally, wrap up your week with fisting Friday where we catch up and talk all things pop culture. Listen to don't blame me but am I wrong on Apple podcast Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

New episodes every Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. You learn from a very early age that it is not polite. In fact, it is rude to swear. It's tactless. It's what sailors do. But not you, not well-mannered people. Well-mannered people don't swear. It's tactless. It's what sailors do. But not you, not well-mannered people. Well-mannered people don't swear. Except they do. Most people do swear.

But why? Why do we have this handful of words that is set aside that we can pull out when we need to, to be shocking and to make a point? Because these words have this special, naughty power. Well, here to discuss this is Melissa Moore. She's author of a book called Holy Sh... You get the idea. A Brief History of Swearing. And the reason I didn't say the word, and by the way, we will not be swearing as we discuss swearing throughout this, in case you have sensitive ears,

because we don't want to have to put that little red E next to the podcast in iTunes, which you have to do if you use explicit language. Anyway, so hi, Melissa. What are the statistics about who swears? How many people swear? Well, it's interesting because the statistics are a bit hard to come by because people don't like to admit how much they swear to people conducting surveys. But certain surveys have found that 90% of people swear every day. So that's about 10% of people who don't swear every day.

And then it's not clear how many of those people never swear. Well, that surprises me, actually. I would have guessed 90% of people swear sometimes, but that 90% of people swear every day? That is what this particular study that I'm thinking of has found, yes. And the percentage of swear words in the average person's conversation, well, ranges from zero to about 3%, the average being 0.7% of words in a conversation being swear words. And 0.7% doesn't sound like very much, but that's actually sort of the same number of first-person plural pronouns. So words like we, us, ours. And so if you think about it in those terms,

that is kind of a lot. It is a lot. So what makes a swear word so naughty? How does that come about? A swear word is a word that has a kind of power to shock and offend that's in excess of its literal meaning. And it comes from the way swear words access taboos, you know, so things that we find sort of horrifying, but also things we find sacred. And, you know, so that it's, they've been, are now and have been in the past, you know, about religion, about sex, about, you know, racism. It's all, it's the kind of really big, important cultural sort of themes. They access those in ways that other words can't, and that's where they get their power from.

But do we know, like, the F word? Where did it come from? And why is it so, like, it's like at the top of the list of things, there is a hierarchy of swear words that some are, you know, acceptable or at least less objectionable. But, you know, pick one. And, you know, where did it come from? Well, the F word is interesting because it's an extremely old word. Like we have records of it in people's names, actually, from the 13th century. But for about 300 years, it wasn't that bad, given that it was appearing in people's names.

And it's only about the sort of 16th century where people start to get a concept of sex being more of a private thing, which has to do with the way people's houses were constructed. People just didn't have the same privacy that we have today. And so sex was something that was not done openly, but it just wasn't as big a deal. And as we get changing houses, changing exceptions of privacy, the F word becomes much more obscene until you get to the Victorian era, where that's the kind of height of the F word's power, and it disappears completely from public discourse. I've heard that swearing does have some therapeutic effect, like if you hit your thumb with a hammer and swear, that that does something for the pain.

Yes, yes, that's true. That's a very interesting study that, yes, you can stick your hand in ice water longer if you're swearing than if you're not swearing. But then people have also found that have done further studies that show that if you're a habitual swearer, like you swear, you're one of those three percenters, it doesn't work for you. You can't be overusing them. They still have to have that power for you. I know people who swear, and swear a lot, and probably think that they can't control it, that it's just part of their personality, that's who they are, they like to swear. But in cases where they swear, you know, if their priest or their grandmother was standing there, they could control themselves, They could stop themselves.

Yes, and that's very interesting in terms of how we use swear words. You know, swear words are stored and processed differently from other language in the brain. They're more closely connected to the limbic system. But, of course, they are also under our conscious control. And so when you do hit your finger with a hammer, you might want to say one thing, but if your grandma's there, you're going to say something else, probably. And so there's this interesting kind of connection between almost automatic language,

but also this control. It does seem that gender plays a role in swearing, that somehow it's more acceptable for men to swear and that you shouldn't swear, you know, in front of a lady. And it's kind of sexist in a way. That's a really interesting point, because, yeah, for me, I'm 44. And so for people of my generation, I think that is true. And you do get people, of course, done done studies about this too, and sort of looking at which genders swear. And as you go up in age, the proportion of men versus women is quite high.

And as you go down in age, sort of women under 25 swear just as much as men, and kind of don't even realize that there once was this idea that women didn't swear. So it seems extremely generational to me. Doesn't swearing in and of itself send a message? I mean, haven't we, at least until recently, thought of people who swear as, you know, lower class, lower socioeconomic, lower education, that, you know, proper, well-educated people don't swear? Well, that's interesting, too, because it is extremely context-dependent. Like, there are some studies that show that if you're giving sort of testimony

or you're a politician and you swear, people find what you're saying more believable because there's this association, which is, for the most part, true, that swear words kind of really come from the heart, and that if you're swearing, you're expressing your true emotions about something you feel really strongly about. So it can sort of make testimony more believable. But yeah, on the other hand, there are also studies that say if you're in a work meeting and you start swearing, people will think worse of you because you don't understand the context. And, you know, why are you doing that? That's not appropriate.

So, yeah, it can be, yeah, it goes either way, I think. When I think of swear words, I think of them as falling into the category of slang. But unlike a lot of slang, they don't change. I mean, the swear words today are the swear words from when my parents were younger and when their parents were younger. I mean, the swear words pretty much are etched in stone. No, and in fact, some of the swear words, you know, more mild ones, you know, religious ones, talking about God and things, you know, those were swear words thousands of years ago, you know, more mild ones, you know, religious ones, talking about God and things, you know, those were swear words thousands of years ago, you know. And that's, I think, because swear words

access and get their power from these taboos that are still the same and that, you know, people have been thinking about and really invested in religion for forever. And, you know, also sex has been a big issue. So these, since these sort of subjects don't change, the words themselves tend to change very slowly. The swear words that relate to God and religion, those seem to have lost some of their power in the sense that they're not really considered swear words anymore. I mean, hell and damn, you know, they're said on television, kids say them, and there isn't the, oh my God, you can't say that, as there was maybe, I don't know, 50 years ago. Yeah, they really have declined in power, I think, over the past, yeah, sort of 40 or 50 years. And yeah, they're quite common. I think, and depending, of course, on how religious you are, you know, some people

say that that's more offensive than the F word in terms of what's really important. But yeah, for the most part, people think it's very mild. And I think like OMG kind of thing, I think the study was something like that's 24% of all women swearing, that women say that, you know, just a ton. Do other languages have similar swear words? Are there any languages that there are no swear words? That's a very interesting question because people used to think that Japanese didn't have swear words and that Akan didn't have swear words. Akan's spoken in Ghana. But they do.

They just tend not to use, and they have similar ones about sex and bodily functions, but they tend not to use it as much because in Japanese, for example, if you want to insult someone, there are so many different ways to insult people. Like there are about, I can't remember exactly, 10 or 11 different ways to say you. And so if you use the wrong form of you, you can give someone a pretty deadly insult without resorting to, you know, the Japanese equivalent of the F word. So if you look, I think pretty much every language in the world, at least all the ones we know of so far, do have swear words that are similar. I mean, some, you know, they do vary. Japanese also is more concerned with, you know, face saving. and so it's worse to call someone a fool in Japanese than it is in English, and it's worse to call someone old. There are more insults about age.

And in Dutch, they, for some reason, have a lot of illness swear words. German has more poop swear words. Each language has things they like to swear about. But yeah, they definitely all have swear words. And they use them in the same way? Like, to express either pain or emotion, or do they use them in any other way? No, I think they use them in the same way, yeah. It is a universal thing, a thing that ties us all together.

Well, it's interesting that a lot of people in every culture swear, so it's a fairly universal thing, and yet it's still considered somehow taboo. And if we made it less taboo, if swearing was more acceptable, it wouldn't be swearing, and then it wouldn't serve its purpose, because it needs to be taboo in order to be powerful. Yeah, well, it is interesting, but I think you had the progression right there. I mean, we do need to have them, you know, out of bounds, or they do lose their power, like the habitual swearers who, you know, it doesn't help them to put their hands in the ice water when they swear.

You know, the words do lose their power and I think only are useful to us if we're not saying them all the time. And it would be interesting to do a study to see whether, you know, if you say, if you've got your hands in the ice water and you're saying a religious, a mild religious oath versus, you know, the F word, if you can, if there's a difference in time there, but, you know, if you, I sort of think that the F word would be more useful, but that I don't know. Well, it's interesting, and really this conversation has gotten me thinking about this, that we all play a role in perpetuating this, this really a myth of these words are so offensive.

These are words we've all heard since we were children. In fact, they were even more interesting when we were children. We've known them forever, but we pretend to be so offended by them. And maybe people really are offended by them. But really, you know, it's not like it's a big, oh, I've never heard, oh, that's just so shocking know, it's not like it's a big, oh, I've never heard, oh, that's just so shocking. And it's not shocking because we've heard these words a million times since we were seven years old. But we perpetuate this story about how these words are so offensive to help those words maintain their power so when we use them, they're so offensive. Melissa Moore has been my guest.

She's author of the book, Holy Shhh, A Brief History of Swearing. And there's a link to her book in the show notes for this episode. Thanks, Melissa. Well, thank you for talking to me. If you blow dry your hair, you do so at your own risk. And it's not just about, you know, making sure your hair doesn't get sucked into the motor, which, you know, is no picnic. And also, you know, not to drop it into a sink full of water and then reach in and pick it up and get electrocuted.

There's another risk, and that is radiation. According to David O. Carpenter, director of the Institute for Health and Environment, every electrical appliance in your home emits electric and magnetic fields of energy. Most of them are pretty low, but some appliances, like hair dryers, emit higher levels of this electromagnetic radiation. The levels are highest right where the cord

connects into the device, and putting just a foot or two of distance between you and that connection can reduce the radioactive levels to zero. Dr. Carpenter says we should take a step back from appliances like microwaves, coffee makers, washing machines, those kind of things when they're in use, and hold that blow dryer a little farther from your head. And that is something you should know. I've been getting so many likes for the Something You Should Know page on Facebook and Twitter lately, so thank you for that, and if you haven't done so, please do so. If you like us and then you follow us, then you'll get updates of when new episodes post,

which is every Sunday night and Wednesday night, and also other content that we don't have in the show you'll get on social media. I'm Micah Ruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know. Welcome to the small town of Chinook, where faith runs deep and secrets run deeper. In this new thriller, religion and crime collide when a gruesome murder rocks the isolated Montana community. Everyone is quick to point their fingers at a drug-addicted teenager, but local deputy Ruth Vogel isn't convinced. She suspects connections to a powerful religious group. Enter federal agent V.B. Loro, who has been investigating

a local church for possible criminal activity. The pair form an unlikely partnership to catch the killer, unearthing secrets that leave Ruth torn between her duty to the law, her religious convictions, and her very own family. But something more sinister than murder is afoot, and someone is watching Ruth. Chinook, starring Kelly Marie Tran and Sanaa Lathan. Listen to Chinook wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Jennifer, a co-founder of the Go Kid Go Network. At Go Kid Go, putting kids first is at the heart of every show that we produce. That's why we're so excited to introduce a brand new show to our network called The Search for the Silver Lightning, a fantasy adventure series about a spirited young girl named Isla who time travels to the mythical land of Camelot.

During her journey, Isla meets new friends, including King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table, and learns valuable life lessons with every quest, sword fight, and dragon ride. Positive and uplifting stories remind us all about the importance of kindness friendship honesty and positivity join me and an all-star cast of actors including liam neeson emily blunt kristin bell chris hemsworth among many others in welcoming the search for the silver lining podcast the go kid go network by listening today look for the search for the silver lining on spotify apple or wherever you get your podcasts