Stuff You Should Know - How Swearing Works

Episode Date: April 20, 2017

Swearing is something that's been done across all cultures, virtually since humans began speaking. What is it about these taboo words that offend some, and are beloved by others? Does it help to relieve stress to swear? Are there general rules of thumb about when it's OK to swear? All of your questions are answered in today's episode. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark with Charles W. Chuck Bryant and Jerry's over there.

So this is Stuff You Should Know, Beep Edition. Are we gonna beep? No. I didn't think so. We're above that. I tell you what, it was a joy to read this Tracy V. Wilson article.

Yeah. Tracy of Stuff You Missed in History class used to do a lot of writing. And her articles are always, she leaves no stone unturned. Yeah, the V stands for Very Good Article. It really was good. Yeah.

It was a very good article. Very good. So very good. Did you notice her images in the article on the site? No. Oh, they were all like Star Trek, Firefly, Harry Potter. I did notice her potty mouth though. What?

Later in the article? Or was that from that other thing you sent me? Oh, that was from another thing. Oh, okay. No. I kind of just put it all in together. So I was like, man, Tracy really went for it. Yeah.

Lot of F-bombs. No, that was not Tracy. That was, well, there were a couple of other articles I sent you. One was James Harbick wrote a good one on the BBC. And another was from Rebecca Roach on Aeon. Was that the swearing in other countries? Yeah.

That was really good. I'm excited about this one because I love to curse and swear. And you folks don't know that because we've always kept our show G rated. I know. Which is, I'm glad we do that. Because we kind of stand out these days among podcasts.

Yeah, that's true. Plus it's kind of like, it just makes it, you have to get a little more creative when you have limitations like that. I found like working within a structure makes you think more rather than just like letting it all hang out, be loosey-goosey.

Yeah. Lazy. Yeah, I'm very lazy then in my regular life. Well- Because my wife and I both have sailor mouth, potty mouth. So why? Should we be telling people this? I don't think it's fine.

Okay. Because this is a good lesson to kids that there are appropriate times to say certain things and inappropriate times. And when you're podcasting, apparently it's inappropriate. Exactly. At least with us.

But Chuck, one thing you might be happy to hear is that a long standing myth called the poverty of vocabulary hypothesis is not held to be correct any longer. Well, what's the myth? The hypothesis was that people swore because they couldn't think of other words. And that you were basically lower class.

Not true. Poorly educated. Nope. With a small vocabulary, which is why you cursed. And up until fairly recently, I think it was a 2016, maybe 15 journal article

that really put the nail in the coffin. And said, nope, we tested people. The people who came up with the most swear words were also the ones who had the most extensive vocabulary elsewhere too. So the idea that you're just dumb if you swear a lot normally, gone. Yeah, but I mean, there,

it depends on how you do it. Like sometimes you can tell someone can't think of a better word, you know what I mean? Yeah. And sometimes, like I know some people that are just some of the best swirers, the most creative, intelligent swirers.

And it's like a music almost. Right. I love it. It is. And it is music. It's definitely not just words as we'll see. Swearing is its own thing. Yeah.

It's kind of phenomenal actually. There's a hypothesis that language came out of swears originally. Oh really? That the first... Tuk-tuk? Yeah. Tuk-tuk was basically hit his thumb

with a club against a rock, shouted something and that became the S word. As we know it today. Well, Tracy, one of the first things she points out was I thought super interesting and that it's a very paradoxical thing and that they are a taboo, but it's not a taboo that people avoid.

It's one of the few taboos like everybody, not everybody, but many, many people embrace. Right. I think like 78% of men. And we're talking for the most of this show about sort of Western countries. Except at the end. But as far as we know, and we being like humanity,

swearing is universal. Here we go, 72% of men and 58% of women swear in public. That's not even in their private life. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and apparently that's a longstanding understanding of swearing is that men do it more than women. And back in the 70s, there was a Berkeley linguistics researcher

named Rebecca Lakoff. And she noticed that women tended more to use what are called minced oaths, which is saying like fiddle sticks instead of the F word, basically talking like Ned Flanders, in places where men would have cursed otherwise. And she surmised that it was because women are taught from a young age to be polite and differential.

Sure. Whereas men are allowed to curse and kind of let it all hang out. But that this put women in an awkward situation, or damned if they do, damned if they don't situation. And that if they are polite and differential, they're treated like a fractional person. Right.

But if they transgress and curse, they've broken taboos. And like in Western society, it's way worse for a woman to curse than a man, at least in public or maybe even private, which is a double standard that we need to do away with. Agreed. Because it's much like the First Amendment episode where I got all riled up against obscenity.

The idea that some words can't be said because it's taboo just irks me to no end as well. I don't think it's a big deal, but I do respect that others do. And I really do try to curb my, how loud I curse in public. Yeah. In public.

No, it's public now. I really do. I try to like, and this isn't just since I've had kids, I've always just sort of tried to be aware. Maybe it was my Baptist upbringing, but as bad of a mouth as I have, I've always tried to just sort of be aware of my surroundings. Cause I never wanted to be that guy.

Sure. That was making someone else feel bad or whose parents had to like shuffle their kids away from me because of the language I was using. Yeah. You know? Yeah. I've had a hard time with Emily.

Yeah. Yeah, she's just. She doesn't mince her oaths? No, she's louder and doesn't just, she's just not a, she's in the moment, you know? She's very free spirited. Sure. And I'm always like, oh, you know,

there's kids right out there. Can you keep it down? Yeah. She's like, oh, eff it. Eff that kid. Not eff that kid. Just eff it. Gotcha.

But Tracy just has a lot of little tidbits here at the beginning. I think we should mention, cause they're just interesting. One is that people, and I found this to be true when I worked at a Mexican restaurant, we all learned the curse words first. Yeah. And when you learn a new language,

one of the first things you learn, if you learn through immersion, rather than in a classroom, are colloquialisms and curse words. Right. Although she says curse words and swear words are different. Yeah. So we should, you want to say what the difference is?

Sure. So most people use them interchangeably, but a curse word is where you're basically hexing something. Yeah. You're calling for someone to be, well, damned. Yeah. Or anything. Like eff this window that I can't get open.

Sure. That's a curse on that window. Exactly. You're right. Whereas swearing is kind of different. It's like by Odin's Raiden, where you're invoking the name of like a deity or something religious or whatever.

Yeah. And you're doing that to like give weight to your words. Or I swear to God. Right. Is a swear. And technically, if you're a pious type, swearing to God is going to be as bad as saying eff that window. Yeah.

If not worse actually. The worst is, you know, if you say GD, I remember growing up as a church kid, that was the worst of all swear words. Yeah, right. You know, taking the Lord's name in vain. Yeah. And that can be in most, basically all words,

we'll use swearing curse interchangeably like any normal human being. But most swear words or all swear words, I believe, can be broken down into two categories. And one of them is deistic. Yeah. Where it involves like a higher authority, God, religion, something about that, right?

Yeah. And the other is visceral. And that is basically everything else. It involves body parts, body functions. It's funny, they really do break down into those. Yeah. Basically everything does. It related to the body or related to God.

Pretty interesting. Yeah, it is. And again, that seems to be universal, but what one culture emphasizes another culture might not. And even within the same culture over a period of time, words can change, emphasis on words can change. Like for example, in the 19th century, you did not say bull, as in look at that bull over there.

B-U-L-O? Yes, because it was associated with sexual virility. So you would say, look at that brute cow over there. Right. Or look at that sea docks. Anything but bull. Because it was a bad word at the time. And then now it's like, someone would look at you like,

what the hell is a sea docks? Is that why BS has bull in front of it? I wonder if it's like a particularly virulent type of fallacy or lie. Because I don't see why else it would. That's what I thought too. Tracy also says that no one really knows, because cursing came before writing what

the first swear words were. But researchers agree, and this I thought was super interesting, is that they called it word magic. Early forms of word magic are where they came from, which basically means, especially in cultures that didn't have writing, they believe that words had a lot of power. And you could curse something, like we said.

Words could be really good, or words could be really bad. And that swearing kind of evolved out of that. Right. Which is just awesome, I love it. It is. And there is a good example of this. Apparently our word for bear, here in English, is rooted from the Germanic word for brown.

And it was based on the pagan Germanic taboo against saying the name of a wild animal, because it might make that wild animal appear. Because of word magic. So that's why we say bear today. So interesting. Because something like ursa would have made the bear appear and killed everybody, and it would have been your fault,

because you didn't say brown. You said ursa. Did you ever hear the four-unlawful, carnal knowledge acronym? That's completely not true. Right. That, the F word, is old, very old, recorded in English since the 15th century.

And they found some roots of it back in Middle Dutch, F-O-K-K-E-N, was to thrust or copulate. Norwegian, F-U-K-K-A, was copulate. And in Swedish, F-O-U-K, meant penis. And apparently, even though it was around, it wasn't really used in common speech that much. It was like a word. In English?

Yeah, but it wasn't really used as a curse word until much later on. Yeah, like the, I think the 16th century is when it first appears in writing. And even then, it seemed kind of casual. Yeah. Just a casual F. I've got another one.

You ready? Sure. Zounds. You know that word? Zounds? Yeah. I think Shaggy used to say it a lot. He said zoinks.

Somebody said zounds. I mean, cyclopedia brown. I don't know. So zounds. Zounds, like that? Yeah. Is, it's related to God's wounds. So you're saying God's wounds.

Oh, really? Yeah. Invoking a deity. So that would be a deistic curse. Wow. And I can't wait till the end when we go around the world. Some of those are really funny. Yeah.

Should we take a break? Yeah. All right, we'll take a break and talk a little bit about why people swear. Ye, ye, ye, ye, Ye, ye, ye, ye, ye, ye, ye, ye, ye, ye. Oh, $$$$ Paydude the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude,

bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars,

friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist?

So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude the 90s called

on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing.

Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS

because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy, teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one.

Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right, so this makes a lot of sense. There's a line of thought that says that swearing eventually comes to take the place of crying. Yeah, I thought this was. There's a lot of anecdotal evidence that makes perfect sense. Makes total complete sense. Yeah, because when you're a kid, you cry about things.

And then when you grow up here in the West, you're, for some reason, taught not to cry anymore, especially little boys, which is total BS. Says Rosie Greer. Yeah, I cry all the time. And so that swearing becomes what they call an instinctive response for if you're upset or if you're afraid or if something bad happens, if you're frustrated,

and that just kind of takes the place of crying. Yeah, which, again, makes a tremendous, do you swear while you're crying? Because I've been here, effort. No, I don't do the ugly cry. We should probably get a judgment call from our legendary producer, Jerry. About?

Is it OK for us to say, effort in place of actual bad words here? Jerry says, yes, we need a ding, ding, ding. So that makes total sense to me, that you learn to swear. And one of the reasons why it makes total sense to me is that swearing is a way of letting off a pressure valve suddenly and quickly, almost involuntarily, right? And if you can do it out of anger,

you can do it out of frustration, you can do it out of shock, surprise, pain. And yeah, at least in the context of our society, it would be weird if you cried in all those situations as an adult when you can get it over with just by shouting the S word or the F word or something like that. And actually, there's a linguist named Joffrey Nuremberg. I probably screwed up his name, but he

had this great description of swear words. He said, swear words don't describe your feelings. They manifest them, which is absolutely true. I've seen it put as like a quick verbal hand grenade. It really drives home. It encapsulates a feeling in a really potent, condensed form. It's true, so bam. Another really cool thing that Tracy wrote about

was that they do a lot to, they can establish a group identity. They can make you feel like a part of a group. They can express intimacy or trust with someone. They aren't just regular words, beyond shock value and humor, which are all valid, but beyond camouflaging your fears, which is valid. They really can like, I remember in one of our first editorial meetings at How Stuff Works years ago,

when our former boss, who gave us the charge to do stuff you should know, dropped F-bombs in the meeting. And this was the first kind of like my stupid chicken killer software job that I had. I was like a frat house, so that didn't count. Like the language in there was terrible. But this was my first real job where I thought, yeah, where I thought like, all right,

I'm in my first meeting, and he starts dropping F-bombs, and I immediately felt a kinship. And I was like, all right, this guy is doing something. He's laying this out to the room, and that means something. It wasn't a casual thing. If you drop an F-bomb in a meeting like that, you're telling people something, like it's

OK to use that language here, or this is what kind of person I am, it really gives off a lot of social cues. I've always loved him for it. It really does. It also kind of presents the person of higher authority on your level. Or it can turn people off, though. I did think about that.

Like, man, I wonder if there's people in here that are offended by this. Well, it is. There's a real, I mean, foul language can be offensive. And this really great article by Rebecca Roach on Aeon basically posits that it's offensive because when you are using foul language in front of somebody, you know that there's a chance that it's going to offend them,

and you're doing it anyway. So basically, purposely creating an atmosphere where someone probably will be offended. Or could be. Is the whole reason why bad language is offensive. Yeah, it's like it's agreed upon between the two parties. Like, there are certain words that if I use in this conversation, you might get offended, or you might feel more included.

Right. And because I know that you might get offended, and I'm doing it anyway, I'm saying to heck with your offense, which again creates the defensiveness in the first place. It's a big, it's a uroboros. Oh, wow. Look at you. It's a dirty word.

Well, I guess we should talk about social response a little bit because it's kind of where we're headed. But it didn't like obscenities and dirty words weren't even really looked at that way until after the 1800s. No, there were taboo words for sure. Yeah. But they weren't considered dirty. It was just taboo.

Like don't invoke Odin's Raven. Right. But like the word profanity didn't come around to the 19th century, which is really interesting. Yeah. And originally profanity and blasphemy meant the same thing. Right.

They both had to do with basically insulting the sacred. And then over time, they started to diverge. Blasphemy still means the same thing. Whereas profanity now is the general catchall for what we would call swear words or curse words or dirty words. Right. Even though there's, in all cultures,

there's a definite hierarchy. Yeah. Of, you know, if your kid says D-A-M-N, not the biggest deal. No. Just maybe to bed without dinner for a few nights in a row. But if your kid is dropping F-bombs, then, you know, it ranks. Or worse, you know.

Sure. Some people think the F-bomb is the worst thing you can do. There are far worse. They're wrong. Yes. That's just plain wrong. I'm sorry. At least in this day and age.

Yes, that is true. That hierarchy you talk about seems to fall into a couple of categories, even though having a hierarchy is universal, what is at the top of the hierarchy is not. Right. One of the things that frequently is found at the top of the hierarchy around the world

is moms, your mother. Yeah. There are plenty of very different cultures around the world where insulting your mother, particularly either a sexual act with your mother, or bringing up a person's mother's genitalia is the worst. It's the worst of the worst. Oh, yeah.

I remember, like I said, in college, when I worked at that Mexican place, we learned all the curse words first. And the guys in the kitchen, I was like, man, you guys talk about each other's mom more than anything I've ever heard in my life. Yeah. It was remarkable.

Right. And that must be in, I guess, is Spanish-listed or Spanish languages? Well, it's Latin languages, Latin-based languages. So Spanish would definitely fall under that category. Yeah. But also, I believe, Mandarin, Arabic, some Arabic languages. Just languages around, like really disparate cultures

have said, like, leave the moms out of this. Well, it was also funny, too, because she followed up with sometimes in Bosnia, it's your father. It can be a really big insult or grandfather. And Albanian, your family, Turkish, your extended family, and finally, Mandarin, which is your ancestors to the 18th generation. There it is, man.

That is the best swear on the planet. F your ancestors to the 18th generation. I wish I knew how to pronounce this. It's just that's as good as it gets. Kao, ni, su, zong, shiba, dai. Oh, you know, this is available in China. No, good. I'm going to learn how to say that, like, for real.

Like, little kids in China listen to this. That whole class just went, oh. I need to learn how to say very sorry, then, in Mandarin. Gasping is universal, too. But speaking of swearing at work, supposedly, swearing at work makes up 3% of the conversation. Is that it? That's what it said.

That sounds low to me. I saw a 2016 study that found that women curse more than men at work. More women admit to cursing at work than men. Oh, well, that's different. But frequency-wise, men curse more. So if the average man who curses at work is placed beside the average woman who curses at work,

the man's going to curse more frequently. But if you fill the room with the women who curse at work and the men who curse at work, they'll be more women. Was that for explaining? They're really confused. Well, and then, apparently, among millennials, 66% of millennials say they curse at work. And then, 54% of baby boomers curse at work.

54? Yeah. Which, if you put that together, comes out to be 120%. So that makes, like, 0%. What if you, you fooled me. I did. If you're talking about the law, depending on where you are, there may be some arcane laws on the books that prevent you

from cursing in public. Yeah. But it's definitely, we did one on free speech recently. It definitely does not qualify as protected speech. It depends. What can? Yeah. All right.

So if you're just walking down the street and you say, if you pig to a cop, you're going to get arrested, but there's a pretty good chance that your case is going to get ultimately thrown out. OK. If you were in Pennsylvania, you are going to, well, depending on the town, and you curse in public. You say, F the Steelers.

Oh, man. You may, you should count your lucky stars if you make it safely to jail. Unless you're in Philadelphia. Well, there you go. Yeah. Apparently in Pennsylvania, they were arresting people left and right for, well, citing them, giving them citations,

for cursing in public. And it finally got to the point where the ACLU got involved and said, what are you doing? You can't do this. This is protected speech. This is curse in public. Right. And it's a gray area, actually.

Like states, there are states, like you said, that have some laws on the books. And apparently, one of them is Pennsylvania. And they were enforcing it. And I don't know if they still are or not. But pretty recently, they were giving people citations for it. And in Michigan, they had a law overturned as recently as 2002 where it was illegal to cuss in front of women and children.

And some guy was canoeing down the Rifle River. His canoe was overturned. He was in the water cursing up the storm. And there were women, children, elderly there. He was arrested and taken to jail. And the Michigan Court of Appeals said, no. This is a 100-year-old law. Well, and the guy overturned his canoe.

Like, give him a break. Right, exactly. Give the guy a break. And he got off. His case was thrown out. And they said, we're this law's null and void, by the way. So there is speech protection. And it is taken to extend to the state level.

But again, it's a gray area. Because if you did that on TV, you could certainly be fined. And that would be upheld because we've long agreed that there are certain situations where you shouldn't curse because kids might hear it. But what's the difference of doing it on TV and doing it in front of a kid? Only the courts can say.

Well, yeah, and that's an FCC thing. And there are certain words, like George Carlin's famous words you can't say on television bit. But those are rules more than laws, aren't they? Yeah, I guess they are rules, yeah, you're right. Rules and regulations. Yeah, but they are upheld. Yeah, but private organizations and if you're

in a store or a movie theater or at work, they can prevent you from doing that stuff. You can be asked to leave. You can be asked off a plane, stuff like that. Hopefully while it's on the ground. Yeah, if you're a company, it's like in the mall episode, I think we talked about where First Amendment protection doesn't extend to private areas.

Yeah, you can have a policy. Yeah, and it can be like some people can consider that a hostile work environment. If you have a real potty mouth boss that makes everybody feel uncomfortable. Because cursing can go, it's one thing to say BS or F this. But if you get really creative with your curse words. Well, plus there's a difference between F this and F you,

especially coming from a boss. Sure. So yeah, you can very easily switch. It really is the best. All right, should we take a break and talk about the brain? Yes. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co stars, friends and non stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL instant messenger and the dial up sound like poltergeist?

So leave a code on your best friends beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast frosted tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, OK, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help.

This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yeah, we know that Michael and a different hot, sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step.

Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. So we're back ready to talk about the brain. Got the top of my skull removed and Chuck has his finger in the ventral dorsal interior postulate.

If I'm not mistaken, I thought this is where it got really interesting. Yeah, because it supports all that anecdotal evidence. All of it. Yeah. All right. So the parts of the brain, um, the cerebral cortex, I guess we should go through all this, huh? I was going to break it down to the big line at the end, but we'll go through it all. Yeah, you got to build it up.

We're showmen, if anything, the cerebral cortex has premotor and motor areas. They control the speech and writing. It's kind of like the higher function. And then we talked before about Wernicke's area. Mm-hmm. Geez, we talked about that a bunch, I feel like. Well, it's pretty interesting. It is.

And they recognize and process words, spoken words. And then you have your prefrontal cortex, which like helps regulate your, what's your social behaviors and stuff. It's a higher, higher function. It's all these things, I was about to say, working together, but they're kind of not when it comes to cursing. Right, when it comes to language, they're all working together. But like we said before, swears are something different. They're separate. Yes.

Scientifically, in fact, they are. Yeah. So they involve different parts of the brain than language processing. The limbic system, which is part of your reward system or the basis of your reward system, but also has to do with housing memory, it has to do with regulating emotion, basic behaviors. And apparently, they think that in primates in some animals, vocalization is based in the limbic system. Just like, like that thing that Tim Allen does, that would be limbic system based.

I don't know what that is. That weird like oinking bark he does. I've literally never seen anything Tim Allen's doing. I'm not about to do it. So you're going to have to go look it up on YouTube. All right. And then the basal ganglia, which is motor, motor function. Yeah, impulse control.

Those two things, which have basically nothing to do with language processing, higher processing in humans are what governs swear words. Yeah. Like Tracy says that the scientists think that it all takes place in those lower regions. It's all emotion and instinct, and that the brain doesn't even process a swear word like a word. Right. Like as what are they called phonemes?

Phonemes, yeah. Phonemes, like the parts that make up the word. The curse word is just the word as a whole, as far as the brain is concerned. Like when you hear the word articulation, there's the part of your brain in the left hemisphere. Yeah. A region is going to work taking articulation, the emphasis you put on it, putting it together, running it against your memory banks or context or whatever, and saying, oh, I know what

you just said. But if somebody shouts the S word, those parts of your brain are not springing into action. It's the parts of your brain that are involved in experiencing and recognizing emotions. The very, very ancient parts of your brain that are involved in it, which gives credence to that hypothesis that language evolved out of expletives. Well, and also in that one article you sent, the theory that, it's not even a theory, just kind of the thought that a curse word isn't even a word so much as it is like a yell. Yes.

I mean, it could might as well just be, ah, yeah. It's just, you've got four letters. And if you think about it, it makes uttering complete sense. Like even the worst of the worst, you know, where you're involving somebody's mom in the worst possible way, when somebody says that, even when they're, especially I should say, when they're saying it to insult you specifically, your brain doesn't dial up that image. It doesn't have to.

No. When you're thinking about the actual meaning of the word, you're responding to the emotional punch in the gut you just took from that word. Like, you know what that word means. Yeah. And it doesn't even mean the thing they mean. On a, on a very emotional level, like you have it stored away in that sense. Yeah.

Because, amazing. Most times curse words almost always, they aren't to be taken literally. Right. Like when, in the one, who was the guy who wrote that one bit that you sent? From the BBC? Yeah. Like, talking about the F word, there's like 10 different ways you can use it. Well, that was Stephen Pinker he was referring to.

Oh, okay. Yeah. And none of them are, you should take literally, and no one does take them literally. Right, exactly. You just know what it means if you say F it, or F this, or F you, you're not literally saying engage in sex with this thing. Right. You know?

Yeah. And you'd think the person was a weirdo who just topped you if they did at your command. Well, which is another reason why we let people that are just learning to speaking English off the hook, when they say curse words, because they don't understand the difference between the literal meaning and the expression. Right. So no offense is intended. Right.

Right. So that social contract is not there yet. Exactly. It's just hilarious when they do it accidentally. It really is. Yeah. What was it? Stripes?

Oh, yeah, yeah. The beginning when they were learning to speak English. Yeah. They were just teaching them very good stuff. And so they've done FMRI studies too that show that functional magnetic resonance imaging test to show that higher and lower parts of the brain can struggle with each other when they swear. And apparently the people who really pride themselves in being super educated and very

literate people, they respond to slang and illiterate quote illiterate phrases the same as they do swear words, and this one is weird to me. They've done studies where you identify the color a word is written in, not the word, but the color, and the swear word distracts them from the color of that word. Right. That's just crazy. Yeah. They literally exist in their own space.

Yeah, they are their own thing for sure. Yeah. Yeah. And you remember them supposedly, you remember swear words four times better than other words. Yeah. It's nuts. So what makes it, I think what's super interesting to me is that they're universal and there's distinctions, but they're also, you know, you can divide most things and most swear words

into just a couple of different categories across the board, you know. But they're not given thought, but they're based on things that you learn. Yeah. So for example, Chuck, I'll start to go around the world, shall we? All right. Are we there yet? Sure. So in French Quebec, it's an extraordinarily Catholic society.

And basically all of their swear words have to do with the Catholic mass, like the chalice, the tabernacle, the host, literally these words, like you say, tabernacle, and it's, that's bad, man. That's a really bad, bad word. And it has to do with the idea that you're bringing the sacred into, you're basically blaspheming and it's a big time taboo. But the idea that that's a learned, like you have to, like you don't look at a tabernacle in a church as a kid without being, you know, the first time you were walking to a church

and say, that's the holiest thing there is. I understand everything there is to know about it so much so that I can break a taboo by saying that word. You have to learn that. But the idea that, that when you do learn it, it's stored as an emotion in your brain as a motor function rather than as a word that your higher cognition refers to or brings forth. It's just astounding to me.

It is. It's like a parallel process to learning language. Yeah, absolutely. There are languages where, like it's different in a lot of countries, but it's also the same like when you talk about like the feces. There are many different languages that use the word feces. They're whatever word for it as a swear word, including English of course, French, German. They all have Albanian.

They all have words for feces that are curse words, but then that's not arbitrary. I guess it just depends on how it came to be in that country. But in Sweden, which is in that neighborhood, you can say skit when you're annoyed, but it doesn't count as a curse word. Like they said, you could say it around a grandmother, I'll skit. So it's a curse word, but the importance, the emphasis of a taboo that it breaks depends on the culture. Yeah.

Or like in Polish, they'll use cholera. Other countries use types of disease. Yeah, like kanker in the Dutch. Yeah. Isn't that crazy? Yeah. The kanker meaning cancer. Uh-huh.

So you are basically wishing cancer on somebody, which is pretty awful. Yeah, that would be a curse. It's not done here, but if you did do it in, you know, normal discussion or even an argument here in the West, there'd be like a record scratch, a needle scratching off a record feeling. What did you just say? That was the worst thing that's been said to me in months. Yeah.

But they just have a word for it. Right. Yeah, I never really thought about that. That would be a terrible thing to say. It really would. If you said that just in a sentence to someone in English. Yeah. Especially if you were like jabbing your finger in their chest while you're saying it.

That's right. I know we have a lot of listeners in Sweden, Swedish people apparently, same with Finland and Norway and Denmark, they put a lot of emphasis on the devil. Oh yeah. So like some of their worst swear words are based on Satan, hell, the devil, that kind of thing. Yeah. So you don't want to bring that up or else you might offend your hosts in Sweden.

Prostitution, apparently a lot of cultures, and this theory makes sense, prostitutes defy a wife's exclusivity and a man's ownership, which is why a lot of words people will use for prostitute can be a swear word against somebody. Yeah. And apparently cultures that we're bringing someone's mother into it is the top of the hierarchy will also have words for prostitutes, plenty of words for prostitutes, and those will be extremely bad words as well. Right.

So it's like those things kind of go hand in hand, which from what I've seen has to do with the patriarchy creating the moral hierarchy, right? Yeah. Because it's such a male view of things. Like you're my mom, so you're the most sacred thing around, and you're a prostitute, which means I can't control you. So invoking those things are the two worst things you can talk about. Yeah.

And then our last step to me, Chuck, in Japan. Yes. Baka, baka, means basically idiot, but you don't call people that. It's a really bad word, which I think is so sweet. I love that country. Idiot. It's bad. Yeah.

Think about how often we call people idiots here in the U.S. Yeah, but that's bad though. I remember my mom being like, don't say that word. Oh, she was right. Yeah. Still. She's not even Japanese. No.

She's from Tennessee. She's got a little Japanese in her. Maybe so. Japanese streak. So I guess we'll finish up here with a little bit on what can happen when your brain is damaged. And we've talked about it a little bit of this stuff before, but there's some pretty interesting things in terms of brain injury.

Something called aphasia is a condition where you can lose the ability to speak or pronounce words because of disease or brain damage. But aphasics have an interesting thing. They can return to their ability of automatic speech, which is just like saying things like um and uh. But the other thing that comes back are swear words, which ties all back into the thing as they exist in their own category, almost like non-speech. Exactly.

So that's one of the first things that can come back. Or never go away. Yeah. Or never go away. And when their ability to pronounce words can evolve while they're recovering, but the swear words stay the same. Right. Like apparently you can have a hemispherectomy on the left of the left lobe where a substantial

part of the left lobe goes away and you can't talk any longer, but you can say the yes word just fine. Right. That must be startling. I'm sure. You know. Yeah. And we did a great episode on Tourette syndrome quite a while back and we talked about coprolalia.

And that is, I think a lot of people have this image of someone with Tourette just constantly screaming swear words and it's actually a very small number and that's actually called coprolalia, not Tourette, and a very small number of people with GTS exhibit coprolalia. Right. Very, very, very small. Yeah. And I think it even, I think you even grow out of it in most cases too, right? Apparently younger males are the ones who are more likely to have that as a tick with

Tourette syndrome. But it also makes sense in that swearing can be viewed as a motor function with a motion attached. Right? Yeah. And a tick has to do with the motor function, whether it's your head twitching or shouting the yes word a few times. Yeah.

Still a tick. My last thing here is I think Pinker, I think it was really interesting and then you noted that swear words were often, most often just very, just the sound itself, you know, being real, just harsh and that that contributes a lot to their function, like when you get hurt or when you're just trying to exclaim something loudly. Like the F word, it's that very sharp K at the end and if you expressed anger using gentler sounds like he says wiffy and slush, it's just, he compares it, what do you say? It's like slamming a door fitted with a compressed air hinge.

It's just not the same thing. Right. There's something about those sharp quick words that ends in Ks and Ts, you know, that are staccato that just sort of provide that visceral, you know, release. Yeah. I think. Yeah. That's an analogy with the hydraulic hinge, which is perfect.

This wiffy door. Yeah. But we should finish on Pinker's seven functions of swearing. All right. What are they? They, so a swear word, no, I'm sorry, five functions. I bet we could make up another two. Swear words, they can be used descriptively.

I can't give an example of that one. Idiomatically. Okay. Yeah. Abusively. F-U. Yeah. Emphatically.

This is F and amazing. Yeah. And cathartically, which is F. Right. Which it makes swears pretty interesting things. Yeah. And I mean, Tracy put some tips in there for when you have children on how to regulate that and explain things, but you know, just parent the way you want a parent.

Apparently though, you're not supposed to laugh. That's impossible. Yeah. It's literally. Laugh and clap and pat them on the head. Yeah. Buy them a toy. Yeah.

My kids at the age where she repeats everything and I hurt myself the other day and let out an F bomb and she said it right after me and there's nothing funny. Wow. Do you have it on tape? No, but she does say the word fox, the animal fox. She says that as the other word. Really? And we do have that on tape.

Wow. I see that. Yeah. I'll show it to you. It's, um, it's good. And you know, it's just a reality that we curse in my household and you know, my kid's probably going to be one of those kids that curses earlier than other kids. But I'm hoping to kind of cross that bridge and be like, Hey, listen, can't say these

things in school. Can't say I'm in front of teachers. Right. Like remember when a teacher would curse how like, no, shocking that was, I don't think I ever experienced. Oh, no. Like the teacher on a bad day that the class had just pushed and they would just break down and scream a curse word.

That never happened. Oh man. I had it happen a couple of times and it is talk about like the social contract. Nothing will make a bunch of kids like straight and up faster than hearing. They're just like, Oh man, like miss so and so is we've pushed her too far. Or when a kid curses at a teacher, there was also that like, Oh boy. Yeah. That's huge.

Like trouble. So yeah, I'm hoping to teach my daughter that's to pick and choose. Yeah. Maybe she'll grow up to be like Red Fox. Make money off of cursing. Maybe so. Or Sarah Silverman. Yeah.

Who's like the modern Red Fox. Well, she definitely has made a career out of breaking taboos with language for sure. Shock, shock value. She's great. Yep. Yeah. So is Red Fox. So too.

RIP. Red Fox, not Sarah Silverman. That's right. It's about Red Fox, Sarah Silverman swearing any of that stuff. You can type those words in the search bar at howstuffworks.com and since I said search bar, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this notable Canadian filibuster. You folks may have noticed we had a Saturday episode on filibusters and that's a new thing

we're doing called the S Y S K selects where we, we republish a Saturday episode that we think was great or relevant in case you missed it and thanks for the support on those. Yeah. And apparently. And by support, we mean thanks for listening, right? Yeah, sure. Yeah, they're still free. Right.

So Blake listened to the filibuster one and he wrote in about a Canadian filibuster. Hey guys, quite enjoyed the episode about filibusters. Although I've worked for several years at various legislatures throughout Canada, can tell you that filibustering is not unique to the U.S. Senate. My favorite example of the filibuster took place in the Canadians Senate. Parliamentary proceedings in Canada are recorded and published verbatim and Hansard. Canada being a bilingual country means that the Hansard, Hansard is available in both English and French, meaning that staff not only have to transcribe everything said, but

translators also need to translate English speeches into French and vice versa for official publicity, I'm sorry, publicly available record. Why is this topical because during one particularly contentious filibuster, believe related to trade agreement in the late 1980s, one senator stood and read the entirety of his autobiography into the record. As you can expect, this took quite a bit of time, but I not only did it delay passage of the bill, the common mythology that the senator also did this in order to get a free professional quality translation of his autobiography, which was subsequently published in French.

Wow. That's from Blake Evans. That's a good one. Blake, thank you for the Canadian history lesson. We don't get enough of that down here. I have one. I have a call out for Canadians. Great.

I've always just made fun of it as fake Thanksgiving, but I realize I never have figured out why Thanksgiving is celebrated a month or so early, well early compared to the U.S. in Canada. We're late. Let us know. Exactly. That's a different way of looking at it. Yes. Okay.

If you'd like to get in touch with us to let us know, you can tweet to us at SYSK podcast or join me at Josh Clark. You can join Chuck on Facebook at Charles W. Chuck Bryant or facebook.com slash stuff you should know. Send us an email to stuffpodcast.howstuffworks.com and as always, join us at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the

cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it. And now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass.

Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts.