What the F
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A caveat in case you’re a psycholinguist or plan to become one: the precise timing with which the picture and word appear on the screen affects the size of these effects.
In picture-word interference, a person names a picture as quickly as possible while attempting to ignore the written word. Taboo words interfere significantly with picture naming as compared with neutral words.
Just as there’s a taboo version of the Stroop effect, there’s a taboo version of this picture-word interference effect. If you print an unrelated, neutral word over a picture (above, left), people have no trouble naming the picture (it’s a dog). But put a taboo word there (above, right), and people slow down, by about forty milliseconds on average.32
Again, an internal editor could be performing quality control here. Alternatively, this generalized slowing down could stem from the emotional reaction people have to the printed taboo word. Taboo words are special in several ways, which means that there are different ways that they could have the same effects on people trying to produce speech.
# $ % !
Why did the pope blunder into profanity? For the same reasons the rest of us occasionally do. There’s time pressure on a speaker to pronounce the present word while planning the ones to follow. Layer on top of that the stress of speaking in public, the challenge of negotiating a foreign language, and the Freudian attraction of thoughts you think you ought to suppress, and the pope’s ability to say anything fluently is a small miracle (but not in the technical sense that would qualify him for canonization). Mistakes like the pope’s reveal the pressures at work in every moment of language use. They underline what a remarkable feat we accomplish in navigating the gauntlet of potential gaffes at every turn of phrase.
And although we tend to notice speech errors when they generate taboo words—those errors really grind our ears—these are far less frequent than innocuous ones. We saw why. A person’s internal monitor isn’t as strongly compelled to censor unintended words when they’re inoffensive. And so the particular error that the pope made (replacing caso with cazzo) is actually a bit surprising, not just because it reveals him to be fallible but because you’d think his monitor would kick in when it detected a potential profanity.
So why did the pope’s self-monitoring fail in this particular case, spectacularly producing the Italian C-word? Possibly the pressures of public speaking in a foreign language overwhelmed his ability to self-monitor, and that profanity slipped by unchecked. But let me offer an alternate account. It’s also possible that he slipped into a profane error because his self-monitoring system didn’t know that he was about to make a profane blunder. In other words, the pope might just have revealed himself not to know the C-word in Italian. He may have produced a word whose meaning he didn’t know and then corrected himself from the to-him-innocuous slipup. Ironically, by flubbing a profane word, he might have shown himself to be something less than the pope of the people that his public image suggests.
6
Fucking Grammar
In every language there’s a logic to where words go. Nouns and verbs and prepositions snap into place to form phrases and sentences. This is grammar. I know that for some people, the mere mention of grammar triggers flashbacks to traumatic childhood moments, diagramming sentences on a chalkboard, covered in flop sweat, in front of a room of jeering classmates. But if you recognize yourself in this description, let me offer you some comfort. What a cognitive scientist like me means by grammar isn’t the angst-inducing stuff of your childhood. We don’t mean admonitions against double negatives or ending sentences with prepositions. These primary school lessons are called “prescriptive” rules of grammar. They’re part of some authority figure’s agenda about how a language ought to be used, rules laboriously hewn into young minds, where they are promptly forgotten.
That’s not our game. A scientist’s place is not to prescribe. The biologist’s job, for instance, isn’t to instruct the birds and the bees on optimal mating techniques. Nor is it the chemist’s job to tutor the gasses on how to be noble. Scientists observe, document, describe, understand, and explain. Language science doesn’t come down on one side or the other in debates about split infinitives or the Oxford comma (even though there’s clearly a right answer).a Instead, it aims to describe and understand the language knowledge already teeming through the minds of people like you.
The Oxford (or serial) comma is a comma inserted before and or or in lists of three or more items. For instance, it’s the comma right before and in I bought bread, milk, and carrots. The main argument in favor of the Oxford comma is that it can help to resolve ambiguities. For instance, without the Oxford comma, the following sentence would be ambiguous: This morning, the president met with lunatic fringe groups, the Republicans and the Democrats. You could read this sentence as a list: the president met with three distinct groups. Or you could take the appositive interpretation, where the Republicans and the Democrats just provides more detail about the lunatic fringe groups. The Oxford comma makes it clear that you intend the list reading. The only argument against the Oxford comma is laziness. Really, dude, you can’t type one more comma? It’s right there by your middle finger. Yes, that finger.
And a capacity for grammar is one of the most extraordinary things that evolution has imbued the human mind with. The rules of grammar that you know, implicitly, without any instruction and without ever reflecting on them, allow you to exercise the most powerful design feature of human language. You have the ability to string together new sequences of words to articulate any combination of thoughts you can come up with. And likewise, using your knowledge of grammar, you’re able to understand any meaningful sentence a person might wish to assemble, no matter how unexpected.
This point, like many dealing with language, was perhaps best articulated by comedian George Carlin when he pointed out that there are certain sentences no one has ever said before and that therefore no one has ever heard, like “As soon as I put this hot poker in my ass, I’m going to chop my dick off.” Or “Honey, let’s sell the children, move to Zanzibar, and begin taking opium rectally.”1 The fact that Carlin could utter these specific sequences of words and that you could understand them is a testament to the combinatorial power of language, which the unique grammars of every language on earth provide.
All typically developing humans use grammar to combine old words in new ways. But other animals don’t, at least not as powerfully and flexibly, and the ability to assemble and interpret previously unexperienced strings of words makes human language a qualitative leap beyond every other communication system in the natural world. So it’s fair to say that grammar is kind of a big deal.
But what are the rules of grammar in your head like? That is, what is it that you know—and are able to deploy—in order to understand a sentence you’ve never seen or heard before, like Honey, let’s sell the children, move to Zanzibar, and begin taking opium rectally? If you’ve never seen it before, the answer can’t be that you memorized it. Instead, you must be able to see how the words fit together because they do so in systematic ways shared by other words in your language. Although you might never have used the children as the direct object of sell, you might have used sell with the car or the house. Children, house, and car behave similarly in English, and it’s largely agreed that the rules of grammar in your head are general enough to cover a range of like words. Instead of knowing one rule for car and another for children, you probably know something about nouns in general and what you can do with them. Add to this your knowledge (again, implicit) that children and car and house are nouns, and you have the beginning of a story about how you can do new things with old words. You know, implicitly, general rules of grammar that you can apply to the tens of thousands of words you know to construct any one of millions—or, in principle, a potentially infinite number—of new sentences that no one has ever said or heard before.
But as soon as you add profanity to the mix, the rules start to change. Profanity, like the rest of la
nguage, follows the largely unstated and usually unnoticed but thoroughly essential rules of grammar floating around in your head. For example, a fluent English speaker might complain, “There’s too much homework in this fucking class.” I know this is grammatical—it’s a sentence that English speakers produce and understand fluently—because I overheard and understood this very sentence when it was uttered by a real, live college student.b This sentence complies thoroughly with the general grammatical rules that American English speakers have in their heads.
Let’s pretend that she wasn’t talking about my class. And while we’re engaging in self-delusion, why not also imagine that I’ve only heard this comment once.
But squeeze this sentence a little, and you’ll find that its grammar is a little strange. And fucking causes all the trouble. Look at what happens when you substitute other words in place of fucking, adjectives like stupid or inspiring. On the surface, these seem like innocuous little changes that don’t make much difference. But then again, swapping out a parachute for a tablecloth doesn’t really make a noticeable difference until you jump out of a plane. So let’s throw these sentences out of a plane—grammatically speaking.
We begin with There’s too much homework in this fucking class, as compared with There’s too much homework in this stupid class. To intensify exactly how stupid the class is, you can add really or very right before stupid to give you There’s too much homework in this very stupid class. Admittedly, this sentence sounds a little clunky. But even if it won’t win you a Pulitzer, it’s still English. You can generally add adverbs like very ahead of adjectives like stupid without fear. Same with inspiring: this very inspiring class. But what happens when you try it with fucking? You get There’s too much homework in this very fucking class. I don’t know about you, but I just can’t interpret this as English at all. It doesn’t seem grammatical—it doesn’t seem to me (or other native speakers I’ve asked) like a possible sentence in the language. In short, a sentence with profanity doesn’t follow the same rules as those without.
Here’s another stress test. Take a subtle variant of the same sentence. Suppose you put the word fucking not in the penultimate position but instead right after too, like this: There’s too fucking much homework in this class! Most native speakers I ask agree that this is a possible grammatical sentence of English. Again, that doesn’t mean that it’s the type of sentence you’ll see in a style guide or that your English teacher will make you recite. But remember, we’re interested in what people actually say, not in what they’re told to say (or not to say).
And notice what’s special about this sentence. Other words, like goddamn, could replace fucking, as in There’s too goddamn much homework in this class! Works fine. Same for damn, bloody, darn, and friggin. These all work. But all of a sudden, you can’t replace fucking with known adjectives. It doesn’t seem grammatical to say There’s too inspiring much homework in this class. And it’s not just adjectives: you can’t replace fucking with any of the other types of words it commonly patterns with, like quantifiers (some) or intensifiers (really).2 All of these give you clearly ungrammatical sentences, like There is too some much homework in this class! Apparently only profane words—or facsimiles of profane words, like friggin—can fit into this particular slot. This means that general rules of grammar can’t account for this particular sentence pattern. Instead, you must know special rules of grammar that apply only to profanity and friends.
Importantly, you can’t just toss fucking about willy-nilly. Hold out on the fucking in our sample sentence until the very end, and you get There is too much homework in this class fucking, which sounds pretty ungrammatical. So the rules you have internalized about fucking aren’t just more lax—you know precisely where fucking can go, what it can go with, and, importantly, where it can’t go. And what’s most fascinating about these special rules is that you know them implicitly. Before reading this chapter, you couldn’t have learned them through explicit instruction—I’d bet my shirt that no one ever sat you down to explain that fucking can go not only before a noun but also after a quantifier. You learned these rules through observation, induction, imitation, and trial and error. You know a lot about the grammar of fucking without ever having brought it to conscious awareness.
Here’s another example to tease your intuition. When you stick not into a sentence, you negate some part of its meaning. Compare Let’s sell the children with Let’s not sell the children. Important distinction. But this general rule meets its match when confronted with certain profane sentences. For example, compare You know jack-shit and You don’t know jack-shit. Is there any difference at all? Most people agree that both versions mean that you know nothing. So how can it be that not has no effect? Could we once more be in the presence of a special rule for profanity?
For a science of language, special rules like these are both an abomination and an invitation. They call into question the very property that makes human language so expressive and powerful: the ability to flexibly mix and match words with general rules. And yet, as our job is to describe and understand, we’re forced to confront them. What is the nature of these rules? What do you know about the grammar of swearing in your language? And why do we have these rules in the first place? These questions have driven language scientists to sully themselves a bit by digging into the nitty-gritty and exceptional details of dirty grammar. And so I invite you to reflect for perhaps the first but hopefully not the last time on some of the things you know—but don’t know you know—about the profane grammar of your language.
# $ % !
Profane words in English occupy nearly every grammatical category. There are, of course, the familiar verbs (to fuck, to shit), nouns (a fuck, a shit), and so on. But one of the most grammatically bizarre is in evidence in sentences like the one I just mentioned: You don’t know jack-shit. Here, jack-shit is acting as something called a “minimizer.” You’ve probably never heard of such a thing, but still you use them all the time. If you had to come up with a nonprofane replacement, it would probably be the more frequent anything—that would give you You don’t know anything. In English, we have a variety of minimizers like anything that go along with negation and serve to emphasize how complete that negation is. These are words (or expressions) like at all, one bit, or a drop, all of which can be appended to negated sentences like You don’t know or He doesn’t drink. Some of these minimizing words are general, like at all, which you can stick into pretty much any negation: I do not skydive at all or It doesn’t hurt at all. Others are quite specific to the action, like a morsel in He didn’t eat a morsel or a drop, which appears only to be not spilled or not drunk.
Minimizers like these follow a general rule: they have to be used in a sentence that describes something nonfactual—a sentence stating explicitly that something isn’t the case. Negation with not is of course the best way to do this. So He doesn’t skydive provides a nice nonfactual home for at all. But a question is also somewhat nonfactual, because it questions whether something might be true. So you can stick at all and other minimizers into questions, like Do you skydive at all? Expressions of doubt work the same way because they also allow a shadow of possible nonfactuality to creep in: I doubt you skydive at all. And so on. But as soon as your sentence becomes factual—as soon as it asserts something as true—then you can’t use at all or its ilk. It wouldn’t make sense to say I skydive at all or He really wants to skydive at all. That’s a general grammatical rule about words like these. They’re only viable when the factuality of the statement is put linguistically in doubt.
But jack-shit and its profane peers flout the rule. You can say You don’t know jack-shit, using it in a negative context, but you can also just as easily say You know jack-shit. Same with dick—I don’t draw dick unless the price is right is fine, as is I draw dick unless the price is right. And other terms like crap, shit, fuck-all, and the like all behave the same way. For instance, You get fuck-all until you say “please” works just as well as the ne
gated version.c This special set of profane words and their strange behavior in this context have gained such notoriety among syntacticians (people who study grammar for a living—yes, this exists) that they’ve been given a name. Two names, actually. They’re sometimes called “vulgar minimizers,” which is an apt description because they’re both vulgar and they minimize what precedes them.3 But “vulgar minimizers” isn’t as evocative as their other name, “squatitives,” in honor of the special place of the word squat among them.4
As I said, this is exceptional behavior. You can say I don’t know anyone but not I know anyone. But there are a few other words that seem to behave something like the profane ones, dick and others, in that they can be used in both positive and negative contexts. And one of these, occasionally, is anymore. Most Americans are perfectly willing to say Honey badger doesn’t give a shit anymore. But what about Honey badger gives a shit anymore? Fascinatingly, there are actually regional differences on this. If you think that it sounds perfectly fine to say Honey badger gives a shit anymore, then you (or your parents) are probably from the Midwest, particularly Ohio and Pennsylvania. You have so-called positive polarity anymore—you can use it, just like dick, in the presence or the absence of negation. The rest of the country, and possibly the world, will strenuously object to this use, largely because they categorize anymore as requiring a negative context. The difference between positive polarity anymore and vulgar minimizers like dick or jack-shit is that sentences using anymore have different meanings when negated and not—I go there anymore and I don’t go there anymore mean different things, whereas You know jack-shit and You don’t know jack-shit mean about the same thing.