No, the languages of the world have mama- and papa-like words because parents hear what they want to hear.
Influential linguist Roman Jakobson—an exile of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia who founded the influential Linguistics Circle of Prague in the early twentieth century before he was again exiled during World War II and found his way to a chair at Yale—explained this better than anyone has since.18 Parents, he argued, have expectations about what their children will say, and they specifically expect that their children will talk about them. Since mothers throughout history—for biological and cultural reasons—have tended to spend more time with infants than fathers, they’ve often been the closest on hand to deploy that assumption, and as children most commonly produce something like mama before dada or papa (contra the findings of the recent British survey), mama gets interpreted as referring to the mother.
This is especially true when a language already has a word like mama for mother, but it’s also true even when that’s not the case. Parents are quick to allow for deviations between how adults use language and how children approximate it. So it’s common for caregivers to accept children’s deviant words and pronunciations as proxies for adult equivalents. If I expect my child to call me daddy, but he’s saying something like dahdah, I’ll take it. But parents go farther. They don’t just categorize what the child says as an instance of an existing word; they frequently repeat, reuse, and reinforce it. At fourteen months, my son couldn’t (or just didn’t) pronounce the t sounds of night-night. (Notice that he predictably changed CVC syllables to CV.) So the rest of the household copied him and told him it was time to go nigh-nigh. At fifteen months, he couldn’t say lifeguard, and we followed his lead in referring to the gar-gar at the pool. Adults come in this way to adopt changes originated by children that the caregivers interpret as meaning specific things. As a consequence, the language changes. When enough adults use a word, the word effectively becomes a word of the language. And by this process, even if a language doesn’t have a word like mama to start with, it can gain that word in a generation.
This explains why so many languages have such similar words for mothers and fathers. And it also explains why, even when they’re dissimilar, words for mothers and fathers are simple for children to pronounce. They’re simple because of the interplay of evolution—which has endowed children with brains and bodies that are similar in their abilities and their proclivity to pronounce certain sounds at certain stages—with cultural expectations that caregivers apply to their children and with cultural change on the time-scale of years and decades, during which changes to a language take hold in a community.
And so, with that in mind, we can return to Samoa. Samoan does have words for mother and father, tina and tama, respectively (pronounced kina and kama). But Ochs’s study reported neither of these as a child’s first word. That, of course, was tae. So why doesn’t Jakobson’s explanation apply here as well? Why would mothers in Samoa not believe what their counterparts around the world do—that their children’s first interpretable utterances refer to them? It came as a surprise to me, though perhaps it wouldn’t to anthropologists more familiar with how cultures can vary around the world, that the Samoan parents Ochs was working with had specific beliefs about children that led them down a different logical path.
Here’s the way the Samoan villagers whom Ochs worked with thought about children, as explained by Ochs herself:19
From the Samoan point of view, the small child is heavily under the influence of amio [natural drives that lead people to act in socially destructive ways]. Infants and small children carry out such outrageous behaviors as running and shouting during a church service or formal chiefly council meeting, throwing stones at caregivers, hitting siblings and the like, because they are [believed to be] incapable of . . . suppressing amio.20
These Samoan parents considered children uncontrollable, unruly, and socially destructive. It’s not hard to see what would lead someone to such a belief. I have thirty pounds of insuppressible amio at home myself. The difference between these Samoan mothers and, say, my household isn’t that Samoans think children are out of control, whereas we don’t. It’s in the balance between this set of beliefs and the idea that children are incipient little communicators, seeking engaged interactions with another person. My family has a little more of the latter, in the balance, and the Samoan mothers, more of the former. And if you’re more prone to think children are ruled by amio, then your expectations about what they’re likely to say will reflect this belief, just as your belief that children are trying to connect through language with their parents will create your expectation that they’ll say a caregiver’s name first. Uncontrollable, unruly, socially destructive little people are more likely to tell those around them to ‘ai tae. And so, whereas an English-speaking North American might interpret something a child emits that sounds like ka as car or cat, the Samoan parents in question were apparently led by their expectations to believe that the child’s little amio was hurling an antisocial epithet.a
The Samoan mothers told Ochs something else, which she was kind enough to relay to me. They told her that, at some level, they liked their kids to be tough, for self-protection. Sticking up for yourself can be a useful survival tool. And so, as they explained it, “sometimes bad is good.” This belief might have contributed to making the parents more prone to hearing profanity.
And so ends the mystery of the diminutive Samoan swearers. Their parents were exceptional not because they happened to have diabolical children or because they let themselves incautiously swear in the presence of infants. Like caregivers around the world, they let their beliefs affect their expectations. In the mushy, imprecise vocalizations of their children, they heard what they anticipated hearing. In other words, in this particular case, the kids didn’t have potty mouths; the adults had potty ears.
9
Fragile Little Minds
In the summer of 2014, Danielle Wolf was arrested after swearing in front of her two children in a North Augusta, South Carolina, supermarket. Accounts of the event differ. Everyone agrees that she said, “Stop squishing the fucking bread!”1 But there’s some debate over whom she said it to. Wolf claims she uttered it to her husband, who she said was throwing frozen pizzas into their shopping cart, crushing the bread beneath. A witness claims Wolf said it to her children. Regardless, by all accounts the children were within earshot. The witness called the police, and Wolf was arrested for disorderly conduct. According to a North Augusta city ordinance (§ 16–88[12]), disorderly conduct includes “utter[ing], while in a state of anger, in the presence of another, any bawdy, lewd or obscene words or epithets.”2
And lest you think this is just a peculiarity of South Carolina (not that I’m suggesting there’s any reason to expect aberrant behavior in South Carolina),3 something very similar happened in my own backyard, in Southern California, in 2006. Elizabeth Venable, a PhD student at the University of California, Riverside, was at the John Wayne Airport when she was overheard using profanity with a friend. As the Los Angeles Times reports it, a sheriff’s deputy, “noticing several families with small children nearby,” asked Venable to “please watch her language while at the airport.”4 According to the Orange County Register, Venable asked, “Is it against the [expletive] law to say [expletive]?”5 Although the paper didn’t report what the expletives were, we can make an educated guess. That’s when the deputy cited her. Later she was charged with two misdemeanors: disorderly conduct and disturbing the peace. The rule she violated appears to be an Orange County ordinance that applies specifically to John Wayne Airport and prohibits people from being “disorderly, obnoxious, indecent or commit[ting] any act of nuisance.” Given how strongly he objected to profanity in film, I suspect the Duke himself would have approved of this enforcement of the ordinance in his eponymous airport.
To be clear, in neither of these cases was there a question of harm being done to anyone, including children, beyond direct or indirect exposur
e to profanity. Wolf was not charged with physically or verbally abusing her children; nor was Venable accused of threatening children in the airport terminal. The deed that landed them in court was using the word fuck around children. There’s a lot to say about whether laws like these are constitutional, especially with respect to the constitutionally protected right to freedom of speech. We’ll pick up that thread later in the book. For now, I just mention these cases to highlight our deep-seated belief—entrenched in our legal codes and our social practices—that exposure to profanity harms children.
If profanity causes harm, we should care. Society, its public institutions, and we as individuals all have a responsibility to ensure the well-being of children. Do we need to monitor the language our children are exposed to in order to protect them? If profanity really does hurt children, there should be social and legal consequences—swearing around children might be most appropriately considered a form of child abuse and should be punished accordingly.
The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) appears to have the answer. In the fall of 2011, it issued a press release warning that exposure to profanity is harmful to children.6 The AAP was relying on a recent study from the prominent and respected medical journal Pediatrics. The AAP’s statement had two parts. First it announced that being exposed to profanity increases children’s use of profanity—in the case of the study, middle school students. That by itself probably wouldn’t surprise many people. We know that kids pick up on what they hear. But the AAP then went on to report that swearing by minors was “a risk factor for increased physical and relational aggression.” Young minds, the AAP would have us believe, are fragile—so fragile that even profanity can damage them.
The media picked the story up quickly and, as they will, amplified it in the retelling. For example, the Daily Mail quoted a media expert who interpreted the results as indicating that “children who use profanity are more likely to make them more aggressive towards others [sic].”7 Medical News Today reported the findings like this: “Bad language and profanity . . . appear to increase aggression in teenagers.”8 And one article cited the first author of the study in question explaining how it works: “Profanity is kind of like a stepping stone. . . . You don’t go to a movie, hear a bad word, and then go shoot somebody. But when youth both hear and then try profanity out for themselves it can start a downward slide toward more aggressive behavior.”9 The party line is clear: profanity is dangerous because it’s a gateway form of aggression.
And this is just one way in which profanity has been argued to harm children. The Pediatrics article identified several other possible dangers that profanity poses.10 First, “exposure to profanity can induce a numbing effect on normal emotional responses.” And second, exposure to profanity causes people to “experience negative physiologic responses, such as increased heart rate or shallow breathing.”
If true, these claims are a big deal. For instance, if they’re genuine, then you probably shouldn’t let your twelve-year-old read this book.
So let’s take a close look at the Pediatrics article’s argument. To reiterate, it raises three core issues:
1.Exposure to profanity can cause direct harm to children.
2.Exposure to profanity makes children more likely to use it.
3.Using profanity in turn makes children more likely to act aggressively.
Because this article appeared in the prestigious, peer-reviewed journal Pediatrics, it’s tempting to take these claims at face value. But not everything you read withstands the weight of careful scrutiny. So let’s take a look, as informed consumers of science, at each of these points. How compelling is the evidence? What do we need to protect children from and why?
# $ % !
Point one: Does exposure to profanity directly harm children?
The original 2011 Pediatrics article describes two direct effects of profanity—a numbing effect on normal emotional reactions and an increase in immediate negative physiological reactions. Let’s deal with both of these in turn.
First, numbing. The paper claims, “Studies have found that exposure to profanity can induce a numbing effect on normal emotional responses.”11 This is a pretty bold claim. Where does it come from? The paper itself doesn’t actually demonstrate this—it’s part of the article’s review of the existing scientific literature. But if you follow the references, the Pediatrics article only cites a single study that ostensibly demonstrated emotional numbing, a 1989 article titled “Desensitization to Television Violence: A New Model.”12 Here’s the problem. That article doesn’t mention profanity—at all. It doesn’t contain the word profanity. Or even the word word. Or language. To its credit, the paper is quite interesting: it offers a new theoretical explanation for the finding that exposure to prolonged “scenes of violence,” like “primitive mutilations,” over time leads to decreased emotional reactions in viewers. That may well be true! But the article doesn’t talk about language at all. And it only talks about adult viewers—no mention of children. Here’s the final nail in the coffin: the desensitization article is completely theoretical, so it presents no new data and has nothing to do with language. Nor do any of the twenty-three other articles that it cites. I checked.
You might reasonably be wondering why the Pediatrics study didn’t cite more relevant research showing that profanity numbs emotions. For instance, what about studies demonstrating empirically that profanity desensitizes people to violence? Those articles were not cited because they simply do not exist. There’s no evidence of the numbing effects of profanity—not for adults, not for children. Now, I’m not the first person to note that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. It could well be that exposure to profanity does in fact directly desensitize people to violence and that scientists simply haven’t asked the question in the right way. But at present, there’s no empirical evidence that exposure to profanity dulls children’s reactions to violence. None. The Pediatrics article got that wrong. Good thing we checked.a
I don’t mean to sow mistrust in science generally. But scientists are humans, and humans sometimes get things wrong. So it’s not unreasonable to take a page out of Ronald Reagan’s book: trust, but verify.
The Pediatrics article further claimed that profanity affects well-being by leading people to “experience negative physiologic responses, such as increased heart rate or shallow breathing.”13 This is sort of the opposite of the initial claim, on a shorter scale. It asserts that profanity causes harm in the moment of exposure because people’s bodies react strongly to it. The authors cite no evidence for this claim. But a glance at the literature on the effects of exposure to profanity reveals that the Pediatrics article is half right. There is indeed a lot of evidence that the body reacts to profanity in predictable ways, including increased heart rate and shallow breathing. As you might recall, we discussed this in Chapter 5. For example, one 2006 study measured people’s heart rates while they read neutral words, school-related words, unpleasant words, and taboo words.14 Heart rates started going up about two seconds after participants saw a taboo word and kept going up for several more seconds.
But does an increase in heart rate mean, as the Pediatrics article claims, that people were experiencing a “negative physiologic response”? Not at all. Increased heart rate and shallow breathing both accompany an assortment of fundamentally quite different states. Heart and breathing rates increase when people perform a hard mental task, like solving an arithmetic problem or playing a computer game; they also increase when people are emotionally aroused, whether angry or fearful or overjoyed.15 They increase in response to not just taboo language but pretty much anything that’s arousing. (The word arousal has a specifically sexual connotation in English, but psychologists use it for responsiveness to stimuli in general.) For instance, a study of college students showed that heart and respiration rates both increased during texting, especially while students were sending and receiving a message16 (perhaps because they were in a more aroused state when anticipating h
ow their message would be received or what they would find in the response). The point is that these two physiological changes provoked by profanity aren’t intrinsically negative. The problem with the Pediatrics paper’s claim lies not in the facts about the immediate reaction profanity causes in your heart and lungs but in the interpretation of what that reaction means. It means only that people become emotionally aroused when you bring them into a lab and present them with profanity. That’s not surprising. But this in no way implies that profanity causes harm—any more than sending text messages or doing mental arithmetic does.
The closest thing to profanity causing harm that you can find in the literature—and you really need to dig for it—comes from public health studies. But, as we’ll see, even those don’t directly address the question of profanity. A number of these studies ask how different types of caregiver abuse predict children’s psychological and physical health outcomes. For instance, take a large 2010 study that surveyed nearly ten thousand Scandinavian teenagers. It asked them whether they had experienced certain types of abuse in the previous twelve months. Aside from physical abuse, they were also asked about verbal abuse. And this category included questions about “sulking or refusing to talk, insulting or taunting or swearing, throwing objects and threatening with violence.”17 Teens who reported exposure to at least one of these behaviors were pooled together as subject to “verbal abuse,” and as a group they were more likely than those who reported no abuse of any kind to also report psychological problems like depression, anxiety, aggression, and hyperactivity.
Surveys like this one focus our attention—appropriately—on how verbal abuse might affect the psychological well-being of adolescents. There’s ample evidence that abuse correlates with psychological problems. This study showed that verbal abuse, defined in the study’s specific way, correlated with an increase of about 16 percent in aggregate psychological difficulty score—a measure of the psychological problems the adolescents were having. Far more damaging was physical abuse, which correlated with an increase in this score of 37 or 49 percent, depending on whether the abuse was classified as “mild” (e.g., pushing, shoving, shaking, or whipping) or “severe” (e.g., battering, hitting with objects, or kicking). I point out the substantial effects of physical abuse not to marginalize the effects of verbal abuse but just to highlight the different things known to correlate with negative psychological health outcomes in minors and their relative severity. Different types of abuse hurt children to different degrees.
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