A whole host of censorship strategies has been deployed, ranging from repeating the word prior to the profanity to superimposing a sound other than a bleep. One of the cleverest I know of is in Missy Elliot’s song “Work It,” which uses an elephant trumpet to replace a noun in the following couplet:
If you got a big [elephant trumpet], let me search it;
And find out how hard I gotta work ya.
There appears to be no unbleeped (or rather untrumpeted) version of the song.
There are plenty of potential objections to what the FCC does, especially the mysterious way it defines profanity. But according to the US Supreme Court, the commission does have the right to function as it does. We know this from a 1973 decision, in which the FCC squared off against a radio station that played George Carlin’s profane standup routine “The Seven Words You Can’t Say on Television.”8 The routine is (ironically) about the words that the FCC bans, which Carlin identifies as shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, and tits (although, of course, there’s no official list). He then goes on to elaborate on his impressions of each word. (According to Carlin, tits sounds friendly, while fuck has a little something for everyone.) The FCC reprimanded the station, which challenged the FCC’s right to censor profanity as a violation of the right to free speech. But the Supreme Court upheld the FCC’s action, stating that the government has a compelling interest in “1) shielding children from patently offensive material, and 2) ensuring that unwanted speech does not enter one’s home.” It also ruled that the FCC has authority to prohibit “indecent” broadcasts during daytime hours (when children might encounter them). And most importantly, it decided that the FCC can determine for itself what constitutes indecency.
In addition to these media regulation bodies, the legal system often acts as a de facto censor of profanity. As we saw in the case of the mom arrested for saying fucking bread around her kids in a supermarket, laws exist all over the country that, interpreted in specific ways, make it illegal to use profanity, especially around children. There’s a good case to be made that these laws violate our First Amendment free speech rights:9 as we’ve seen, there’s no evidence that profanity of the Fucking type intrinsically causes harm. But logic hasn’t often prevailed in this arena. The bans exist as a reaction to profanity, with the intent of negatively sanctioning people who deviate from normative linguistic behavior.b
Even words that merely sound like profanity are often tainted. For example, in 1999, the assistant to the mayor of Washington, DC, David Howard, was forced to resign his post for calling a budget niggardly. So was a Florida drug counselor who told a client that he was being niggardly about opening up during his drug rehabilitation. To be clear, niggardly has nothing to do with nigger, either in its history (it’s related to niggling) or its current meaning (it means “stingy”). And yet, the mere similarity with a taboo word is enough for a repressive reaction to kick in. See Dowd, M. (January 31, 1999) or Mayo, M. (November 11, 2011).
But these efforts have been largely for naught. People are still being exposed to profanity, and they’re still using it. Exposure to profanity on television has not decreased over the last three decades; if anything, the frequency of strong profanities has increased.10 As musician and professor Tom Lehrer put it, “When I was in college, there were certain words you could not say in front of a girl. . . . Now you can say them, but you can’t say girl.”11 Films and video games similarly have seen no decrease in the use of profanity in a similar time frame, with profanity increasing especially in video games. The type of video game that now receives a T or M rating, either of which overwhelmingly includes profanity, essentially didn’t exist twenty years ago.
Nor is censorship through bleeping or other local strategies effective. People still infer what the bleeped words were. One clever study12 had people read sentences with either profane words (like This custard tastes like shit) or censored versions (like This custard tastes like s#!t). After reading the sentences, participants performed a memory task to see whether they remembered exactly what they had seen. They would see one of the two sentences, with s#!t or shit, and had to say if this was the exact sentence they saw before. When shit replaced s#!t, most people had no idea. A full 59 percent of the time, people answered that they had seen exactly that sentence previously. In other words, more than half of participants had encoded the word shit in memory and thought they had seen the uncensored word, even though it was actually censored to begin with.
Bleeping also doesn’t decrease people’s impression of how much profanity the program they’re watching or hearing contains. One of the few studies to investigate the effects of bleeping presented people with one of two different versions of A Season on the Brink, an ESPN biographical documentary about basketball coach Bobby Knight.13 The uncensored version included seventy-six instances of curse words—Knight is renowned for his vitriolic temper and quick trigger with colorful language. The censored version had all those words bleeped out. People were shown one version or the other, then asked to rate how offended they were by the program and to estimate how much profanity it used. People thought the bleeped version was significantly less offensive, as you might expect. But surprisingly they also thought that the bleeped version had more profanity: people who saw the bleeped version estimated that there were fifteen more curse words in the film on average than people who saw the unbleeped version. So bleeping increases the perceived frequency of cursing.
Even when censorship does have the desired effect of limiting exposure to certain terms, it has unintended and counterproductive consequences. Language is a moving target, and outlawing a word today will inevitably lead to new words sprouting up in its place tomorrow. Censorship is like a game of linguistic whack-a-mole. For example, when Matt Stone and Trey Parker made their feature-length South Park film, they were aiming for an R rating. But the first cut they submitted to the MPAA ratings board came back rated NC-17, which would have reduced its potential viewership to a small fraction and killed its chances of breaking even financially. So the filmmakers submitted a series of revisions, responding to each edit the ratings board recommended. But because Stone and Parker aren’t exactly fans of censorship (their movie itself is an anticensorship screed), they tried to get away with every bit of vulgarity they could. As Matt Stone said to a Los Angeles Times reporter, “If there was something they said couldn’t stay in the movie we’d make it ten times worse and five times as long. And they’d come back and say ‘OK, that’s better’.”14 For instance, it’s been reported that the film originally included a song called Motherfucker, but that when it was rejected, Stone and Parker replaced it with the arguably equally offensive (and certainly more novel and memorable) Unclefucka. Additionally, sources report that the title was originally South Park: All Hell Breaks Loose, but the MPAA categorically rejected the word Hell, so the film was retitled with a plausibly more offensive double entendre: South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut.15
In sum, the various ways we react to profanity by trying to limit it are grossly ineffectual. They generally don’t decrease how much it’s used, and even when they do, new words spring up in their place. Bleeping or other word-internal censoring strategies still activate the same words in the listener’s or the reader’s mind to the point where they’re usually indistinguishable in memory from the real thing.
# $ % !
But trying to ban language is more than just ineffectual. The practice is actually its own worst enemy. Here’s what I mean.
We know that taboo words aren’t taboo because they’re intrinsically bad. We’ve seen over the course of this book that profane words are just words; they’re made up of sounds and enter into similar (although not always identical) grammatical patterns to other words. There isn’t a fixed set of profanity in a language—words meander into and out of taboo-ness. Over time, words move fluidly from banal to profane and back again—think about the histories of cock and swive (the now deceased, archaic predecessor to fuck). Nor is there
anything unique or defining about what taboo words mean: even if they tend to draw from certain semantic domains, they can denote the very same things as mundane words (like penis and copulate). And in fact, a culture doesn’t even have to have taboo words if historical vicissitudes haven’t conspired to give it any. In other words, there’s nothing deterministic about any particular words having to be profane in any given language at any specific time.
And that means that our beliefs about profanity are largely a social construct. The same word can provoke radically different reactions in different cultures or at different times. In Great Britain the word wanker is bad, slightly worse than nigger. On this side of the pond, it doesn’t even register as profane. And even within a country, when people speak different varieties of the language, there’s remarkable variation. Nigger is profane, except, as we saw, among some speakers of African American English, where nigga is a commonplace word that can be used positively and pro-socially. Profanity isn’t fixed. It’s variable, it’s context-sensitive, and it’s relative. It’s the product of cultural attitudes toward specific words, attitudes that can differ radically from person to person and from culture to culture.
But for these cultural beliefs to exist, they must somehow be instilled. They must be propagated. And this is where it gets interesting. How do you know which words are the bad ones? Think about your own life experience. How do you know that cunt and nigger are bad?
I suspect you’ll come to the same conclusion as sociologists. The things that create and perpetuate these normative beliefs about words stem from the contexts in which those words are used. You can infer what people mean to do with a word by observing how they use it. If you see someone acting violently toward another person while using a slur, such as shouting You’re a fucking cunt!, that’s good evidence that the word is meant to cause harm. This is surely part of the story. But notice that the situations in which people use the words aren’t enough. For instance, you wouldn’t infer from You’re a fucking cunt! that all the other words in the sentence, like you and a, are also meant to cause harm. So in addition to learning about words from how people use them, you also learn from how they avoid them.
Profane words like fucking and cunt are socially suppressed. People have told you that they’re bad. As a child, you might have been scolded or spanked. When your uncle stubbed his toe and yelled holy fucking cock ass fuck!, your mother might have chastised him for swearing in front of the kids. There are subtler signals too. When parts of words are bleeped out, or even when you simply notice that people use words in informal settings that they avoid in more formal settings, you learn that those words are not socially appropriate. Adults act as though some words aren’t to be said in public, by children, or around children. Children learn precisely that lesson. That’s where taboos come from. That’s what makes those words profane.
In other words, paradoxically, the taboo words in a language are taboo because of the very actions people take to limit their use. The remedy is the cause.
Profanity isn’t special in this regard—cultural norms in general are regularly propagated from person to person and from generation to generation via personal behavior and social and legal institutions that constrain taboo behaviors in certain contexts. I’m sure you can think of many, many socially constructed taboos that go hand in hand with personal and institutional opprobrium. Polygamy, for instance, is commonly practiced throughout parts of northern Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia and the Pacific.16 But it’s taboo in many countries, especially countries with histories of important Christian influence, like the United States, where it’s legally banned. Other taboos that vary cross-culturally and are accompanied by personally or institutionally imposed sanctions include things like incest (legal in Côte d’Ivoire, Spain, and many other countries)17 and open defecation (practiced by 1 billion people worldwide).18 In places like the United States, not only laws but early childhood instruction, admonitions, and punishment by caregivers and authorities reinforce taboos about these behaviors.
But compared to polygamy, incest, and open defecation, which could arguably compromise the health of communities that practice them, most profane words (perhaps except slurs) pose little known danger. Mores about taboo words in general are more similar to stylistic faux pas. For example, wearing a mustache has been seen as dirty and suspicious in different times and places in the United States. I’d guess that wearing Bermuda shorts to a funeral would meet with disapproval most anywhere in the country. Facial tattoos and piercings have historically been banned or otherwise negatively sanctioned—and still are to varying extents. These behaviors violate social conventions not because they endanger public health but because of a tacit social agreement about the things we do and do not do. But there’s nothing intrinsically bad about Bermuda shorts or mustaches; the taboos reflect the cultural values we apply to them. Likewise, the actions people take to negatively sanction profanity create the norms surrounding it.c
The arbitrariness of profanity might be important for its social purposes. Other arbitrary things like hair or clothing styles are able to signify social meaning—and to have meaning that changes over time—precisely because they’re arbitrary.
So by actively prohibiting profanity, we’re acting like a dog licking its wounds. Let me spell out the analogy. Dogs (like humans) have a natural inclination to lick injuries, and for good reason: saliva may speed healing. But there’s also a downside. Overlicking can lead to a granuloma, a lesion potentially infected with staphylococcus. A suppressive response can turn a tiny nick into a large, enflamed, and infected hot spot.19 Like dogs’ wound licking, our response to profanity creates a runaway process because it exacerbates the conditions that trigger a progressively more and more aggressive response.
We shouldn’t be surprised to see these normative behaviors in ourselves and our neighbors. Many of us have been inculcated with these beliefs, just as with other socially constructed norms, since our early childhood. Three-quarters of Americans believe in hell.20 Most have believed in it since childhood, and we perpetuate the same belief in children in large part by reenacting the same routines that led us to believe those things in the first place: describing hell’s uniquely unpleasant conditions and identifying those acts of an ill-behaved child that will land her there. We recreate hell for our children in the same way that we create word taboos for them. Early indoctrination into beliefs has effects that persist through adulthood.d
Some people even extend these taboos into mystical realms. The Chinese word for the number four, si, is homonymous with the word meaning “death.” As a consequence of this chance overlap in sound, many Chinese people are superstitious about saying the number four. The same is true in Japanese. It turns out that these superstitions about taboo words can have serious consequences. A paper in the British Medical Journal compared death figures among Chinese and Japanese Americans from 1973 to 1998 with those of Caucasians. They counted how many deaths occurred in each group on each day of the month. And they found that Chinese and Japanese Americans had significantly more heart-related deaths on the fourth day of each month than you would expect by chance, whereas the Caucasian deaths on the fourth showed no such peak. Some people are so superstitious about word taboos that they are literally scared to death. (Note though that no such increase in deaths exists for Friday the thirteenth in Western countries.)
This creates a remarkable paradox. Our parents and the culture we grew up in programmed us to suppress profanity. But our reenactment of these same suppressive responses as adults gives profanity the power it has. Excessive licking exacerbates the wound. Profanity is a monster of our own perpetual creation.
# $ % !
For the most part, this all seems rather harmless. The book-length love letter to profanity that you’re holding in your hands might have tipped you off to the special affection I have for swearing. I think that in general we shouldn’t worry so much about profanity. Aside from the special value it holds for science—
we learn things about language, the mind, the brain, and society from profanity that we simply couldn’t know if we pointed our microscopes elsewhere—it has practical social benefits.
For one thing, swearing increases your tolerance for pain. In several recent studies, people performed something called the “cold pressor,” a task in which they’re instructed to stick a hand into very cold water (five degrees centigrade) and keep it there until they can’t bear it any longer.21 This measures their pain tolerance. What happens when people swear during the cold-pressor test? In one experiment, people were told to say a swearword (like shit) or a control word (a word that could be used to describe a table, like wood) during the task. And sure enough, the people told to swear tolerated the painfully cold water significantly longer than those told to say the control word. Intriguingly, male subjects in the swearing condition also reported that the cold water was less painful than did those in the nonswearing condition, though women in the two groups reported that it was equally painful.e
Why does swearing alleviate pain? One hypothesis is that it creates an elevated feeling of aggression. It’s known that people who are more aggressive have higher tolerances for pain, and it could be that swearing hooks into the brain systems for aggression. People might be swearing themselves into a state of high pain tolerance. Swearing is special in terms of how it works in the brain, and in this case the automatic physiological reactions you have to uttering profane words allow you to better tolerate pain.
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