The Hindu Business Line : Overuse of taboo words blunts their emotional edge

Words are easy, like the wind; faithful friends are hard to find, sings a happy Bard, in one of his poems. “My words are dull; O, quicken them with thine!” invites Queen Elizabeth, in King Richard III.

“Words are words; I never yet did hear that the bruised heart was pierced through the ear,” wonders Brabantio, in Othello. Alas, most people don’t see it that way, writes Steven Pinker in The Seven Words You Can’t Say on Television ( www.landmarkonthenet.com). Which explains why taboo language is among a startling array of human concerns, from capital crimes to the future of electronic media!

“Whether they are referred to as swearing, cursing, cussing, profanity, obscenity, indecency, vulgarity, blasphemy, expletives, oaths, or epithets; as dirty, four-letter, or taboo words; or as bad, coarse, crude, foul, salty, earthy, raunchy, or off-colour language, these expressions raise many puzzles for anyone interested in language as a window into human nature.”

While almost all languages have ‘emotionally-laden words that may not be used in polite conversation’, an extreme example, according to Pinker, is Djirbal, an Aboriginal language of Australia, in which “every word is taboo when spoken in the presence of mothers-in-law and certain cousins”.

He decodes that the ability of taboo words to evoke an emotional reaction is useful not just when speakers wish to convey their own distress to a listener but also when they want to create that distress in a listener from scratch.

Pinker concedes that there are moments in everyone’s life when one feels the urge to intimidate, punish, or downgrade the reputational stock of some other person. Perhaps, the crafting of maledicta has exercised people’s language instinct more vigorously than all the other kinds of speech acts put together, he continues. “In many cultures it has been raised to a high art, sometimes called flyting.”

Language has often been called a weapon, and people should be mindful about where to aim it and when to fire, the author advises. Even in its mildest form, intended only to keep the listener’s attention, the lazy use of profanity can feel like a series of jabs in the ribs, he cautions.

If an overuse of taboo words, whether by design or laziness, blunts their emotional edge, it will have deprived us of a linguistic instrument that we sometimes sorely need, Pinker rues.

He concludes his slim book with the suggestion that swearing can be hilarious, poignant, and uncannily descriptive, when used judiciously.

“More than any other form of language, it recruits our expressive faculties to the fullest: the combinatorial power of syntax; the evocativeness of metaphor; the pleasure of alliteration, meter, and rhyme…”

Also, it engages the full expanse of the brain, left and right, high and low, ancient and modern, Pinker argues.

A book you may like to read aloud… when alone.

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Overuse of taboo words blunts their emotional edge