What the F Page 5

  Could profanity be sound symbolic? There are some good candidates; consider words like barf or piss. Of course, the word barf isn’t a perfect imitation of what vomiting sounds like; nor is piss an exact replication of the sound of micturition. Still, there’s enough of a resemblance between the words and their referents to create a semblance of sound symbolism.

  But how can we tell? This is a hard problem because we don’t have a great way to measure sound symbolism. One brute-force approach would be to just ask people to report how sound symbolic a word seems to them, say, on a scale from one to seven. Researchers do this a lot. But this really only tells us what words English speakers subjectively think are sound symbolic—it’s an index of their sound-symbolic feeling. We, however, are looking for an external, objective measure of whether the words would sound like what they mean even if you weren’t already a speaker of the language.

  So a slightly more nuanced way to measure symbolism is to take a list of words from one particular language, say, English, and present them to people who don’t speak that language, say, monolingual Japanese speakers. And then you ask them to do something like guess the meanings of the English words. You have to do a lot to set up an experiment like this right. You have to use participants who really haven’t been exposed to any English and English words that haven’t been borrowed into Japanese. You have to be sure that there aren’t any similar Japanese words just by chance. But if you get it all right, then in principle the English words guessed more easily by people who speak only Japanese (or any other non-English language) are more likely to be sound symbolic.

  But to my knowledge, no one has ever done this systematically with taboo words. So we don’t know. And in any case, it’s unlikely to work. For one thing, the implementational details would make it hard to pull off. For instance, it’s getting harder and harder to find people around the globe who aren’t familiar with some English, especially profanity. So you’d probably encounter the most success if you used profanity from Finnish or Basque or some language with a lower profile than English. But the deeper issue is that it’s unlikely in principle that sound symbolism of the cock-a-doodle-doo type is in play for a lot of profane language. Sound symbolism is most common and most effective with words that describe either sounds or things that systematically make stereotypical sounds. Barf has potential for sound symbolism because it describes an action that makes a canonical and recognizable sound. Same with piss. But there are few other viable profane candidates: maybe crap, queef, and a couple others. Most profane words are ill-suited to sound symbolism because the things they refer to don’t systematically sound like anything. Bitch isn’t a good candidate, at least not in the taboo use, because there’s no sound associated with a malicious or unpleasant person that can be imitated. And the same is true for language about sacred concepts (what does God’s prophet sound like?) and sexual organs (what does a penis sound like?).

  But the real death knell for profanity being generally sound symbolic comes when you compare profane words with similar meanings. If words sound like what they mean, then words with similar meanings should also have similar sounds. For instance, there’s reason to believe that moan, groan, and whine are sound symbolic not just because they individually sound like the sounds they denote but because they have both similar meanings and similar sounds. Likewise, if fuck somehow sounds like what it means, then other words with similar meanings should sound similar. But they don’t; a good comparison list might include verbs like bang, bone, dick, shag, screw, and so on. Consider how these words sound and how they’re spelled. Most don’t share any sounds at all.

  And you get the same insight when you compare words across languages. Look at words that are the translation equivalents of fuck in other languages. French has baiser, Spanish chingar, Mandarin cào, Russian yebát, and so on. Even at first glance, and even including in our little sample only languages that are very closely related and that maintain close cultural contact with one another, despite their similar meanings, these words sound nothing alike. None of the sounds in fuck are in any of these other words (the c in the transliteration of cào is pronounced more like English ts than k). The words are different lengths, they contain different sounds, and they’re written differently. And the same is true of shit and bitch and any profanity you want to try out. These words, across languages, behave more like horse, in that the various words don’t share a resemblance, than neigh, where they do.

  The point is that no matter how apt fuck feels to express the concept it does, when you turn to the next language, people have the same feeling about their words—French baiser or Spanish chingar—which use totally different sounds. By this measure, the sounds used to express the meanings of these words appear arbitrary. That is, it appears that nothing about the sounds in the word fuck makes them particularly apt to express the meaning of the word fuck. And nothing makes the sounds of fuck a better fit for its meaning than the sounds of cào. Over the course of the history of English, French, Spanish, Chinese, and thousands of languages on earth, words have evolved that do similar social work—that fit a similar communicative niche—but are pronounced in very different ways.

  The upshot is that while some profanity might sound the way it does because of sound symbolism, this is unlikely to be true for the majority of taboo words. (At least not in the words of spoken languages. But in the next chapter we’ll look at gestures and at the signs of signed languages, where the story is revealingly different.) Perhaps the sound-symbolic feeling we get with profanity is really just the result of a lifetime of using a word with a particular sound to mean a particular thing. If seeing a horse (or smelling or hearing or feeling it) often goes with hearing or thinking or saying the word horse, then why wouldn’t you develop a strong association between the sound and the meaning, especially if that’s the only language you know? And likewise for profanity.

  So it seems that sound symbolism isn’t what makes profane words sound dirty.

  # $ % !

  If not sound symbolism, perhaps some other aspect of how profane words sound makes them seem dirty. Let’s loop back around to where we started. English exhibits a higher proportion of four-letter words among profanity than among words in general. As you’ll recall, there are also more profane three-letter words. So let’s dig into these words. What’s special about how these three- and four-letter words sound?

  The three-letter words included in the list are ass, cum, fag, gay, god, Jew, and tit. And the four-letter words are anal, anus, arse, clit, cock, crap, cunt, dick, dumb, dyke, fuck, gook, homo, jerk, jism, jugs, kike, Paki, piss, scum, shag, shit, slag, slut, spic, suck, turd, twat, and wank.

  Do you notice any general trend in how these words are pronounced?

  Here’s one idea. I haven’t seen it discussed anywhere in the literature on profanity before, but it occurs to me that if you look closely, the three-and four-letter words tend to have two properties. First, regardless of how many letters they’re spelled with, they tend to be pronounced with just one syllable. In case you need a refresher, a syllable is a rhythmic beat of language, during which the mouth opens and closes. When you pronounce bitch and shit normally, they’re only one syllable long.e Just a few words on the list have more than one syllable: anal, anus, homo, Paki, and, arguably, jism.

  That said, you can opt to make them into two-syllable words, as in Sheeyit, what a gigantic beeyotch! And if you’re not into the whole brevity thing, you can even turn it up to three syllables with biz-nee-atch and shiz-nee-at.

  Now, this can’t possibly be the whole story, because there are thousands of one-syllable words in English, and most of them aren’t taboo—11,752 to be precise (with the vague notion of precision appropriate for counting words in a language).f The profane words are but a speck in a sea of monosyllables. And if we’re just looking at three- and four-letter words, it’s no surprise that they’ll tend to be pronounced with one syllable or two.

  The count of all monosyllabic words appearing in
the MRC Psycholinguistic Database at least once is 11,752: Wilson, M. D. (1988).

  But these words don’t just tend to be monosyllabic. They tend to be built in a particular way. English allows many different types of syllable. Every syllable has a vowel at its core.g For some syllables, the vowel is both the beginning and the end (the alpha and the omega, as it were), as in words like a, I, and uh. (Don’t be confused by spelling—there’s no h in the pronunciation of uh.h) But most syllables also have consonants in them, before or after the vowel. So with this in mind, we can return to English profanity. If you briefly revisit the words in the lists above, you may notice something remarkable about their syllables. I’ll wait for you to discover it yourself.

  Or something vowel-like. A word like hurdle has two syllables, but neither has an easily recognizable vowel. Yet both the ur and the le can anchor syllables.

  Unless you’re Butthead.

  Got it? I’ll give you a hint. There are four exceptions. They’re gay, Jew, homo, and Paki.

  Here it is. Every other word on those lists ends with one or more consonants. That is, they all have “closed syllables” rather than syllables sporting bare vowels. (A decent mnemonic is that your mouth closes at the end of a closed syllable.) As you can see, many profane words even double down on their final consonants. Words like cunt and wank actually have two consonant sounds at the end. Interestingly, consonants seem pretty important in general—all but a few (like ass or arse) begin with at least one consonant, and many begin with two, like crap, prick, slut, and twat. But really the strong generalization here appears to be that syllables of profane words tend to be closed.

  Could these two tendencies—a trend toward having just one syllable and another toward that one syllable being closed—be part of what makes profane words sound profane?

  We can start to answer this by splitting our data in a different way—based not on how many letters a word is spelled with but on how many syllables it has and whether those syllables are closed. When we do that, we find that not just the three- and four-letter words are closed monosyllables; so are seven of the sixteen five-letter words, like balls, bitch, prick, and whore, but not Jesus or pussy. In all, thirty-eight of the eighty-four words on the list are one syllable long, and thirty-six of these (or 95 percent) are closed. Only two profane words on the list, Jew and gay, are “open” monosyllables (the w and y aren’t pronounced as separate consonants—they’re part of the respective vowels they follow). How does this ratio compare to the words of English more generally? I took the top 10 percent most frequent monosyllabic words from the MRC Psycholinguistic Database, which has both frequency information and phonetic transcriptions for English words. It turns out that whereas 95 percent of our profane monosyllabic words are closed syllables, that number drops down to 81 percent when you look at nonprofane words, which is significantly lower.i

  Fisher’s exact test: p < 0.05.

  You might now be scrambling to find exceptions—profane monosyllabic words in English that are open. Our list of eighty-four words definitely doesn’t cover all profane words in the language—we were using it, as you recall, because it was constructed without any explicit prior expectations about the sounds or spellings of profane words. And you can probably find some profane open monosyllables. Like, potentially, ho, lay, poo, and spoo. These are good candidates. Maybe you can come up with one or two more. But for each one, there are a dozen closed monosyllable candidates that we left out of our initial list. They include, in alphabetical order, boob, bung, butt, chink, cooch, coon, damn, dong, douche, dump, felch, FOB, gook, gyp, hebe, hell, jap, jeez, jizz, knob, mick, MILF, mong, muff, nads, nards, nip, poon, poop, pube, pud, puke, puss, queef, quim, schlong, slant, slope, smeg, snatch, spank, spooge, spunk, taint, tard, THOT, toss, twink, vag, wang, and wop. And I’m only getting started. Run the numbers again with these new open and closed monosyllabic words, and you still have upward of nine out of ten profane monosyllables that are closed.

  This pattern is statistically real, but we really want to know whether it’s psychologically real too. Do English speakers think that closed monosyllables sound more profane than open monosyllables? There are different ways to figure this out. Here’s one type of circumstantial evidence. When English speakers invent new, fictional swearwords, do they tend to be closed? For instance, when English-speaking fantasy and science fiction writers invent new profanity in imaginary languages, what do those words sound like? Battlestar Galactica has frak (“fuck”). Farscape has frell (also “fuck”). Mork & Mindy had shazbot (a generic expletive). Dothraki, the invented language in HBO’s Game of Thrones, has govak (“fucker”) and graddakh (“shit”). Not all are monosyllabic, but they all end with closed syllables. In fact, it’s very hard to find fictional profanity ending with open syllables. The one glaring counterexample I’ve been able to dig up comes from the movie Star Wars: Episode 1, in which poodoo means “bantha fodder” and is used as a weak expletive. Just by way of speculation, the open syllable might have been selected because the target audience of the movie appears to have been quite young (it was rated PG), and so a more profane-sounding fictional profanity could have felt too strong.

  We can also indirectly assess the psychological reality of profane closed syllables by looking at real words that are not taboo by dint of their meaning but happen to have closed syllables. Do people think of these words as obscene despite their innocent meanings? In fact there’s a phenomenon known as word aversion, in which some people have particularly strong reactions to particular words, even though the words have totally anodyne (or inoffensive) meanings. The English word that appears to crawl most insidiously under people’s skin is moist. I can’t tell you how often, upon discovering that I’m interested in profanity, people declare their everlasting hatred for this word. I suspect that the fact that moist is a closed monosyllabic word has something to do with it (along with aspects of its meaning). But to date I know of only one piece of empirical research on word aversions,3 and it focuses exclusively on moist, so if there are indeed other words that people find to be the linguistic equivalent of nails on a chalkboard, it’s impossible to know what those words sound like.

  But alien languages and word aversions really only supply very indirect evidence about profanity. The best way to tell whether people feel that closed monosyllables are more profane than open monosyllables would be to conduct a study with invented English words, ones that differ only in what kind of syllable they have. You could ask people how profane those words would be if they were real English words. Would people feel that cheem is more vulgar than chee? Is smoob more profane than smoo? That way, you could control for all other differences between the closed and open monosyllables and measure whether having a final consonant alone is enough to push the profanity needle.

  So I ran this study. I generated a bunch of potential monosyllabic words of English that happen not to be real English words, like chee and smoo, and I paired up each open monosyllable with a closed monosyllable that was identical except for the last sound. So skoo went with skoom, and stee was paired with steesh, and so on for twenty pairs of words that were the same on all the relevant dimensions and different only in the type of syllable.j I also manipulated how many consonants there were at the beginning of the word, known as the “onset,” just to see if this also made a difference in how profane the words sounded to people. So of the twenty pairs of words I created, ten began with just one consonant, like dee and deeve, and the other ten pairs began with two consonants, like smee and smeef, always an s followed by some other consonant, because that happens to be a way English likes to put multiple consonants at the beginning of a syllable. And then I asked sixty native speakers of English, “How profane does the following made-up English word sound?” on a four-point scale from “Very Profane” to “Not at all Profane.” You can see what they thought in the graph above. (Words that start with just one consonant are shown under “C onset,” and those with an s and another consonant are “sC onset.”) />
  Open and closed monosyllabic words weren’t significantly different in neighborhood density, mean positional phoneme probability, or mean biphone probability, none of which you would ever have heard of if you weren’t a psycholinguist but all of which you would be very concerned about if you were.

  People rate made-up words as more profane when they have more consonants, either at the beginning of the syllable or at the end.

  Pretty clearly, when everything else is held constant, native English speakers think that closed syllables sound more profane than open syllables (the dark bars are higher than the light ones). Also of interest, and slightly more surprising, there appears to be a weaker though significant effect where having more consonants at the beginning of the word also makes a word seem more profane (the pair of bars on the right is higher than the pair on the left).

  So not only does English profanity tend to be pronounced with closed monosyllables, but English speakers moreover think that closed monosyllables sound more profane than open ones. In terms of how languages work in general, this isn’t entirely unprecedented. Sometimes within a language, you will find clusters of words with similar meanings that happen to have similar forms. These arise not because their forms reflect their meanings through sound symbolism but for another reason. Consider words in English that have meanings related to light or vision. Many of them happen to start with gl. I’ll give you a few: glisten, glitter, gleam, glow, glare, glint. And there are many more, from glaucoma to glower. Now, it’s impossible for sound symbolism to be at play here because light and vision don’t sound like anything at all, and even if they did, there’s no reason to think it would be gl. Instead, we’ve uncovered a little dense spot in the English lexicon where words with similar meanings have similar forms for no better reason than that they do.