What the F Page 6
The story of how these sets of similar words come about goes something like this. In general, sound symbolism notwithstanding, words arbitrarily pair together forms and meanings. But because the words of any language are governed in part by chance, there will happen to be some places in the lexicon of a language where a couple words that have similar meanings happen also to have similar forms. People who learn and use this language may notice these little clusters, or they may not (for example, you may or may not have noticed English gl-words before), but over time the clusters will act as a form of attractor for new words. Old words that are misheard, mislearned, or misremembered will be slightly more likely to gravitate toward the form and meaning of a cluster, which appears to have happened in the history of the gl-words in English. And new words that people invent will also be attracted to the clusters such that they’re slightly more likely than chance to have meanings and forms aligned with the growing pattern. This, too, has happened in the history of English: see examples like glitzy (in 1966) and glost (a glaze used in pottery, in 1875).4 It’s also a factor in product naming—imagine which glass-cleaning spray you’d prefer to buy: Brisserex or Glisserex. Over centuries, maybe even millennia, these clusters are reinforced in a kind of rich-get-richer process until you have English, where a healthy 39 percent of words starting with gl relate to light or vision.5
And perhaps this is what happened with English profanity. Perhaps through historical accident there came to be a core set of profane English words that happen to be pronounced with a closed monosyllable. They exerted a gravitational tug on words around them—existing words came to be pronounced similarly, and newly coined words were more likely to follow the same pattern. We can see this in our newest profanity, where acronyms like MILF, THOT, and FOB tend to be closed monosyllables. And we can see it in the profane abbreviations that people have created over the years, like gyp, hebe, and smeg.
# $ % !
We began by asking if something about words like fuck and cunt, aside from their meaning, makes them profane. By following the four-letter road, we discovered a hidden pattern in how profane words sound in English. At their core are closed monosyllables. This isn’t just a descriptive fact about the words that are currently profane in English; it also affects what English speakers think about new words, whether inventing a science fiction language or participating in a behavioral experiment.
To reiterate, though, there are many exceptions to this closed monosyllable pattern. Not only are there a few profane words with open monosyllables, like gay, spoo, and so on, but there are also many profane words that have more than one syllable, like asshole, motherfucker, cocksucker, and company. But this shouldn’t be too surprising to the well-weathered linguist. Languages exhibit few exceptionless rules. We all know that English makes past tense forms of verbs by adding -ed. Except that it often doesn’t, in so-called irregular verbs like spend, go, and drink. English nouns place stress on the first syllable and verbs on the second (compare a record and to record, a permit and to permit). But then sometimes they don’t—copy and double are pronounced with first-syllable stress as both verbs and nouns. So it’s no surprise that we can’t find a hard-and-fast rule about how English profane words sound. As with these other generalizations about language, there’s a tendency. Just as English profanity tends to be drawn from certain semantic domains, so it tends to sound a certain way.
This trend and the fact that it has exceptions might explain differences among words with similar meanings. Words like poo, pee, gay, Jew, and spoo are all arguably profane words. But if the closed monosyllable pattern is real inside the heads of English speakers, then all other things being equal, words like these should seem less profane than words with similar meanings that are pronounced with closed syllables. Indeed, when you contrast them with closed versions, they might seem to have less oomph. Which is more profane: pee or piss? Compare spoo with spooge. Jew with hebe. Gay with fag. Does it seem to you like the closed-syllable words are somehow more profane? If so, how well they fit with the closed monosyllable pattern might be responsible. And it might also predict how well they maintain their oomph over time and how widely they’re used. As a closed monosyllable, spooge ought to end up more widely disseminated as a profane word than would an open monosyllable like spoo.
And, of course, the polysyllabic profane words in English still have to be considered. In a way these words are exceptions to the closed syllable trend, and in another way they aren’t. More than half of the polysyllabic words on our profane list (twenty-seven of forty-six) begin with a profane closed monosyllable, like the cock in cocksucker and wank in wanker. And even more of these same words (thirty in total) end with a closed monosyllable, like bastard and faggot. The numbers become a little muddier when we try to count these composed words—we could consider dozens that include shit, fuck, dick, or cum in them, and we’d have to make arbitrary choices about what to count. But even without going there, we see clearly that English profanity is built in part from closed syllables, whether by themselves or as part of longer words.
If this closed monosyllable pattern is real, where does it come from? I offered an analogy with gl-words earlier, suggesting that there doesn’t have to be an intrinsic motivation in terms of what the word means and why a particular sound would be well suited to it. For a cluster to take off, it need only be sufficiently frequent. Perhaps, somehow in the history of English, the ratio of open to closed monosyllables in English shifted locally in the subclass of profanity. And that little tilt in the lexicon snowballed.
In keeping with this story, the closed monosyllable principle isn’t a cross-linguistic universal. Some languages don’t allow for anything like the range of closed syllables we have in English. For instance, syllables in the Hawaiian language can never end with a consonant—they’re always open. So there’s no possible Hawaiian version of the English closed syllable pattern. And many of the most profane words you might now be familiar with from other languages are open syllables or polysyllabic: French putain (“whore”), Spanish chingar (“fuck”), Russian yebát’ (“fuck”), and so on. But as I’ve mentioned, we don’t have reliable studies of profanity for most languages. As a consequence, it’s hard to know whether the English pattern shows up in other languages as well.
I want to raise the possibility of another explanation for why profane words in English sound the way they do. It’s possible that some of those sounds are particularly well suited to the functions that profanity serves. To be clear, I’m not talking about sound symbolism. It’s not that the words might sound like what they mean. The idea instead is that they might sound the way they do because that way of sounding is effective for the way you want to use the words.
This could work in several different ways, in principle. One way is based on the difference in childishness of open and closed monosyllables in English. It just so happens that as they’re learning a language, children are first able to pronounce open syllables. That’s why a child typically says ma and mama before mom; a child substitutes ba for ball and da for that.6 (We’ll have a lot more to say about this in Chapter 8, when we explore where children’s little potty mouths come from.) As the child’s motor system matures, she then develops the capacity to coordinate consonants not just at the beginnings but also at the ends of syllables. So on the basis of those developmental facts, here’s a just-so story. Maybe open syllables sound more childlike because they are in fact easier for children to pronounce. Perhaps people unconsciously associate words that are harder to pronounce with the adults whose motor systems can in fact articulate them. So closed syllables—and words with lots of consonants at both ends—sound like words adults but not small children say.
If this story is true, then we’d expect profanity to show a preference for not only syllable types that are harder for children (closed ones) but also sounds that are harder for them. We’d expect to see sounds like th, which is hard for kids, rather than p, which is easier. And we’d expect profanity to esch
ew the repetition of syllables (known as reduplication) that’s typical of infant and toddler speech: mama, baba, and so on. Something like poo-poo would be the epitome of a childlike and therefore nonprofane word.
That’s one possible foundation for the cluster of profane words we see in English. Here’s another, equally speculative explanation. Perhaps short, closed words are more useful than others for swearing. There’s an argument to be made that monosyllabicity is useful for expletives—when you slam your finger in a car door, you don’t exactly have a lot of time to express what you’re feeling. Short words are simpler and more direct. That’s the monosyllabic part. Now to the consonants. Perhaps having a consonant at the end works particularly well for words, like profanity, that are deemed inappropriate in some settings. An open syllable just keeps going, whereas having a consonant at the end seals the word in silence. This is especially visible in epithets or slurs, derogatory labels for groups of individuals, which overwhelmingly follow the pattern (think of hebe, chink, gook, jap, WOP, and so on). These are precisely the type of word you might want to be able to cut short and mumble into your beard. A closed syllable permits that.
We can actually test this seemingly far-fetched idea by looking at precisely what types of consonants bring up the rear of English closed monosyllables. The key is that not all consonants are created equal. Some consonants bring a word to an immediate halt—notably consonants known as “stops” or “plosives,” like the sounds behind p, t, k, b, d, and g. Other consonants allow sound to continue being emitted—you can prolong a nasal n or m, a fricative s or f, or an approximant l or r. English monosyllabic words in general show a healthy preference for stop consonants over others in their final position—just under half of them, as you can see above, end with a brief, percussive sound, like p, t, or k. But split profane words in the same way and, as you see above, the bias toward stop consonants is significantly more exaggerated. There are far more profane words like spic and twat and far fewer like piss and cum than we’d expect by chance.k This is far from conclusive evidence, but it does lend a little credence to the “shut your mouth” explanation for profanity’s tendency to end with a consonant, and not just any consonant.
Specifically, a Fisher’s exact test reveals that profane words ending with stop consonants are significantly more frequent than would be expected from the lexicon in general, p < 0.01.
Profane English monosyllables are significantly more likely to end with a stop consonant, like t or k, than other English words.
It’s possible that one or a combination of these pressures has chiseled the cluster of profanity that we now see in English. But it could alternatively just be a matter of historical accident, like the case of gl. Without systematic studies across languages, we may have to settle for merely observing the pattern of profanity pronunciation in English, in combination with the kind of idle speculation that the last several paragraphs have illustrated.
But one avenue of human communication—a way in which we communicate profanity—has, unlike words, very clear motivation. Beyond words, we also use our bodies to communicate—articulating with our arms and hands, orienting our torsos, and shifting our eyes. We do so both in the everyday gestures that accompany or replace speech and also, among people who are deaf or hard of hearing, through the signs of signed languages. And in the hands, as opposed to the mouth, it’s much clearer why the signals we send—including the obscene ones—have the forms that they do.
3
One Finger Is Worth a Thousand Words
Sometime when you’re in public—in a park or a restaurant—take a good look at humans and how they communicate. To do this right, you need to suspend what you already know, or think you know, so it helps to imagine yourself as someone with absolutely no prior expectations. Someone like an anthropologist from Mars.1 Pretend that you’re here to study the humans, and just watch what they do to communicate. As a Martian anthropologist, you will surely note how much flailing about there is of parts of the body that contribute strictly nothing to the sounds of the words. Fists shake. Heads cock. Shoulders shrug.
The visible body, deployed appropriately, can do a lot of communicative work—from requesting the time to conveying the size of a drink order. You see this most obviously when vocal-tract calisthenics are of no use, like when a person’s mouth is full or when he or she doesn’t speak the local vernacular. But physical gestures are also deployed as intentional communicative acts of their own. An A-OK gesture tells a pilot he’s cleared for takeoff. A Check-Please gesture summons an attentive waiter. And the Bird, well, you know what that does. Across a room, across the world, across the lifespan, people silently convey information using visible movements of their bodies. Words tell only part of the story of how we communicate; gestures tell the rest.
Gestures like those mentioned above are so rich with conventionalized meaning within a culture that they can replace words. This also makes them relatively easy to detect. But these emblematic gestures are merely the tip of the manual iceberg. Most speech is accompanied by often subtler and unnoticed gestures. Sometimes a finger can provide information redundant with the words it accompanies—a contestant on a dating show might punctuate the words I choose Mary by pointing to the lucky winner. But movements of the hands, head, and torso can also encode information beyond what’s strictly conveyed by words. For instance, suppose someone with a wry sense of humor says, “Oh yeah, I had a great time at the opera.” Did she really? Or is she being sarcastic? Her body might tell you. Suppose she accompanies the words with a roll of her eyes and a flick of her wrist in the form of the Jerk-Off gesture on the next page. Probably not an opera lover.
Source: David Bergen.
People often gesture when it’s useful to the person they’re speaking to, like when giving directions. But they also gesture when it’s not, like when there’s no one to see them. You’ve probably caught yourself gesticulating when talking on the phone or when staging imaginary conversations in the shower (telling off some self-important PTA member or delivering your Nobel Prize acceptance speech). People gesture even when it couldn’t possibly benefit listeners because the listener is a newborn infant or a blind person.2 Gestures like these that accompany and complement speech will make up the preponderance of the communicative body movement that you, the Martian anthropologist, will notice.
But unlike you, Martian anthropologist, we mere humans only rarely take conscious note of all this vigorous activity of the arms, head, and torso. One way this manifests is that we rarely consider gestures important enough to enshrine in written language, with the exception of certain emoticons like (which is supposed to be a shrug, but is really rare because try typing that on your phone!). Very occasionally, you’ll come across gestures transcribed in words, like *shrug* or *sigh*, but these are vanishingly rare. A more recent innovation, emojis, can encode limited gestures, like Thumbs-Up, A-OK, and even the Bird. Nevertheless, these remain limited to certain users and contexts. Gestures are mostly absent from written descriptions of pretty much any human interaction. For example, scripts and screenplays contain lots of words for people to say but only the occasional direction regarding gesture. And even when gestures might matter most to people’s lives, in court transcripts, they’re again mostly absent or at best vague. For instance, consider this example of courtroom dialogue from the Alaska Shorthand Reporters Association:3
Source: David Bergen.
Q.Did you see the driver of the other car?
A.(Nods head)
Q.Can we have an audible answer, please? The reporter can’t take down a nod or shake of the head.
A.Yes.
Q.How tall would you say the other driver was?
A.About this tall.
Q.That’s about five-foot-eight?
A.No. More like six feet.
Notice how problematic gestures are here. Court stenographers are the best real-time transcribers of language known to humankind, but even they can’t encode everything important and meani
ngful about gestures. On the rare occasion when a gesture does make its way into the written record, it still remains vague—for instance, “(Nods head).” From a description like this, it’s impossible to know if it was a nod with conviction, a hesitating nod, or any other kind. Because the head nod could convey information about the witness’s certainty, it could be invaluable to the proceedings. But even in court, the overwhelming majority of gestures go unrecorded. The way a witness shrugs her shoulders or scrunches her eyes, the trajectory she uses with her hand to depict how a car came to an abrupt or careening stop—gestures like these mostly don’t make their way into writing because they rarely permeate our consciousness. In short, we largely treat communication as primarily about words, with gestures being optional add-ons.a
This could be a positive feedback loop. We might fail to write down gestures because we don’t think they’re important, and we might think they’re not important in part because we don’t have easy ways to write them down. I do hope someone will figure out what causes what.
Those gestures that we do notice tend to be the profane ones. For example, a lake of ink was spilled during Barack Obama’s first presidential campaign as political observers asked, did Obama just flip someone the Bird? On April 17, 2008, the Los Angeles Times observed that in a speech, he scratched his face with his middle finger while describing Hillary Clinton’s debate performance.4 And it happened again during his victory speech in November of the same year while he was praising his defeated opponent, John McCain.5 We can’t know whether his middle finger betrayed what he really thought about his political opponents or whether his nose just itched. But his finger had a way of riling people up.