What the F Page 9
Compare the two signs from American Sign Language (ASL) on the next page, BITCH and BASTARD. I might need to explain why the names of signs are set in all caps. Signed languages aren’t just signed versions of local spoken languages. So it would be inaccurate and often misleading to label signs with their translations into some spoken language (like English). But still, we need some label for the signs so that we can talk and write about them. The compromise is to label them in all caps typically using words of the local spoken language, when there’s a close translation equivalent. The ASL sign that we label PUSSY below means something similar to English pussy. But you’ll see examples where the sign labels aren’t recognizable in English. With that out of the way, let’s look at BITCH and BASTARD. As you can see, both use the same handshape—a flat palm—and both involve striking the face, but they do so in different places.f
And a presentational note: Signs in a signed language involve hands configured into particular shapes moving through space and changing shape over time. This means that the best way to show a sign is in person or, barring that, using video. But this is a book, and writing is illsuited to describing how signs are articulated. I’m just as disappointed as you are that I can’t embed video in this book. It’s 2016. Come on. So instead, I’ve done the next best thing. The signs you see in this chapter encode motion using sequences of still images that you should read like a comic strip.
Everything about how you form these signs with your hand and arm is strictly regimented to correctly articulate them. If you bend your fingers just a little, or if you touch your palm to a different part of your face, or if you touch it to your face and hold it there rather than tapping briefly, you will be “mispronouncing” the sign. You may inadvertently sign another word—for instance, the only difference between BITCH and BASTARD is where you hit the face—or you may produce gobbledegook, in the same way that a small change to the pronunciation of a word in a spoken language will change meaningful bitch to meaningless gitch.g
In the time since I generated this example, I’ve been informed that in some varieties of mostly Canadian English—perhaps centered in Saskatchewan—gitch is in fact a word, meaning “undergarment.” This strikes me as a suitable meaning for a closed, monosyllabic word like gitch.
BITCH in ASL. Source: Jolanta Lapiak.
BASTARD in ASL. Source: Jolanta Lapiak.
Signed languages also have very specific conventional rules of grammar that dictate how the signs fit together to form larger utterances. American Sign Language has its own grammar, totally distinct from that of English. Let’s compare an English sentence with its equivalent in American Sign Language. Say you want to tell someone she’s an unlikeable person. In English, the sentence might follow the typical subject-verb-object order of transitive sentences: You are a bitch. But in American Sign Language, as you can see below, the sentence would more probably go like this: YOU BITCH YOU. There’s no verb. But the subject occurs twice, at the beginning and the end. This most definitely isn’t English, but it’s still grammar—standard grammar for ASL.
The point here is just that ASL, like any signed language, is a fully formed language with its own rules, distinct from the spoken languages around it. And this gives it an expressive power that far surpasses speech-accompanying gestures like the Bird. And signers swear. There’s been surprisingly little research on the profanity of American Sign Language—or any other signed language for that matter. But here’s what little we do know about swearing in sign, largely taken from the primary resource on the topic, a paper by Gene Mirus of Gallaudet University and colleagues.27
YOU BITCH YOU in ASL. Source: Jolanta Lapiak.
Physical characteristics are fair game. Many English speakers are shocked when they first learn how casually Mexican Spanish speakers describe people by their physical characteristics. If you have a high body-mass index, you might well be nicknamed gordo (“fatty”). If you have exceptionally large ears, people might call you antenas (“antennas”). The same is true in American Sign Language. As Mirus and colleagues put it, “An ASL signer might pick someone out by their large nose, acned skin, or asymmetrically placed eyes. . . . This is perfectly acceptable behavior; it is not rude or even politically incorrect, regardless of the situation.”28 So taboo language in ASL doesn’t typically derive from these sources, unlike in English.
Audiological status can be inflammatory. Many of our most profane expressions are terms that describe groups of people. One group that ASL signers find socially important enough to have slurs for is hearing people. For example, there’s a sign in ASL for HEARING in which the index finger makes circles in front of the lips, perhaps to indicate that hearing people communicate by moving their lips. There’s also an insult built off this sign, in which you take the index finger and move it up to the forehead to signify THINK-LIKE-A-HEARING-PERSON. According to Mirus and colleagues, this sign is derogatory and degrading.29
How you sign it makes a sign taboo. Many profane signs can also be used in nonprofane ways. For example, the sign PUSSY (which we’ll discuss more in a moment) looks almost identical to the sign VAGINA—same hand shape, same location. They’re distinguished only in that the former is produced with “a quick, sharp movement and sometimes an angry (or perhaps joking, depending on the situation) facial expression.”30
Finally, signs are pretty iconic, but it’s complicated. Gestures tend to be more iconic than the words of spoken languages and more transparently so: they’re more likely to look the way they look because of what they mean. So are signs. Even if all you know about American Sign Language is BITCH, BASTARD, and YOU, you might already have a pretty good sense of how arbitrary its signs are. Some, like YOU, which you’ve just seen, are not at all arbitrary. Many other ASL signs are similarly not only iconic but transparently so.31 This is especially true of profane signs. On the next page you’ll see the signs FUCK and PUSSY in ASL. I’ve left them unlabeled to let you experience for yourself precisely how iconic they are or aren’t.
A sign in ASL. Source: Jolanta Lapiak.
Another sign in ASL. Source: Jolanta Lapiak.
I presume you had no trouble ascertaining which is PUSSY and which is FUCK. The iconicity of PUSSY would be hard to miss. Remember, for this sign to be PUSSY and not VAGINA, it needs to be accompanied by the right movement and facial expression. In contrast to PUSSY, you might have trouble seeing why FUCK looks the way it does. It may help to know that in this sign, as elsewhere in ASL, the outstretched index and middle finger represent legs.
While PUSSY is quite transparently iconic, other signs, like BITCH and BASTARD, are less obvious. What BITCH denotes—an aggressive or unpleasant person—doesn’t superficially have anything to do with touching the palm of the hand to the chin. Same with BASTARD and the forehead. And yet, the forms of these signs aren’t entirely arbitrary. If you happen to know a lot of American Sign Language, you might have noticed that BITCH and BASTARD actually make sense in terms of how the rest of the language uses space systematically. Signs in ASL for females, like GIRL, MOTHER, AUNT, and so on, tend to involve touching the chin. And signs for males, like BOY, FATHER, UNCLE, and the like, tend to involve touching the forehead.
BOY in ASL. Source: Jolanta Lapiak.
GIRL in ASL. Source: Jolanta Lapiak.
Why? The historical explanation is iconic. The sign BOY originates in touching the brim of a cap, at the forehead. And GIRL comes from the placement of a bonnet string under the chin. Generalization from this pattern may have introduced a local systematicity into the signs of ASL. Just as gl-words in English tend to have meanings related to light or vision, and just as profane English words are more likely to be closed monosyllables, ASL has its own systematicities, based on its own conventions and its own history of iconicity. BITCH and BASTARD are consistent with the rest of the system in where they’re placed: forehead for male, chin for female. Of course, that doesn’t make them any less arbitrary for someone who doesn’t already know the language—the sign BITCH is
no more or less inherently appropriate for its meaning than is the English word bitch. But iconicity and convention underlie even arbitrary-seeming signs.32
# $ % !
I started by selecting some signs from ASL because it’s the largest signed language indigenous to the United States and Canada, as well as the best documented. The number of people who currently use ASL is unknown; reasonable estimates range from about 100,000 to about 500,000 signers.33 But ASL is just one of the hundreds of signed languages around the world: French Sign Language, Mexican Sign Language, British Sign Language (BSL), and Japanese Sign Language are just a few of the larger and better-studied ones.34 And most of these languages are unrelated. British Sign Language, for instance, developed along a totally separate track from American Sign Language (which itself derived from a nineteenth-century form of French Sign Language).35
But because of their rampant iconicity, even totally unrelated signed languages show easily noted similarities. The sign PUSSY in British Sign Language—which, to reiterate, is totally unrelated to ASL—is identical to the sign PUSSY in American Sign Language. They’re both iconic and in the very same way. Slightly less similar are the ASL and BSL signs for FUCK. Compare the ASL sign we saw earlier with its BSL analog.
The two FUCKs exhibit clear differences. They use different handshapes: ASL uses closed fists with index and middle fingers extended, whereas the hands in BSL use open palms with a gap between the thumbs and the other fingers. The motion is also different. It’s hard to depict this in still images, but whereas FUCK in ASL uses a together-apart-together motion, the BSL version taps the hands together only once.
PUSSY in BSL. Source: Commanding Hands.
Are these two signs for FUCK still iconic, even if different in handshape and motion? Arguably, yes. Iconicity in signs can be just as nuanced as in gestures. FUCK in both BSL and ASL could be iconic by encoding something about the meaning of the sign in how each is articulated. The meaning of FUCK offers a bounty of details that the form of the sign could highlight and lots of ways to depict those details. The index and middle fingers can stand for legs, as in ASL. Or the gap between the thumb and index finger can represent a crotch, as it appears to do in BSL. Languages have latitude.
So just like in gesture, there appears to be rampant iconicity in signed languages. But as we’ve seen, this doesn’t mean that the world’s signed languages are identical. Languages choose how to encode meanings iconically. And even if those choices are all equally valid, once they’re made, they’re binding—people who learn the language come to take the shape and motion of those signs as given. And it couldn’t be otherwise; without settled, agreed-upon conventions, communication would be reduced to a game of charades. And to be sure, signers are doing something far more complex. Just like speakers of any spoken language, fluent signers can communicate efficiently about anything from the tax code to nanotubes. They can exhort, they can impel, they can request, and they can swear. And they do so—just as quickly as speakers of spoken languages36—because the signs of a signed language are just as fixed as the words of a spoken language. Signers use rules of grammar, some of them specific to profanity, just like speakers of spoken languages.37
FUCK in BSL. Source: Commanding Hands.
This brief introduction to profanity in the signing world should have revealed two things. First, there are striking similarities across totally unrelated signed languages due to iconicity. The contrast with spoken languages is stark. If you take two unrelated spoken languages—or distantly related languages—the words for similar concepts are likely to be quite different. As we already saw, English cunt doesn’t sound anything like Cantonese hai or Russian pizdá. Profane signs are far less arbitrary. And second, while the hundreds of signed languages across the globe are similar in their rampant iconicity, they differ markedly in exactly how individual signs look. This means that while a particular sign in one signed language might tempt the nonsigner to believe that signing is essentially pantomime, it’s anything but. Signed languages are conventional systems.
This means that knowing one signed language won’t allow you to understand the next one. At its core, BSL is quite different from ASL—so much so that they’re usually described as “mutually unintelligible”38—just like English and Chinese. When you compare signed languages, everything from the alphabets to the signs and the grammar can be different. For instance, Japanese Sign Language has a sign that’s produced by doing what looks like pointing two Birds at the person across from you and pumping them up and down in alternating thrusts. This sign—in Japanese Sign Language—isn’t the least bit profane. It means “brothers.” In fact, the raised middle finger in Japanese Sign Language doesn’t have any sort of taboo connotation. Its meaning might have a hint of iconicity, but the erect finger doesn’t represent a phallus so much as a person. In Japanese Sign Language, many signs for people involve extended fingers—MAN is the thumb, WOMAN is the pinkie, and so on. Critically, the extended middle finger is BROTHER. And, again through iconicity, multiple fingers represent multiple people. If you put these principles together, two extended middle fingers represent brothers in a way that’s both iconic and conventionalized.h
Thanks to Nozomi Tomita and So-One Hwang for bringing this example to my attention!
At the same time, like gesture systems, signed languages balance arbitrariness with iconicity. To say that two signed languages are totally different—because they have different histories, different signs, and so on—is only true to a point. In fact, in some ways signed languages are more similar than spoken languages can be to one another. Some native signers of ASL have reported to me that if you are a sufficiently clever and observant signer of ASL, you might do better with BSL than someone totally naive to signed languages. Some signs are similar due to iconicity. Some look superficially different but are motivated in a similar way by iconicity. Perhaps knowing how a signed language harnesses and uses iconicity helps you figure out what’s going on in a different language you don’t know at all, as long as it operates according to similar underlying principles. And iconicity may also help adult nonsigners learn signed languages.39
# $ % !
The vocal tract is only one of the channels that humans use to communicate. Most of what you can do with your mouth you can also do with your hands, and vice versa. But the different channels are not equivalent in fundamental and consequential ways. Using your hands and arms and the rest of your body to perform visible actions, whether gesturing or signing, affords different possibilities and imposes different constraints.
Iconicity is one way the channels differ. It’s hard to talk iconically about motion and shape using spoken words, but gesture and sign are particularly well equipped to do this because you can use your body to mark out movement through space and trace or recreate shapes. Hands can be contorted into various shapes; they can move in three dimensions with specific speed, dynamics, direction, and so on. Visible movements of the hands afford analog representations of far more of the world than words do. This appears to be the reason that both gestures and signs are generally less arbitrary than the words of spoken languages.
The verbal and manual channels differ in other ways that would lead someone using a spoken language to prefer one or the other in specific contexts. Obviously, there are conditions that make words inaudible and gestures unseeable. On the highway, for instance, the Bird might be the only way to get your message across. Conversely, sometimes undetectability increases the value of a word or gesture. A Bird can be crafted discretely, for example, at the back of a classroom behind a laptop in such a way that the intended audience of other students can see it but the hapless teacher at the front of the room cannot. Gestures and spoken words are processed via overlapping but somewhat distinct pathways in the brain,40 and it’s possible that these pathways give profane gestures more direct access to emotional reactions. And finally, because, as I mentioned earlier, gestures are largely not “on the record”—we take them less seriously as
communicative acts than words—they allow plausible deniability. A discrete middle finger scratch of the nose, the type that President Barack Obama has perfected, is ambiguous enough to leave the audience wondering, did he just mean to do that?
4
The Holy Priest with the Vulgar Tongue
Jacques Lordat is the most important neuroscientist you’ve probably never heard of. Born in 1773, he trained as a physician and then practiced medicine and served as a professor in Montpellier, France. But at the age of fifty-two, he suffered a devastating stroke. A stroke, as you might know, occurs when a blocked or leaky blood vessel reduces blood flow to part of the brain. Deprived of the oxygen that the blood carries, neurons in the affected region start to die off, and this can cause long-term impairments to the functions that rely on those cells. Lordat’s stroke apparently stemmed from a tonsil abscess that led to a blockage in the carotid artery,1 which brings blood to the front of the brain. And it left him unable to speak. But slowly and with effort, he began to heal himself (as physicians will). And throughout his recovery, even in the early days when his capacity for speech was decimated, he could still think lucidly. So when he eventually regained the ability to speak and write, he recorded for the scientific record not only the objective facts of his case but also the subjective experience of what it feels like to lose language due to brain insult. And he eventually used his expertise to lay out the first modern theory of how our brains produce language, a theory that’s still broadly recognizable in the contemporary scientific consensus nearly two centuries later.2 So, in short, he’s kind of a big deal.