Word: swearing
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...publishers really thought they'd lose money on it. I also hadn't prepared for an older audience, but people with gray hair were reading it. That was unsettling because of all the cursing in the book. I was like, "Oh no, Uncle Fred is going to know I swear!" But I can't complain. I did warn Zeitoun, though. I said, "You have to know what you're getting into. This book might be huge, or it might go nowhere at all. You just never know...
That's probably because humans are hardwired to swear cathartically, says Steven Pinker, a Harvard psychologist and author of The Stuff of Thought, an exploration of the psychology of language. Pinker distinguishes cathartic cursing from using profanity descriptively, idiomatically, abusively or for emphasis, and points to similar behavior in animals that suggests its evolutionary roots. If you step on a dog or cat's tail, it will let out a sharp yelp of pain, for example. "Swearing probably comes from a very primitive reflex that evolved in animals," Pinker says. "In humans, our vocal tract has been hijacked...
...part of the brain that accounts for the urge to swear - or yelp, in the case of animals - is deep within, suggesting its primitiveness. Studies of non-human primates show that vocalization is nearly always attributed to subcortical processes in the brain, in those regions that control primal, raw emotions, says Diana Van Lancker Sidtis, a professor of speech language pathology and audiology at New York University. In humans too, the urge to swear likely stems from primitive parts, but it is usually overridden by commands from the brain's more complex cortex - the abundant gray matter on which humans...
...before you go yelling four-letter words at every turn, consider this: in Stephens' study, swearing reduced the perception of pain more strongly in women than in men. That may be because in daily life "men swear more than women," says Pinker, which could have the unfortunate side effect of dulling the natural painkiller. "[For women] I suspect that swearing retains more of an emotional punch because it has not been overused," he says...
...That's one of the reasons that I think people should not overuse profanity in their speech and writing," says Pinker. "That's not because I'm a prude, but because it blunts [swear words] of their power when you do need them. You should save them for just the right occasions...