(Abusive) Language

It has been a long damn year. But you know what, studies show may help ease your pain? Swearing. 😉

Though, be careful with what you speak. You can take back money that you gave but you can’t take back words that you spoke.

Language is an extremely powerful tool which has united the whole human race under an umbrella of unity where anyone from everywhere can understand and communicate with each other and debate about their various views, issues and social stigmas.

In this era of endless squabbling over what is or is not offensive, a corner of academia has been pursuing the language that we pretty much all agree is not polite — studying the syntax of sentences like “F-ck you” on the same college campuses where students are being safeguarded by trigger warnings.

Let some social scientists tell it and the way profanity affects us reveals elements of our nature as evolutionary beings, I sh-t you not. “If you don’t study this kind of language,” says psychologist Timothy Jay, “you’re missing an important part of being a human.”

Gosh, swearing is so fun right !-Opinion of some delusional teenagers.

If you’re offended by some of the words you’ve read so far, it’s par for the coarse. Your sensibilities give these strings of letters their potency. “We’re told that these are words, early on, that you can’t say. We punish people for saying them,” says cognitive scientist Benjamin Bergen, who explores profanity-related research in his new book What the F. “So we’re training kids, socially, that these words are powerful.” (On the other hand, our politicians and leaders tend to use these words for dramatic effect and political influence).

During his career at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts, Jay has recorded and analyzed thousands of people swearing, and he’s come up with two core reasons for why we do it. For one, it allows us to express our emotions, to vent, to release. “It also communicates very effectively, almost immediately, our feelings,” Jay says. “And other words don’t do that.”

If you are feeling excited you want to say F*ck, If you feel sad you want to say F*ck if you feel angry you want to say F*ck. It’s as if this word expresses that very emotion in words that no other word has the ability to do.

The utterance of a single f-word can convey the state of a person—whether they are angry, upset, excited, surprised or aroused—and the intensity of that state. Because we learn early on that profanity is too strong feelings what blaring horns are to a tornado, the body becomes conditioned to physically respond to it. “Your pores open and you start sweating. Your heart rate increases. Your pupils dilate,” says Bergen, who teaches classes about profanity at the University of California, San Diego. “You experience this fight or flight reaction.” Research has found that reading and writing profane words have an emotional effect on people, he says, but not nearly as much as saying and hearing them does.

F*CK YOU. -That felt good didn’t it. We have trained our minds to feel more relaxed and less tense when we express our emotions through swear words.

Like any powerful tool, these words can be used “for constructive or destructive purposes,” Bergen says. They are generally inspired by taboo-ridden domains: sex (“f-ck”), bodily functions (“sh-t”), religion (“hell”) and words describing other groups people (the n-word). The words in the final category tend toward the destructive because “they really are built to offend, to cause harm, to divide and to denigrate,” Bergen says. In studies, Americans rate those group-based swear words as the most offensive.

Swearing is extremely useful as well though. When researchers observed how people dealt with the pain of submerging their hands in icy water, they found that people could withstand more discomfort if they repeated a swear word, rather than a non-swear word. Scientists have also found that unlike most sounds we utter, cussing can happen in both voluntary and involuntary ways. The latter—like when we drop our keys in the snow and yell “F-ck” without consciously deciding to—offer evidence that language isn’t just produced one way in the brain. That has clinical and research implications, says Bergen, and it may tell us something about why we came to communicate as we do.

It also suggests that these emotionally charged words can become so deeply ingrained in us that uttering them toes the line of being a physical act rather than a symbolic one, more like a sneeze than a sentence. “When you say them,” Jay says, “you feel something.”

A tingling in the stomach, an exhilarating thrill, a skipping of a beat and relief.

Those strong feelings drive some people to try to stamp profanity out. After cable news networks played the infamous video of Donald Trump saying he grabs women “by the pussy,” about two dozen people filed indecency complaints with the Federal Communication Commission—which regulates the use of profanity on public airwaves—according to records obtained by Morning Consult. “Some consumers are easily offended,” a lawyer interviewed by Morning Consult said, “while others have a high tolerance for what is being shown on television.”

The Paki awaam enjoin more in swearing than any other activity as far as I have seen in my short lived life.

People with larger vocabularies can actually generate more swear words than people with smaller ones.

Also, It is worthy to discuss at length the fact that “F-ck you” seems to disprove one of the fundamental rules we learn in school: that a grammatical sentence needs to have a subject (you is the object of f-ck but it remains unclear who is performing the action someone wishes you to receive)

For all we don’t know, one thing is clear that as every language evolves so does the swear words that are in existence because swear words are one of the few things that the whole human race cherishes and enjoins in using against each other or for other ingenious causes. (wink wink)

Reference:
http://time.com/4602680/profanity-research-why-we-swear/

A different language is a different vision of life ~  Federico Fellini.