Harvard psychology prof Steven Pinker has an interesting demo of this in one of his stump lectures on language an emotion. He recites fifty English swear words in raid succession. By the end of that minute the audience is cringing. Who could think a distinguished Harvard professor could go potty mouth like that? Pinkers point is that swearing is processed by an alternative language system deeply tied to emotion and can override normal language emotion.
P.S. Pinker has several video lectures on his website and one of them might have this demonstration.
The link doesn't contain the fifty English swear words in rapid succession, but I found interesting at which words he seems to fumble himself, eg. death and nigger (there, I said it), but that might just be observation bias. Still, he seems to have missed to list death as a principle category.
Weirdly enough, when he was demonstrating the Stroop test, I had absolutely no slowdown for cuss words; maybe 3x faster than when the text named a different color.
Agreed, I could name the colors for the swears as fast as the initial one where the word was the same as the color it was printed in.
Also there's a trick to doing the Stroop test where the colors don't match. Look just above the word and slightly out of focus, that way you're just naming the color of the blob instead of fighting yourself to read it.
This is actually a really awesome article, though poorly titled for the HN crowd. It is about brain research in brain injured individuals and how that impacts use of language:
Studies from people with different types of aphasia have delineated different brain regions that regulate different aspects of communication. Wernicke’s area is like a dictionary: it helps us to understand the meanings of the words we hear and to choose the words we want to use in a particular context. People with damage to this area can’t understand language, yet they can pronounce words and assemble sentences—it’s just that the sentences they come up with don’t make any sense. Broca’s area is in charge of producing sounds; people with damage to this area have trouble articulating words and sentences.
But both Wernicke’s aphasics and Broca’s aphasics, and even global aphasics, can swear. These swear words are coming from somewhere else in the brain, not the parts known to be responsible for generating the rest of language.
My ex husband didn't cuss -- at least, not until I stupidly corrupted him (I have a terrible potty mouth and it's a long story). We knew this was completely sincere and not some sort of affectation because when our oldest son accidentally stepped on his dad's junk once when his dad was in a dead sleep on the living room floor, he woke up making cartoon sweary noise (a la "rassum frassum mrrrfff").
Matlab had a f##k command. On the prompt, it returned "your place or mine"... Then, in V4, it returned "this command is obsolete". Then it was gone in V5.
Speaking of "fuck" I read a paper in the 80s (unfortunstally I've lost it -- it was back when papers were, well, printed on paper) that analyzed why you can say "fan-fucking-tastic: but not "fantas-fucking-tick".
I wish I could find it again -- I'd surely understand it better now.
Three days ago I was scanning Unicode (looking for useful characters for a roguelike, as one does), came across the metrical triseme (⏗), tetraseme (⏘) and pentraseme (⏙) in the Miscellaneous Symbols section, and added them to wikipedia. As far as I could ascertain, these are used to indicate scansion - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scansion#Other_symbols - which is apparently primarily a term used to describe rhythm and meter in a poetic context. However, the Expletive infixation page uses the alternate term prosody in perhaps more of a formal linguistic sense. PS: prosody & scansion. Certainly on the cryptic crossword one of these decades...
Can I ask what library you use for your roguelikes? Last time I was working with ncurses, I found it doesn't support unicode, and wncurses isn't well support on the Mac.
I use a few libraries. The roguelike one I use is rotLove[0] for LÖVE[1] for Lua[2], which is a port of rot.js[3], which is itself a libtcod[4] port. However, fonts are handled by LÖVE. I have a bug filed with them right now where Chinese text crashes though, so I wouldn't call it ultra stable. Then again, it's just a fun project to learn Lua, so I'm not in a hurry.
Didn't this happen for spellings in various ortography reforms? I think german had the largest one in recent years and iirc there was a deprecation period for old spellings.
An English spelling reform would be a blessing but almost certainly isn't going to happen. And even if something would work it probably would lead to more fun akin to color-colour.
Is it because 'tick' is a word? Or because it's nicer to have 1-2-2 syllables rather than 2-2-1? Or because 'tic' is the least stressed syllable in the word 'fantastic'? And the middle syllable is the most stressed, so preceding it with 'fucking' feels nicer?
Intuitively, I'd expect it to be because it's much easier to transition from the position of the tongue during the 'n' sound of fantastic to the 'f' sound of fucking than the transition from the 's' in fantastic to the 'f' in fucking. It sort of rolls of the tongue easier.
I discovered cussing late in life due to my upbringing, and I've been making up for lost time ever since.
As someone once eloquently put it, trying to negotiate a compromise or agreement with someone without signalling that strong emotions are involved is a form of self censorship that is self-destructive. If the person you're talking to doesn't know how you feel about something why would they ever honor your concerns?
At about the same time I read this I was trying to reject the notion that there are magic words that can force other people into an emotional state. Why do we let other people control how we feel? That's bullshit. I am my own person and unless we're discussing a matter of public policy (you are denigrating an entire group of people on purpose or through carelessness), if what you say upsets me then that's my baggage, not yours. It would be nice if you were sympathetic, but that power dynamic needs to be broken, and pretending it doesn't exist by censoring yourself makes you an Enabler, in the language of Codependency.
It took me another ten years to realize that I still get emotionally hooked on other people's mostly innocuous word use. It's the basis of marketing and persuasive speaking, and in many ways the person swearing is being far, far more up front and honest with you about what they're trying to do to your head.
It's unprofessional, but not unhelpful or unarticulated. A close friend of mine and her mother are both linguists, both professionals (one a speech pathologist, one an editor), both highly articulate and highly educated. They both swear a lot, except in professional settings. They love words, and the speech path in particular loves shakespeare, poetry, and constantly has a book in her hand (these days, more an e-book).
Swearing is only unarticulate if you saturate your speech with it.
As for the unprofessional part, that's got its edge-cases as well. I used to work in support for an agricultural telemetry company, and the primary clients were farmers. They'd call up with a problem, and usually they'd swear as part of their normal speech. I found that if I wasn't responding in kind, it would sometimes make the client self-conscious and make the trouble-shooting harder. So, torn between being professional and being pragmatic, my solution was to swear one 'step' less than the client. If they said 'shit', I didn't swear at all. If they were saying 'fuck', I would go as far as 'shit'. If they were saying 'cunt', I'd go to 'fuck'. It worked quite well, and removed a barrier to building that rapport need to work support efficiently.
There is a certain art to truly inventive swearing. Farming seems to be an exceptionally fertile ground for salty phrasing, colorfully descriptive word-images, obscene suggestions, and disturbing juxtapositions. I think all of my favorites I learned tinkering on broken-down tractors - although the Quebecois loggers and truck drivers added a certain Catholo-Gallic leavening.
I don't think it is unprofessional on face value. In fact, every 'professional (what does that even mean)' I have known curses.
If all you do is curse and never explain an idea, then it is simply a defense mechanism to not knowing what you're talking about. But, cursing is a great to way provide extra emotion to a topic. "The user experience is bad" vs. "The user experience is shit" does add value. But use shit, and if you add steaming pile on there really conveys that it is not just bad, but worse than bad.
Neither example is very descriptive and thus not helpful. Using cusswords only puts the other people in an emotional frame of mind, which hinders rational thinking that would otherwise help correct the problem, but I suppose this also depends what exactly the discussion is about. If you're talking about a marketing campaign that is intended to appeal to emotion, then sure, "It sucks" conveys the emotion. If you're talking about packaging logistics, "It sucks" isn't any more helpful than "It's bad". Also, bear in mind that, depending on who you're talking to, some people may secretly harbor less respect from you. People notice when you cuss, esp. if you usually don't. It shapes their perceptions of you.
That said, I do wonder how much tolerance society has for cussing now since many people are starting to accept it as normal. It's as if people are left with the emotional attachment without the actual meaning. How many people here thinking of what "fuck" actually means when they hear the word? Or are you just stuck with the negative connotation?
I can't help but wonder if this is because of how english swear words get adapted into other languages.
It's not uncommon to hear variations of english swear words in my language.. even printed in the newspaper or children's books.. nobody thinks twice about it.. but our native swear words take on a different tone and meaning altogether.
Maybe this could contribute to why it's easier to swear in english? (the words not holding the same type of gravity/meaning)
I'm kind of surprised HN doesn't implement censorship of swear words. Also I worked at a company where Fuck was dropped all the time. I'm not sure why people think it's unprofessional.
What is the appropriate age to begin using profanity? If I'm out at a restaurant with my "brogrammer" friends, and a mom with kids is at the next table, is swearing inconsiderate, or OK?
>What is the appropriate age to begin using profanity?
Any age, just don't let your parents hear you. It was a hilarious and harmless way to blow off steam when we were in kidergarten to swear like truckers.
> If I'm out at a restaurant with my "brogrammer" friends, and a mom with kids is at the next table, is swearing inconsiderate, or OK?
All swearing reveals to me is that you're inarticulate, vulgar, don't respect others, and are probably of low birth. Hahaha, JK. I love swearing and most of my favorite people swear a lot.
P.S. Pinker has several video lectures on his website and one of them might have this demonstration.