Filthy English, page 39
These old parts of our brain that are linked to swearing include the basal ganglia and the limbic system. The idea is that in TS, these structures are dysfunctional. Attention focuses on a particular part of the limbic system, the amygdalae – a matched pair of almond-shaped clusters of neurons, one for each hemisphere, about an inch in from the area behind the ears.
Diana Van Lancker Sidtis is Professor of Speech-Language Pathology and Audiology at NYU Steinhardt. Among other things, she’s stimulated the amygdalae of macaque monkeys – with a small, painless electrical impulse. She got exactly the result I expect she expected. The monkeys ‘vocalized’. That is, they made a noise, a meaningless, involuntary sound just like the compulsive swearing of people with TS. Or try another experiment. Wire some people up, with receptor probes in their amygdalae. Then swear at them. Their amygdalae light up almost instantly.
Professor Van Lancker Sidtis’s view is that TS swearing comes out of the limbic system. In particular, there has been some kind of damage to the basal ganglia. This is the area of the brain that inhibits us. It’s the traffic lights to primitive urges. It makes sure we do stuff in the right place at the right time by stopping us from doing stuff in the wrong place at the wrong time. Damage to it is linked to obsessive-compulsive disorder and foreign accent syndrome (FAS) – in which people who have had some kind of brain injury or insult start talking in a new accent. The important thing is that they have no idea that their accent has changed and are often ostracized by neighbours who think it’s an affectation. It’s an extremely rare condition but perhaps indicative.
In 1999, an American woman called Judi Roberts had a stroke and lost all speech. When it came back, she had acquired an English accent – though claims that she had also taken to using English slang are probably wrong. She was diagnosed and studied by Jack Ryalls, professor of communicative disorders at the University of Central Florida†. I got in touch with Professor Ryalls. He linked the accent change to vocal tract posture, citing the work of British phonetician Peter Ladefoged who says that British vowels are tenser, shorter and more clipped than their American English versions. ‘This is how that woman’s higher voice and different vowels may both be explained by changes in muscular tension in speech muscles.’ A far more common type of FAS in the US, though, he added, is to ‘Eastern European’ or ‘Scandinavian’. Or rather, something that sounds like that to the listener, partly because aphasics have a tendency to drop articles and prepositions – as do Russian and other eastern European languages.
When Linda Walker of Newcastle had a stroke, her accent changed, from Geordie to Jamaican perhaps or maybe Italian or Slovak, French Canadian even. Different people perceived her accent differently. As with Judi Roberts, the brain insult had affected the way she shaped her mouth when talking. Her brain had changed the instructions she was sending to the complex mix of various muscle groups – lips, tongue, vocal cords – that produce the sound that is speech. That creates our accent. That makes us sound like ourselves. Jack Ryalls: ‘Basically, I think we hear a “foreign accent” because of a “gestalt” phenomenon. Our brains have a whole lot more experience “hearing” foreign accents, than they do hearing very slight motor speech disorders from brain damage.’
Why do people with TS and aphasia swear? Because, it seems, the usual control mechanisms are damaged or at least dysfunctional. There is, in Dieguez and Bogousslavsky’s words, ‘disinhibition’ of ‘emotional-automatic speech’. The censor has gone. This is pretty much what Freud speculated in his prepsychoanalysis days. In 1891, he wrote that swearing in aphasia results from ‘functional retrogression (dis-involution) of a highly organized apparatus and therefore corresponds to earlier states of its functional development’. Which is the shortest of steps to Freud’s theory of psychological repression. We don’t swear because society doesn’t like it, because our parents don’t like it, because the parents and society we’ve stuffed into our own brain – or had stuffed into our own brain – don’t like it.
Why, though, do people with TS say ‘fuck’ rather than, say, say ‘fish’? Because it’s taboo. ‘Coprolalia in TS is not merely the uttering of dirty words; it is a behaviour far more deeply integrated into a speaker’s experiences and personality,’ wrote Timothy Jay. Fuck! and shit! Those are the kind of words he’s writing about – the same sort of language that is all that’s left to aphasics. Or rather, these words are representatives of the only thoughts left them. Primitive, gut-level expressions about … well, about what exactly? Jay again: ‘The connotative function of curse words is essential for speech because it provides information about feelings and emotional states that other words do not.’ Touretters say they get more relief from real swearing than pretend swearing. ‘Fuck!’ feels better than ‘Fiddlesticks!’ Swearing is, in good part, the baby inside us all, the primitive man or woman behind the public face. It’s the way all those old bits of our brains get to appear in public. And imposing them on others. ‘The common denominator of taboo words is the act of forcing a disagreeable thought on someone,’ wrote Steven Pinker. Their power is also rooted in their magical qualities. As Ferenczi saw, they have a physicality that other words don’t. When we say ‘Fuck you!’ to someone we are conjuring up the act itself – even, probably, if we are only doing it jokingly. What exactly is being conjured up? Not a pleasant interlude of intercourse, I think. More likely rape or buggery. Some etymologists have seen links with both those acts in the historical antecedents of the word ‘fuck’ – while Pinker sees the fuck in ‘fuck you’ as a modern, secular substitute for its religious predecessor ‘damn you’.
Taboo words make us respond emotionally whether we like it or not. Psychologist Don MacKay did a clever little experiment of getting people to read out lists of words where the ink colour changes from word to word. As you can imagine, we do it more slowly when the word ‘red’ is printed in green. Next he gave people a second list and asked them to name the ink colours. This list had words such as cunt, shit, fuck, tits, piss, asshole. People did it more slowly than they did with a list of neutral words. Of course they did. They were making an internal, quite involuntary gasp – which held them up and slowed down their reading speed.
So swearing of one kind or another is a human universal and deeply rooted in the deepest depths of our brains. Which suggests it must be pretty important for us. So, swearing, what is it good for? Applied linguist Ruth Wajnryb’s idea is that it is health-affirming, usefully cathartic. This is how she sees it working. We feel stressed – emotionally or neurologically, it’s ultimately the same thing. We shout ‘fuck’. As Tourette’s swearers do when they swear, we feel better. Autocatharsis, this is sometimes called. A 2009 study by Richard Stephens of Keele University found that swearing really did seem to reduce pain. Cursing subjects could keep their hands in ice water longer than non-cursing ones – though the study lacked the obvious control group of non-swearing shouters. In her study of male-female swearing at Leicester University, Claudia Berger writes that ‘swearing has a relief-purifying-pacifying effect’. As she also showed, there’s little truth in the old saw that says men swear while women cry – i.e. for the same cathartic reason.
Ashley Montagu suggests that ‘potentially noxious energy is converted into a form that renders it comparatively innocuous’. It’s an acceptable way of expressing anger. Which should mean, I guess, that more public swearing should lower levels of violence. I see no evidence for that in Soho of a Friday night. On the other hand, it’s possible that more swearing means less power for individual swear words. Neuropsychologists have a concept that maybe backs up the idea that repetition of a word affects its capacity to contain meaning. It’s called jamais vu and you can demonstrate it to yourself right now by repeating the experiment done in 2006, by Chris Moulin, a psychologist at the University of Leeds. He got 92 of the usual psychology experiment subjects, psychology undergraduates, and asked them to write the same word over and over again, for two minutes. One of his predictions for the experiment was that the more familiar the word, the stronger the jamais vu effect. It was. The words’ meanings did fall apart for the subjects. Two-thirds of the subjects said they started ‘feeling peculiar’. One, asked to write door, said: ‘They begin to lose their meaning the more you look at them. They seem just like a string of letters instead of a whole word.’ Another subject, asked to write ‘room’, said: ‘Began to look like a shape, not letters.’
It’s true that some swearing is clearly and – fairly – simply neurological. But there’s more to swearing than simple neurology or tension-reduction. It is, in good measure, under our control. We choose to swear or not. Even Tourette’s swearers do. Of all the words they could choose to use repetitively, these are the ones they have chosen. I hit my hand with a hammer. It hurts. I express that hurt with a word. So far, so simple. But why that word? When I said ‘fuck’, I didn’t know I was saying ‘fuck’. I had, though, used it in an appropriate circumstance. So I had already learned its significance. Most likely, I’d heard someone else hurt themselves and say it. I’d heard the emotion in it. Then, some time later and alone, I’d seconded it.
How does that relate to TS coprolaliacs? Well, they don’t just use any old words. They use offensive ones. Wherever they are in the world, their language busts local taboos. A Japanese coprolaliac doesn’t shout ‘fuck’. There wouldn’t be any point. So compulsive though their swearing undoubtedly is, it’s also mediated. Timothy Jay: ‘The child who develops TS reveals forbidden psychological and cultural anxieties in [his or her] coprolalia.’
I think it’s precisely because they are swear words, because they are taboo, because they are forbidden. That’s where the significance of swear words lies. It’s the taboo that holds the words’ power, not the words that express the taboo’s power. When we construct a taboo we are protecting a word’s significance – or, rather, the concept signified by the word. It’s not the hiding itself that’s important, it’s the demonstration of the hiding. If you really want to hide something, you don’t just hide it, you hide its hiding. With taboos, you don’t. Taboos are ways of hiding that draw attention to what’s hidden. Robbers are, sensibly, drawn to buildings which have the word ‘bank’ on them in big letters. So we are drawn, ineluctably, to marking as taboo certain things which are of great importance to us. No significance: no taboo.
Swearing is also a social thing. (In a way, even my solitary ‘fuck’ was social – one part of me swearing at or for another part of me.) A 2007 study by Baruch and Jenkins of the management department at the University of East Anglia found that swearing was regularly used ‘to express and reinforce solidarity among staff, enabling them to express their feelings, such as frustration, and develop social relationships’. Among ‘lower level’ staff, anyway – ‘executives’ apparently didn’t feel the need. As so often, organizational power confers psychological benefits.’ There’s a classic study of swearing and sociability. It’s true it is a tiny one but it’s certainly indicative. It was done on a boat expedition to arctic Norway by eight members of Hull University’s zoology department. The paper, by Dr Helen E. Ross, was published in 1960, as Patterns of Swearing. She found strong links between swearing, social bonding and stress. When a sub-group broke off for a separate journey, those left behind started swearing more – solidarity through swearing to reduce stress. The longer the separation, the lower the level of swearing. When women spent more time with sweary men, they swore more. The expedition’s leader, R. G. B. Brown also wrote a paper, commenting on Ross’s paper. He noted that at extreme levels of stress, speech of any kind declined to virtually nothing and that the few words left were mostly swears. Shortly before 2 p.m. on Tuesday, 31 March 2009, a Super Puma helicopter returning from an oil rig crashed into the North Sea, fourteen miles off the coast of Scotland. All sixteen passengers and crew died. The pilot’s final message was ‘Mayday, mayday, oh fuck …’
Swearing is not just something we do lightly. It runs through our brains from the ancient depths to the most complex, most modern parts. It’s social, cultural, emotional, neurological. It sits at the very heart of what it means to be our self, what we think of ourselves, how we think of ourselves. We use it to express emotion (thought, too, of a simple kind) and we use it to create, sustain and nurture social bonds – from saying to a good friend ‘How you doing, you cunt?’ to not saying that to an ageing aunt. The essentials of existence are all there: sex (and its attendant body parts), excretion (plus its attendant body parts and products), hatred (and its half-siblings, envy and love). We have always sworn. We will always swear. (To those who claim they don’t, I have just three words to say: pants! fiddlesticks! and **********!) Swearing is a central part of what it is to be human – which means being an individual caught in a social web, with a brain and mind that spend their days and nights mediating between a primeval underworld and a twenty-first-century topping.
Which leads us, the way thoughts about what it means to be human so often do, to Darwin. In The Descent of Man (1874), he posed one of his seemingly simple but really clever questions: how do you get from the basic, unvarying noises that many animals utter to the staggeringly complex and constantly changing noise that we call language? Or to make the leap a little smaller, from our cousin primates’ mating calls to our endlessly varied lexicons of loving which, as C. S. Lewis pointed out, bounce around between the nursery, the gutter and the anatomy class?
Language started some thirty thousand or more years ago – writing followed twenty thousand years later. Neanderthals may or may not have been able to talk but their physiology would certainly have afforded them a far more restricted range of sounds than we can produce. The jury’s out on Cro-Magnons, too. So how did language start? There have been various theories over the years. Danish linguist Otto Jespersen grouped them into five types. One, bow-wow – the idea that language emerged from onomatopoeic imitation of sounds in the natural world. Two, poo-poo – it came from instinctive interjections, like ‘oooh’, ‘aah’ etc. Three, ding-dong – from spontaneous sounds in reaction to environment, with the (to my mind unlikely) example of the word mama being related to the opening of a baby’s mouth as it nears the breast. Four, yo-he-ho – from newly collaborative hominids grasping the productiveness of communal work which, in turn, led to communal work-enhancing grunts and, eventually, the oohs and ahs of Sam Cooke’s ‘Chain Gang’. Five, la-la – Jespersen’s own theory, that language arose from the need for emotional expression. Darwin was, essentially, a poo-pooist. For him – and some modern cognitive neuroscientists – the evolutionary missing link in the emergence of language was ‘vocalized outbursts’. Swearing, that is. The idea is, quite simply, that language started with what language itself has enabled us to categorize as cursing, profanity, dirty words, swearing etc.
In other words, first there was the word and the word was ‘fuck’ – which wasn’t exactly my first word but it was in there among the first few thousand. As I noted earlier, this is true for all children, swears being among the first words they all learn – even if their parents don’t know or notice. Personal experience would, I guess, make me a la-la-poo-pooist – need to communicate emotion produces vocalized outburst. Swearing as the begetter of all language: it’s a quite unprovable proposition, of course, but it’s the only suggestion I’ve seen that pays such eloquent tribute to swearing’s ubiquity and universality.
*
So what about that archetypal, incontinent swearer at the Arsenal match? What happened after he’d had enough of watching such a patently rubbish, league-topping team? At last, as he single-filed his friends down the steps to the vomitorium, I could see him rather than merely just hear him. He was middle-aged, slightly overweight, with a roll to his shoulders and a mid-brown zip-up jacket. At least, that’s how he appeared to the naked eye. Who he really was at that moment, though, that’s a quite different question. I doubt if he was the same man he saw in the mirror as he’d shaved that morning.
This version of him was something quite different, more like a two-year-old caught in a tantrum, quite unable to see beyond or escape the emotional waves lifting and surfing him into incoherence. As I put it earlier, swear word = regular word + emotion. Even if he wasn’t exactly clear about the emotions he was expressing he was certainly expressing them. Or, at least, the baby inside him was. The baby, that is, that’s closer to the primitive, ancient parts of our brain, most of them pre-human. This swearing man – and that little baby inside – was telling us the really important stuff about himself. But a two-year-old caught in a tantrum isn’t really a two-year-old. It’s a tiny baby – three months old, say – who has been blessed with the powers of speech and locomotion. Or cursed. I found myself thinking: on a chill Saturday afternoon, tiny babies don’t really belong in the upper tier at a football stadium, they should be at home with their mums.
As we left, stewards blocked us from taking the nearest staircase. Behind them, a window had been broken. The floor was dusted with bits of glass. Broken by the swearing man, I’m certain.
† A well-known analyst once lamented socially to a friend of mine: ‘All those years of people talking to me about shitting and fucking. I’m not sure how much more of it I can take.’
† I checked him out at ratemyprofessors.com. The first comment said: ‘Don’t listen to the rumors. He’s a really nice person once you get to know him (he’s a bit on the sarcastic side). He definitely knows his stuff.’
