Planet Word

by J. P. Davidson

  Jay sees an evolutionary advantage to swearing as well. ‘We’re the only animal that can express these emotions symbolically, so we can say “fuck you” instead of hitting you or biting you. Three-year-olds, before they really learn how to say “I hate you” or “fuck you”, will bite you and scratch you. But when we learn how to use language to express that emotion, that primitive animal anger goes away.’

  The idea that swearing is both evolutionarily and developmentally primitive is also being explored by linguist Steven Pinker. He argues that swearing and linguistic taboos tap into the workings of the deepest, most ancient part of our brains. He likens these deep brain responses to that of, say, a dog’s brain: bumping your head and yelling out an expletive is the same as a dog yelping suddenly when you step on its tail – a sort of canine curse. ‘Cathartic swearing,’ he says, ‘comes from a primal rage circuit, in which an animal that is frustrated, confined or hurt erupts in a furious struggle accompanied by an angry noise, presumably to startle and intimidate an attacker. Some neuroscientists have even revived Darwin’s suggestion that verbalised outbursts were the evolutionary missing link between primate calls and human languages.’

  Coprolalia

  Clearly many of us like to swear, even if we disguise it as a minced oath. But there are some people who have no choice in the matter – they have to swear. Uncontrollable, often foul words erupt from them; the urge to speak the unspeakable impossible to deny. They have a condition called coprolalia (from the Greek kopros – faeces – and lalia – talk), a disorder which we probably associate most with Tourette’s syndrome – although only around 15 per cent of Tourette’s sufferers have involuntary coprolalia.

  The inappropriate language seems to vary from culture to culture, depending on the different taboos. So in Catholic Brazil you’ll get references to the Holy Mother; in Asian cultures, where the family is honoured, you get outbursts like ‘shitty grandma’ or ‘aunt fucker’. Most English-speaking Touretter’s say the same sort of things – ‘fuck, shit, hell, cunt’ – and they don’t usually use euphemisms. It’s the socially inappropriate words that they can’t put a brake on.

  Jess Thom has suffered physical and verbal ‘ticks’ since she was a small girl. The physical ticks are unpredictable and exhausting; the verbal ones involuntary and socially difficult. It’s a bit like having a jack-in-the-box in the brain, on such a strong spring that it’s forever breaking its latch and popping out at the most inopportune moments. Jess goes through phases with words – swear ones as well as random day-to-day ones. Today her recurring involuntary word – apart from ‘fuck’ – is ‘biscuit’, with the occasional ‘Happy Christmas’ thrown in. She describes her earliest memories of having Tourette’s.

  ‘I had noises. The first fuck noise I can remember was a squeaky one when I was about six. My ticks when I was younger and all through my childhood were much more motor and also much more mild fuck than they are now. Fuck. For lots of people Tourette’s gets better as they get older. Fuck. For me in adulthood and in my early twenties my ticks got much more noticeable to other people fuck, although the sensation for me biscuit didn’t change that much. Fuck.’

  Jess’s sentence construction is almost perfect – despite the constant involuntary interruptions. Listening to her, it’s clear that the considered sentence is coming from one part of her brain and the ‘biscuits’ and ‘fucks’ from another part. It’s as if there’s another person in the room, butting in on the conversation.

  ‘It’s going all the time biscuit, and my thoughts are clear. It doesn’t very often interrupt my thoughts … Sometimes my sort of thinking fuck sometimes it does. Sometimes I’ll be put off my train of thought by ticks. But very unusual though. Ha biscuit. Mostly I sort of know what I’m saying fuck fuck. What I don’t know that I’m saying, what I’m not choosing to say, is all the fuck, all the ticks which just sort of frustratingly interrupt. They’re not communicative. It’s sort of eighty per cent biscuit of the language I use doesn’t have a communicative purpose or intent. Fuck. Happy Christmas.’

  Jess’s family and friends have learned to pick their way through her sentences, zoning out the random words. She says they’re even able to distinguish an intended expletive from an involuntary one.

  ‘I was speaking to my dad on the phone fuck the other day, and he’s used to very rude swearing in our conversations constantly peppered with ticks but sort of understands them for what they are. Fuck. But then I used fuck to describe something. I said something was fucking something and he knew instantly and told me off and told me to mind my language. Fuck. And it really made me laugh ’cos it was like he hadn’t heard all the offensive words because he knew they were ticks and had no meaning, but as soon as I’d used something deliberately, he pulled me up on it.’

  Proof, if ever it was needed, that it’s not the words themselves that matter but where they come from.

  ‘Absolutely,’ agrees Jess. ‘I think lots of people misunderstand Tourette’s and say, “I wish I had Tourette’s, it could mean I could get away with swearing or it means I could say whatever I biscuit biscuit I could say whatever I wanted to.” The whole point is I can’t say whatever I want to. Lots of what I say I don’t want to say. It’s just there fuck and it’s biscuit biscuit biscuit Happy Christmas, but you know that doesn’t mean that I can’t articulate my thoughts and make myself understood. Fuck. Biscuit.’

  Deaf Tourette’s

  A fascinating addendum to verbal ticks is that there have been cases of deaf Tourette’s patients who swear compulsively in sign language. The medical journal Movement Disorders reported a case study from 2001 of a thirty-one-year-old man who was deaf from birth and who had motor and vocal tics as well as coprolalia.

  He would feel a compulsion to use the sign for ‘cunt’ (see Fig. 1) in contexts (grammatical and social) that were not appropriate. This is essentially the sign for the medical term ‘vagina’ except that the sign is pushed toward the person at whom it is aimed and accompanied by threatening body language and facial expression. The patient would then feel embarrassed about the compulsion and aim to disguise it as another sign. Commonly, this would be the sign for ‘petrol pump’ (see Fig. 2). This can also be used to symbolise a small watering can.

  Fig. 1

  Fig. 2

  This single case illustrates clearly that coprolalia in deaf and hearing people with GTS [Tourette’s] is not just a random utterance or gesture but one that conveys meaning and purpose.

  The Mechanics of Swearing

  The study of Jess and other Tourette’s patients is providing fascinating insights for neurologists trying to identify the mechanics of why we curse. Time for a bit of science.

  Around the edge of the brain’s cortex is the limbic system, a complex network of deep brain structures which is thought to control our motivation and our emotions. Interestingly the same structures can be found in the brains of evolutionary ancient animals like the alligator.

  On the outer layer of the brain is the neocortex, made up of folds of grey matter, which is responsible for higher functions like knowledge, conscious thought and reasoning. We process most of our language in the neocortex, but there are some words – curses and taboo words – which have strong emotional connotations (Timothy Jay’s emotional intensifiers), and these are processed in a part of the limbic system called the amygdale. The amygdale is an almond-shaped mass of neurons at the front of the temporal lobe of the brain that appears to gives our memories emotion. Studies have shown that, if the amygdale is stimulated electrically, animals respond with aggression. If it’s removed, the animals become tamer and don’t react to things that would normally have angered or frightened them. In humans, brain scans show the amygdale light up, i.e. become active, when the person is shown a card with an unpleasant word, especially a taboo word, written on it.

  ‘The response is not only emotional but involuntary,’ writes Steven Pinker in his article ‘Why We Curse. What the F***?’ ‘It’s not just that we don’t
have earlids to shut out unwanted sounds. Once a word is seen or heard, we are incapable of treating it as a squiggle or noise; we reflexively look it up in memory and respond to its meaning, including its emotional colouring.’

  As Timothy Jay argues, once we’ve seen or heard these emotional intensifiers, we can’t erase them. And when things go wrong in the left hemisphere of the brain, where we process language, it’s those emotional words lodged in the deeper limbic system which we are still able to access.

  Possessed by the Devil

  The French poet Charles Baudelaire was visiting the ornate carved confessionals of a Belgian church when he felt dizzy, staggered and fell. By the time he had reached his carriage, the forty-five-year-old poet’s language had become confused – he asked for the window to be opened when he meant shut. ‘One of mankind’s greatest-ever language centres had started to die, for ever,’ as Peter Silverton put it in Filthy English. Baudelaire’s rich linguistic repository was cleared out. Within the month he could not speak at all – apart from one expression which, to the horror of the nuns who were looking after him, was the blasphemous curse cré nom (sacré nom de Dieu) – damn! The nuns thought Baudelaire had been possessed by the devil.

  One hundred and fifty years later we know that Baudelaire had suffered a stroke. The blood flow to his brain had been cut off, causing damage to the language centres in the left hemisphere. This impairment of speech after a stroke is a condition known as aphasia. And the shouting of a single blasphemy, cré nom? Well, around 15 per cent of people who have aphasia have verbal automatisms, brief unconscious utterings which are often, although not always, swear words.

  Les Duhigg suffered a stroke fourteen years ago, aged forty-one. When he came round in hospital, the first thing he said was, ‘Where am I?’ Except that he didn’t actually say it. As Les recounts: ‘In my mind I’d say that, but nothing could come out and I was … dumbfounded, not able to speak for the first time in my life.’

  He was, literally, dumbfounded. And then, a few days later, he uttered his first word, ‘FUCK!’, when he heard the doctors discussing moving him to a side ward in which another stroke victim had just died. It gave the doctors – and Les – quite a shock. Les hadn’t been much of a swearer before his stroke. It wasn’t that he was now putting swearing into normal speech but that swearing was the only word he could generate. It wasn’t ‘Pass the fucking cup of tea’, it was simply ‘fuck’.

  For a while he used the f-word for everything, much to the embarrassment of his wife, Marion. ‘I was always apologizing for him, especially to the physiotherapist. But she’d worked with stroke people before and said it was a common thing.’

  Les was unconsciously pulling out those emotional memorized words from the undamaged right side of his brain. He and Marion saw something similar happening with other patients.

  Marion remembers: ‘We had a chap in the stroke group. He couldn’t speak, but if someone started singing a song and he knew it, he’d just join in with them. And we couldn’t make it out because he couldn’t speak properly and then all of a sudden he’d come out with singing.’

  Singing songs learned as a child – like counting and nursery rhymes and swearing – is often automatic, and the patient can still produce the motor movements associated with a sequence, even though afterwards they can’t retrieve the appropriate words to say what it was they were singing.

  Les had to learn to speak all over again. The involuntary cursing has stopped and, fourteen years later, speech therapy is helping his brain learn new pathways to reinvent language. ‘It’s like being born again,’ he says ‘starting off as a little kid.’

  Les is a patient of Professor Cathy Price at University College London. To help explain what is happening in the brains of aphasia sufferers like Les she suggests performing an experiment on a guinea pig, Mr Stephen Fry. She wants to show that Les’s involuntary swearing wasn’t a grasping on to the only emotional, automatic words he could access; rather, the mechanism which allows people to inhibit words and actions in social situations had been damaged

  Cathy’s plan is to wheel Stephen into an MRI scanner and record his brain patterns while he performs a Just a Minute routine – exactly like the long-running panel show on BBC radio, in which contributors have to speak for a minute on any given subject without hesitation, deviation or repetition. He is asked first of all to speak freely on various subjects that force him to use the left side of his brain, where information is stored. Sure enough, the scan shows the frontal lobes in the left hemisphere activating. Then he is given a variety of subjects to speak about without repetition, interspersed with bouts of counting. These scans are fascinatingly different. Although Stephen is still using the frontal lobes for the factual knowledge, a tiny little structure deep in the grey matter of his brain is flashing away. Cathy explains that this is called the left head of cordate within the basal ganglia structure, and one of its functions is as an inhibitor. The scans show it working hard as Stephen tries not to repeat his ‘taboo’ Just a Minute words – exactly as it does when one tries not to swear in front of children and old ladies.

  Cathy compares this with what happens when someone who is bilingual is speaking – they have to focus on one language while suppressing the other one. Then she contrasts the MRI scan of Stephen’s brain during the Just a Minute routine with Les Duhigg’s brain scan. While the left head of cordate in the basal ganglia area – the inhibitor – lit up in Stephen’s scan, in Les’s it remained dark, damaged irreversibly during his stroke.

  Brian Blessed’s Swear Box

  Actor Brian Blessed is a prolific swearer. Turning the air blue comes as naturally to him as breathing; he makes Gordon Ramsay seem like a choir boy.

  Brian agrees to join Stephen in an experiment conducted by Dr Richard Stephens, one of whose specialities is the connection between swearing and pain. He devised this test after noticing how his wife seemed to get natural pain relief from swearing during childbirth.

  In the middle of the room is a fish tank, filled with ice. The point of the experiment is to plunge a hand into the icy water and see how long they can keep it in. The first time they are only allowed to repeat a single word that could be used to describe a table; Stephen’s is ‘functional’. The experiment begins:

  Richard: So, Stephen, when you put your hand in the water, I’d like you to repeat that word at an even, steady pace. Keep your hand in as long as you can and take it out when you’re ready.

  Stephen: That is cold actually. Functional. Functional.

  Functional. It’s beginning to hurt. Functional. Functional. It begins with the right leg. Functional. Oh fuck.

  Richard: Don’t swear.

  Stephen: I’m not to swear, I’m sorry. Functional. Functional. Functional. This really hurts. Oh this is not funny any more. Functional. I’m going to get hypothermia. Functional. Oh God, I can’t take it, I’m sorry.

  Richard: Right. OK I’d like you to do that again. This time I’d like you to tell me a word you might say if you hit your finger with a hammer.

  Stephen: Well, I’m afraid I’ll be dull and it would be ‘fuck’. That would be the first one that would come, and then the many others would stream afterwards … And here we go. Oh yes. Good. Fuck. Ah ha. It’s all right for the moment.

  Brian: Is it worse this time?

  Stephen: It’s still cold and my hand … Oh fuck me. Oh fuck this for a game of fucking soldiers. Fuck. Fuck the fuck.

  Brian: Terrible language.

  Stephen: I’m so fucking sorry. Fuck it.

  Brian: This is going to go all over the world. You’re going to lose your reputation as an elegant person.

  Stephen: Oh fuck, fuck, fuckedy fuck. Ooh. It feels better actually saying fuck. It actually doesn’t feel so bad. Fuckedy. Ooh. Ooh. Very tingly. I think I’m ready to bring it out at any fucking point now but … you know I can keep it in here in a way that I couldn’t before. I genuinely mean that. That’s quite extraordinary. It just lets you. It does, doesn’
t it? I think I’m ready to take it out now.

  Richard: Brian, you’ve seen the procedure; we’ll do the same thing again. So we’ll start with the word that you might use to describe a table.

  Brian: Wooden.

  Richard: Wooden. That’s a good choice.

  Stephen: And no swearing. No swearing.

  Brian: Right. Oh, it’s lovely and warm. Wooden. Wooden. Wooden. It is cold, isn’t it? Mustn’t swear. Oh, wooden. This is horrible, isn’t it? Wooden. Wooden. Wooden. Oh, fuck.

  Stephen: No.

  Brian: Oh no, no wooden … Wooden. Wooden. Wooden … I’ll take it out.

  Richard: OK, Brian, and so this time I’d like you to use a word that you might use if you hit yourself on the thumb with a hammer. Can you give me your word that you might use?

  Brian: Yes, I’d say bollocks. Fuck it.

  Richard: Just one word.

  Brian: Bollocks … Here we go. I always get terrible fucking wind. I’ll be all right in a minute. I don’t know why the fuck I do that. I get terrible wind. Here we go. Right. Oh bollocks. Oh bollocks. Bollocks. Bollocks. Bollocks. Oh bollocks. Is that all I can say is bollocks?

  Richard: Steady, even pace please.

  Brian: A steady even … Fucking hell, man. Bollocks. Bollocks. Bollocks. Bollocks. Oh fuck it.

  Richard: That’s great. Thank you … This couldn’t have really gone any better.

  The results of the experiment are revealing. Stephen is not an inveterate swearer, so, like the majority of people who have taken part in the test, he tolerated pain better when he swore. He kept his hand in the icy water for thirty-eight seconds with his neutral word but for two minutes and twenty-nine seconds with his swear word. Brian, on the other hand, is an habitual swearer, so swearing appeared to have no effect on his pain threshold at all. In fact, he kept his hand in for five seconds longer when he shouted ‘wooden’ than when he swore.