by Emma Byrne
The Gardners and their team committed to only ever use sign language rather than spoken language around their fosterlings. Earlier in her career, Beatrix Gardner had studied the observation of animal behavior under Nobel Prize winner Niko Tinbergen and, from these observations, she knew that gesture was far more important than vocalization to chimpanzees. And so, from the very start of her life with the Gardners, Washoe was surrounded by human “friends” who didn’t speak, but who exclusively talked in sign language to her and to each other: every single member of the project team took a vow of silence around Washoe: she never heard her human companions speaking.13
Why the embargo on human speech? We know that human children also pick up the rules of conversation not just from being spoken to, but from watching other, older humans talk to each other. That meant that the team would have to have all their conversations in a way that the chimpanzees could potentially understand. In order that the chimpanzees wouldn’t think of sign language as something unusual, the team took drastic lengths to avoid other humans who might try to speak to them. Outings for treats at Dairy Queen and McDonald’s were carried out in an atmosphere of stealth: Washoe and one adult would stay in the car at a secluded parking lot while another person went to buy the food. If they were spotted, the person in the car would drive off with Washoe to prevent any interaction with curious onlookers, leaving the other passenger stranded with the takeaway until the coast was clear.
Over time it became apparent that the humans in the lab tended not to be the ones to initiate conversations—they were too busy recording observations, writing reports, and running the experiment. Washoe and the other chimpanzees learned to get their human companions’ attention by making sounds, but they immediately switched to signing once they had done so.14
But the chimpanzees mainly talked to each other, and to themselves. Unlike in Project Nim, signing wasn’t just a way of getting something from the humans. “Washoe, Moja, Pili, Tatu, and Dar signed to friends and to strangers. They signed to themselves and to each other, to dogs, cats, toys, tools, even to trees. We did not have to tempt them with treats . . . most of the signing was initiated by the young chimpanzees,” reported the Gardners. They even witnessed the chimpanzees “reading aloud.” Washoe would correct herself when signing to herself while leafing through magazines. Allen Gardner recalls Washoe looking at an advertisement for a drink. THAT FOOD, she signed to herself, then examined her hand before changing the sign to THAT DRINK.15 Washoe would also sign QUIET to herself when sneaking somewhere she shouldn’t go, and sign-talk to her dolls the way a human child would speak to theirs.
After about ten months, Washoe was signing short sentences like GIMME SWEET and YOU ME GO OUT HURRY. “Washoe was thinking abstractly like a human child,” says Roger Fouts, “but she was also communicating like a human child. She wasn’t just learning symbols, she was using them to share her feelings, to control her backyard world and to get her way in every imaginable situation.”16
Washoe also had a good understanding of the difference between what she knew and what others could know. In human children, this ability develops at around the age of four, when we figure out that just because we saw something happen, that doesn’t mean everyone else knows about it. Washoe, too, understood that she could see and know things that her human friends did not. From her treetop vantage point she could see people arriving before any of her human friends and would “announce” them as they arrived at the Gardners’ home.
As with any small child, this fluency with signing and the ability to understand conversations was a two-edged sword: for example, like many parents, the humans on the team took to spelling out “B-A-T-H” rather than using the actual sign because of the way that the chimpanzees would react if they knew they were about to be bathed.17
The question of whether or not chimpanzees can swear, of course, demands a positive answer to the question “Can chimpanzees communicate?” Communication is necessary (though not sufficient) for swearing to take place. Were Washoe and her family’s signs really language, or just another, elaborate way of begging for treats? I firmly believe that they are true language. For a start, while some of the signs were fairly obvious ones for a hungry chimpanzee to learn, much of their vocabulary had nothing to do with treats. While they learned twenty-nine signs to do with food and drink, they also readily learned the signs for things like WRISTWATCH, PHONE, STAMP, KEY, and VACCUUM CLEANER.18 Anyone who has both a smartphone and a small child will recognize the fascination that adult objects held for the chimpanzees.
What’s more, the chimpanzees started to create compound words as soon as they had eight or ten signs in their vocabularies, even though they had never explicitly been taught to do so.19 In the same way that my niece, Romilly, spontaneously invented the tuple “eye bubbles” for spectacles, Washoe invented OPEN FOOD DRINK for refrigerator, CANDY DRINK for watermelon and CRY HURT FOOD for radish. Moja spontaneously described a cigarette lighter as METAL HOT and a thermos flask as METAL CUP DRINK COFFEE, while Alka Seltzer was LISTEN DRINK. They could also answer questions about the features of the things and people around them. The researchers would ask questions to see whether the chimpanzees understood the relationship between signs and the real things they represent, much like we might ask a small child, “What noise does the duck make?” or, “What animal goes moo?” and there are many examples of conversations about the redness of Washoe’s favorite boots, or to whom the METAL HOT belongs, to show that they could understand the relationships between signs and objects, the signifier and the signified.
The chimpanzees were, I think it’s safe to argue, linguistically very talented indeed. They could understand signs, invent new meanings, and talk about their world. But I want to go one further and make the argument that these chimpanzees didn’t just invent clever new names for watermelon and Alka Seltzer, or new ways of being emphatic. As soon as they mastered language, they invented their own swearing. But first, they needed one other skill.
When You Live with Humans, DIRTY Is Taboo
I don’t think Washoe would have learned to swear if the people with whom she lived hadn’t decided to potty train her. That said, I can’t imagine anyone being brave enough to test my conjecture; living with a chimpanzee long enough to teach them sign language without potty training them would be an interesting and malodorous challenge. Wild chimpanzees deliberately piss and shit on the human researchers who visit their turf in a grim territorial display that is impossible to ignore.20 Knowing this, the Gardners weren’t taking any chances; if Washoe was going to live in their home, they were going to have to teach her that there is an appropriate time and place to excrete—at least while she was among her human family.
Like many toddlers, Washoe didn’t find potty training particularly easy. The taboos surrounding bodily functions were already ingrained and Washoe had become “potty shy”—she would rather use her diaper than the pot.
The team realized that they needed to teach Washoe that DIRTY might be bad but DIRTY in the potty is fine. Roger Fouts began his career as a research assistant to the Gardners, and was largely responsible for that potty training. He remembers these as some of the most challenging weeks with Washoe. “This request soon became so routine that poor Washoe sometimes sat on the potty while I begged her in sign: PLEASE PLEASE TRY or PLEASE TRY MAKE MORE WATER,” he recalls.
Washoe had become more modest than some humans; the young chimpanzee had internalized many of the taboos and standards of politeness of a suburban American family. Allen Gardner recalls that Washoe “seemed embarrassed when she could not find a toilet on an outing in the woods, eventually using a discarded coffee can.”21 The Gardners’ chimpanzee family no longer shit in the woods, having learned that DIRTY anywhere but the potty is BAD.
Among Washoe and the other chimpanzees raised by the Gardners and their team, the DIRTY sign was consistently used by chimpanzees and humans alike for feces, dirty clothes and shoes, and for bodily functions. Double use of the wo
rd DIRTY was used to intensify the meaning, either in anger or shame. DIRTY DIRTY SORRY was a phrase used to apologize for accidents, while DIRTY GOOD was the name that Washoe used for her potty.22 This name, invented spontaneously by Washoe, shows a surprisingly nuanced understanding of the excretion taboo: pooing in a potty is necessary and acceptable, but shit out of context is shameful and wrong.
One other thing that persuades me that DIRTY is taboo to chimpanzees is that they, like us, are motivated to lie if discovered doing something shameful. The mortification of being caught out in a transgressive act prompts humans to tell some enormous whoppers. Again, anyone familiar with toddlers or young children will have seen the transparent and sometimes hilarious lies they will tell when caught red-handed, like the three-year-old I saw recently, solemnly swearing, through lips ringed with jam and sugar, that her three-month-old baby brother had eaten the last doughnut. From the data collected by Roger Fouts we know that DIRTY was something shameful enough for the chimpanzees to lie about in much the same way. Take Lucy: she was a chimpanzee who wasn’t originally raised by the Gardners, but whom Roger studied in her foster home with another family.
Lucy was a show-off and didn’t like it when she wasn’t the center of attention. If Roger ignored her while he was speaking with her human family for too long she’d relieve herself in the middle of the living-room floor. It’s not that she wasn’t potty trained—if she was in a good mood she’d poo in the appropriate place. But when crossed, Lucy would stage a dirty protest. Here’s one conversation she had with Roger:
Roger comes into the room—sees Lucy’s little message and asks: WHAT THAT?
WHAT THAT? Lucy replies with what seems to me like artfully feigned innocence.
Roger isn’t fooled, though: YOU DO KNOW. WHAT THAT?
Lucy replies, DIRTY DIRTY.
Roger asks WHOSE DIRTY DIRTY?
SUE signs Lucy. (Sue was Roger’s assistant and a graduate student at the time. While I can vouch for the fact that stress makes PhD students do odd things sometimes, Roger is pretty certain that Sue wouldn’t go that far.)
He tries again. IT NOT SUE. WHOSE THAT?
ROGER, replies Lucy, in what is, admittedly, a pretty desperate attempt to shift the blame.
Roger scolds her: NO. NOT MINE. WHOSE?
Lucy: LUCY DIRTY DIRTY. SORRY LUCY.
Perhaps because of the shame associated with it, DIRTY soon became an insult, used when people or other animals didn’t do what Washoe wanted. This wasn’t something Washoe was taught to do; she spontaneously began using DIRTY as a pejorative and as an exclamation whenever she was frustrated. When we internalize a taboo, chimpanzees and humans alike create an emotional connection with the concept. The words for taboo subjects don’t just cause strong emotions; they leap to mind whenever we experience strong emotions. For example Washoe signed DIRTY ROGER when Fouts wouldn’t let her out of her cage and DIRTY MONKEY at a macaque who threatened her.
In fact, MONKEY became Washoe’s somewhat derogatory sign for any other primate who couldn’t sign. Somewhat depressingly, it seems as though slurs are another deeply ingrained part of our language.
Although Washoe and her peers had only one sign that they used as swearing, they used it with a great deal of flexibility. In the same way that “fuck” and its variants are often hissed, shouted, or spat, DIRTY would be signed with considerable emphasis by the chimpanzees. “The DIRTY sign is the back of the wrist brought up against the underside of the chin and sometimes the chimpanzees would make this sign so emphatically that the clacks could be heard throughout the lab.”23 You can imagine the strength of Washoe’s disapproval as she bangs her wrist into her jaw, smacking her teeth together. It’s an image that is both forceful and very human and reminds me of the way that the middle finger can be brandished or the fist pounded into the crook of the elbow when some utter shithead cuts you off in traffic. (Surely that’s not just me?)
But, like humans, the chimps don’t just rely on the shit-taboo as a means of hurling abuse and expressing anger. As every small child knows, scatological is funny; its power to shock causes a reaction that can startle us into a laugh. By the time the DIRTY taboo had been internalized it became clear that Washoe wasn’t above a bit of scatological humor. She cottoned on to the fact that the human observers didn’t like cleaning up her mess—initially this became a weapon to control the team: “it didn’t take long for her to learn that she could manipulate us by having, or threatening to have, an accident. It must have been terrific fun to go high up in her tree and commit a simple, natural act that would cause grown-up humans to jump around in desperation on the ground below,” speculates Roger.
The power of making the humans scurry around at her bidding might have been satisfying, but Washoe soon discovered that dirty jokes could be funny for their own sake. She really enjoyed piggybacks and would ride on Roger’s shoulders for a treat. One day, Roger noticed that Washoe signed FUNNY to herself while snorting. “For a second,” says Roger, “I couldn’t figure out what was funny. Then I felt something wet and warm flowing down my back and into my pants. I never forgot the sign for FUNNY after that.”
These chimpanzees, raised like children, ended up behaving like children. It’s so compellingly human—the lying, the joking, and the shame that are connected with our bodily functions. The taboo becomes so powerful that it can be used to berate and control (DIRTY ROGER, DIRTY MONKEY) but it also becomes the basis of hilarious ribaldry. There’s absolutely no doubt in my mind that Washoe, Moja, Pili, Tatu, Dar, and Lucy all learned to swear, as soon as they learned what a taboo was. That same emotional connection exists in chimpanzees and humans alike.
Teaching the Kids: Can Chimpanzees Pass on Language?
Roger and Washoe eventually left the Gardners’ lab and set up on their own. Because Washoe showed such strong maternal instinct,* Roger decided to contact other primate research institutes to see if there were any infant chimpanzees who needed adoption. Roger brought Washoe ten-month-old Loulis and, after a slow start, they soon bonded as mother and child.
Roger and Deborah Fouts made the decision to change life for Washoe drastically at this point. In order to see if language could be learned across generations, they banned all humans from signing with Washoe whenever Loulis was around. Because Loulis and Washoe were inseparable there was, in practice, no time when Washoe could sign with her human friends anymore. For five years, Washoe had hardly any conversations with the human friends who had raised her since infancy. For five long, sad years, the chimpanzees and humans were no longer on speaking terms.24
In that time, Washoe taught Loulis to sign in the same way that she had been taught, modeling some signs for Loulis and shaping his hands to make others, directing his attention to objects or encouraging him to do certain things. By fifteen months, five months after being adopted by Washoe, Loulis had learned several signs and had also started to combine them into two-sign compounds like HURRY GIMME and PERSON COME. The Gardners had continued to foster infant chimpanzees throughout the 1970s, and as these chimpanzees reached adolescence they were sent to join Project Washoe. In 1979, Washoe and Loulis were joined by Moja, and in 1981 five-year-olds Tatu and Dar joined the group. All five signed back and forth both with each other and with Washoe’s adopted son, reinforcing Loulis’s learning and adding to his fluency.
In the time that he was exclusively signing with other chimpanzees, Loulis learned fifty-one words including BOOK, DIRTY, HUG, PLEASE, and SORRY. Washoe, too, was still learning: Moja, Tatu, and Dar had learned the new word BLANKET while living with the Gardners in Reno and Washoe soon started using it, showing that the ability to learn language persists well into adulthood for chimpanzees as well as humans.
Between 1980 and 1993 the Foutses and their chimpanzee family were based at Central Washington University. They had left the University of Oklahoma, where the facilities for Washoe had been unsafe and unwelcoming, for Washington, which was far more supportive of the aims of Project Washoe. Although
CWU was supportive of the program, a lack of funding meant that the facilities were very limited. Washoe, Loulis, Moja, Tatu, and Dar found themselves confined to a 300-square-foot home on the third floor of the university’s psychology building. Having moved from the Gardners’ suburban home in Reno to the prison camp in Oklahoma, Washoe and her family now lived in the equivalent of an urban apartment. They had no access to the outdoors and the only natural light they saw came from a single window. The chimpanzees lived as a family, ate raisins, and drank Kool-Aid, played games of chase and tickle with each other and with the research staff, but it was a cramped and unnatural life for even these chimpanzees.
Roger and Deborah Fouts worked tirelessly to try to change the chimpanzees’ living conditions. In May 1993, after much lobbying of Washington state legislators and donations from the Friends of Washoe charity, they finally moved the chimpanzees. Their new home had over 7,000 square feet planted with grasses, bamboo, and wild plants and equipped with swings and climbing frames, fire hoses, and a vegetable garden that the chimpanzees liked to discuss almost as much as they liked to eat from.
This new space was a huge change for Loulis, who had not seen the outdoors for most of his fifteen years. At first he was nervous, and the human research team had a plan to introduce the chimpanzees to the new space in stages, letting them adjust to the move before gradually opening up the indoor and then the outdoor space. But Washoe had watched the staff discussing the move in sign language, so she knew what was waiting for them beyond the doors. She’d been missing the outside world for over a decade. “Our plan quickly changed when a few hours after moving in, Washoe woke up and looked outside through the glass enclosures and . . . began signing OUT OUT OUT THERE,” said Roger.25
