Why we swear

war provides us with new nationalistic slurs directed at our "enemies", so I don't think we will ever be at a loss of new taboos......but the idea of green cunts, red piss and blue assholes sticks in my mind a lot longer. (To comment on Robin Williams: has anyone noticed that many punchlines in television commercials are just random acts of violence now? Like the Bud Light commercial where they play rock paper scissors, and the guy gets hit with a rock? Or the countless occassions where someone or something smashes into a wall, through a wall, or through a table? This is how we are selling products...somehow the parents don't have a problem with this. I guess cause there's no blood.) fuck i fucking spent too fucking long fucking typing this fucking response. I fucking guess I will fucking stop ( I just want to feel my amygdala).

Cursing is what I always thought it was - a cheap, stupid way to lock brains onto a target - similar to the way in which increasing flicker rate locks eyes onto a TV show.

Children's cartoons used to be relatively slow moving and have sped up as a result of technological sophistication and the fact that when kids channel surf they are highly likely to watch whichever cartoon has the fastest flicker rate - the fastest shift from one image to next. Improving content of the story would be a good reason for kids to watch a particular TV show, a higher flicker rate is a poor reason.

Now we have TV news with waving flags and other animations that stay in motion behind the person at the anchor desk because people are more likely to have their eyes lock on to a moving image and less likely to change the channel. The way in which our eyes and brain lock onto a moving image is related to hypnosis.

We see from Pinker's article that cursing causes a small, obligatory explosion of emotion in the brain -- that can grab our attention and keep it if there is one curse word after another. This is a cheap, sad way to be amused.

Some years ago I saw an interview with comedian Robin Williams in which he said that stand up comedy wasn't as much fun for him as it was when he started. When he started, you could go to a club and tell a joke that lasted a long, long time -- starting slow, introducing lots of characters, explaining a complex circumstance and building to laugh line that would elicit a HUGE, DEEP response from the crowd -- one that they would be laughing about for days or years afterwards when they thought about it. As time wore on Williams found that stand up comedy became like entertaining a hyperactive, 200-pound gorilla -- you had to have people laughing in the first 30-seconds after you walked out on stage or they would go dead.

Curse word, potty word, run around the stage really fast, curse word, fart joke...

"Amusing ourselves to death" - great book by Neil Postman.

"Amusing ourselves to boredom" - what pops into my mind after reading Pinker's article. After a while the curse words that used to shock don't anymore so you need bigger, badder curse words to amuse or, maybe, we need something altogether more satisfying.

Thanks for the post jfriedman!