Kids get grounded for swearing, and bad words are banned from television... but why is that the case if most adults swear anyway? Linguist and cognitive scientist Benjamin K. Bergen says that swearing can be funny, cathartic, and even useful! In this rated-PG episode, he explains how the science of swearing can help us understand how our brains process language, and what the worst words tell us about our culture. And the episode is squeaky clean: no swearing included! Additional resources from Dr. Benjamin Bergen: Benjamin K. Bergen, UC San Diego Department of Cognitive Science "What the F: What Swearing Reveals About Our Language, Our Brains, and Ourselves" "Louder Than Words: The New Science of How the Mind Makes Meaning" Other studies and resources discussed: Swearing, Euphemisms, and Linguistic Relativity | PLOS Effect of Manipulated State Aggression on Pain Tolerance | SAGE Journals Cursing and gender in a corpus of MySpace pages | Semantic Scholar Swearing in English: Bad Language, Purity and Power from 1586 to the Present | Google Books Gender, expletive use, and context: Male and female expletive use in structured and unstructured conversation among New Zealand university students | ProQuest Follow Curiosity Daily on your favorite podcast app to get smarter withCody Gough andAshley Hamer — for free! Still curious? Get exclusive science shows, nature documentaries, and more real-life entertainment on discovery+! Go to https://discoveryplus.com/curiosity to start your 7-day free trial. discovery+ is currently only available for US subscribers.
Kids get grounded for swearing, and bad words are banned from television... but why is that the case if most adults swear anyway? Linguist and cognitive scientist Benjamin K. Bergen says that swearing can be funny, cathartic, and even useful! In this rated-PG episode, he explains how the science of swearing can help us understand how our brains process language, and what the worst words tell us about our culture. And the episode is squeaky clean: no swearing included!
Additional resources from Dr. Benjamin Bergen:
Other studies and resources discussed:
Follow Curiosity Daily on your favorite podcast app to get smarter with Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer — for free! Still curious? Get exclusive science shows, nature documentaries, and more real-life entertainment on discovery+! Go to https://discoveryplus.com/curiosity to start your 7-day free trial. discovery+ is currently only available for US subscribers.
Full episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/the-science-of-swearing-and-what-it-says-about-our-values
CODY GOUGH: I'm curious, is swearing good or bad?
BENJAMIN BERGEN: Well, it's like asking is nuclear power good or bad, right? I mean, it's powerful. There are some good things that you can do with it. There are some bad things that you can do with it, and harnessed appropriately by the right people at the right time in the right place, you could do amazing things with it. Harnessed inappropriately, it can do damage.
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CODY GOUGH: Hi, I'm Cody Gough with the clean and wholesome curiosity.com.
ASHLEY HAMER: And I'm Ashley Hamer. Today, we're going to talk about the science of swearing without actually swearing.
CODY GOUGH: Every week, we explore what we don't know because curiosity makes us smarter.
ASHLEY HAMER: This is The Curiosity Podcast.
CODY GOUGH: We're not going to say any bad words in this episode, but we are going to talk about swearing, and that's important because swearing is a thing. I mean, we all know somebody who does it.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah, know somebody. But at the same time, why do we swear? Why can't people say certain words on TV, and why do kids get in trouble for swearing? Is it even bad for them?
CODY GOUGH: Today's guest is an expert in the science of swearing. Benjamin Bergen is a professor of cognitive science at the University of California, San Diego, where he directs the language and cognition laboratory.
ASHLEY HAMER: He's also the author of What The F, What Swearing Reveals About Our Language, Our Brains, and Ourselves, and today, you'll learn just why we swear, and what it means.
BENJAMIN BERGEN: It's powerful, and we know it's powerful. It's got a direct line to our emotions. It triggers these physiological reactions in our bodies and our brains. It can cause harm if used inappropriately, but it can also do good things for you, for your social life, and for your ability to endure pain. So it's kind of both.
CODY GOUGH: That's really interesting. What good things can swearing do?
BENJAMIN BERGEN: Right, so the science on this is new, but there are a couple of really interesting findings. One has to do with the ability to endure pain. I think a lot of people have the experience when they slam their finger in a door or stub their toe or, in my case, with little kids, step on a piece of LEGO with bare feet late at night.
CODY GOUGH: Is that why you wrote this book?
BENJAMIN BERGEN: Almost, that they swear, and anecdotally, it sort of feels like the swearing takes the edge off, and there's been a little bit of research on this. The way that this paradigm is designed isn't to have people walk around in bare feet, but to do something more replicable. You bring people into the lab, and you have them immerse their hand in nearly freezing water, and you ask them to hold their hand there as long as the-- and what the researchers find is that if you tell them to swear while they're doing this, they can hold their hand in about 50% longer, and they also report that it hurts less. So it appears that there's a pain-relieving effect of swearing.
CODY GOUGH: And are they connected to fMRI machines or any brainwave analysis going on while this is happening?
BENJAMIN BERGEN: No, not yet. I mean, people have been scanned while they're swearing or listening to swear words, but not while they're also enduring pain. It gets a little complicated. You can't put the tub of water in the fMRI machine and stuff like that. But, yeah, well, when people are swearing, or when they're hearing swearing, we know that their brains react a little bit differently from how they react to the rest of language, and that's from these fMRI sta--
ASHLEY HAMER: Scientists do have a hunch for why swearing relieves pain thanks to a combination of a few different types of studies. For a study published in 2011, researchers from the University of Bristol in England had volunteers read swear words, euphemisms of those swear words, like the term f-word, and neutral words, like drum, while they measured the activity of their nervous system through electrical signals in their skin.
They found that the autonomic nervous system activity and heart rate were both greater with the swear words than with the other types of words. In other words, swearing might activate your fight-or-flight response just a bit. That can lead to the release of all sorts of pain-reducing hormones. Of course, that's just one possibility. If swearing reduces pain by triggering your fight-or-flight response, then other things that trigger the same response should do the same thing, right?
Right, and in 2012, Richard Stephens, the psychologist behind that ice water study Benjamin mentioned, along with his student, Claire Alsop, published the results of a pretty brilliant twist on the original study. See, feelings of aggression are linked to that same fight-or-flight reaction. So the researchers made people feel more aggressive by having them play a stressful, first-person shooter video game then dunked their hands in ice water.
Sure enough, the people who had played the shoot-them-up video game could keep their hands immersed for much longer than people who had played a simple golf game. 174 seconds versus 106 seconds on average for the women. 195 seconds versus 117 seconds for the men. The team thinks that swearing might lead you to feel aggressive, which leads to that pain relieving fight-or-flight response. So the next time you stub your toe, you might feel better if you go a little aggro. Just watch out for who's around.
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CODY GOUGH: Let's like a step back.
BENJAMIN BERGEN: Yeah.
CODY GOUGH: Where does swearing come from in the first place? I mean, what makes a swear word a swear word because they're changing over time, right?
BENJAMIN BERGEN: Right, well, the first thing to say is that if you look-- take the broad view, and look across languages and culture, you find that most languages have something like swearing. They have some set of words that are judged to be taboo. Words that you wouldn't say in just any circumstance. They're the spicy words, and they're words that, oftentimes, cultures deem inappropriate for certain circumstances, like around kids or in formal situations.
These words usually come across the world from four domains of human experience. They come from religious terminology and concepts. They come from words about sex. They come from words about bodily functions and body parts involved in those functions. I'm sure you can see where I'm going with this. And then, finally, they're words for other groups of people, usually marginalized groups of others, and those four categories of human experience provide the profane vocabularies of the world.
Probably, in part, because those are taboo things themselves. We have lots of taboos about religious concepts, When they're to be used and what they are even. Lots of taboos about sex and bodily functions, which is why we wall off those functions into rooms inside of houses, and we have taboos about other groups of people. And so in a way, across the world, these words have transferred the taboos from the world itself to the word.
CODY GOUGH: So taking the physical actions, and this is just the verbal expression, the verbal embodiments of those taboos?
BENJAMIN BERGEN: Exactly.
CODY GOUGH: It's really interesting. Is there like a first recorded swear word? Not that we have to say what it is, but any cultures or civilizations where you say, oh, these ancient Sumerian texts from 5,000 BC is when there was a really bad word.
BENJAMIN BERGEN: We don't have anything like that. Those ancient texts are usually transactional. It's four goats for two bushels of hay, and they weren't usually accompanied by any expletives. But we do know that these taboo words don't start their lives as profanity, right? They start their lives as just words that have just meanings or have meanings related to sex and bodily functions. Those words provide the basis for profanity, but not all words related to sex, for example, are profane, right?
There are words that you could use with your doctor or your priest, marital relations, right? We know what that means, and there are words that you can use to describe bodily functions with a four-year-old, and that I do with my four-year-old. So it's not enough for those words to belong to one of those domains of experience. They have to be selected, and why these particular words that we judge to be profane. The four letter words, for example, get selected is kind of a complicated question.
CODY GOUGH: Yeah, and that's why you had to research it, and there's not a lot of research on this because it's hard to get funding, right?
BENJAMIN BERGEN: Yeah.
CODY GOUGH: To study. I mean, you don't want to tell your students' parents, oh, yeah, I need this grant so I can say dirty words for a while in a lab.
BENJAMIN BERGEN: That's right. I mean, there are taboos about these words. They are the taboo words, and it's kind of like what I imagine must have happened in the 1940s and 1950s when people started studying human sexuality. So you go through a period at the beginning of the 20th century, where sex is verboten. You just can't talk about it, let alone study it, and all of a sudden, there's a change.
There's a shift, and there's resistance to that shift, and I think that's what's happening here. These words are also becoming less and less offensive. Many of them are. I mean, the F word, for example, used to be absolutely impossible to say in public or see on TV or hear on the radio. Things have changed, the media landscape has changed, the degree of control that federal agencies exert on the media has changed, and your access to a newly-democratized media has changed.
You've got the world in your hand, and anyone can write anything to anyone at any time, and so there's just been a lot more profanity around over the last 20 years. And as a result, millennials, our studies show, don't find those traditional bad WORDS those words relating to sex and bodily functions and so on, quite as offensive as their parents did.
CODY GOUGH: And what are they finding offensive now?
BENJAMIN BERGEN: Well, there's this really interesting change. So if you survey people, they say, younger Americans say that the most offensive words are words that denigrate people. So these are slurs, words that pick out people by their sex or ethnicity or sexual orientation and so on. I'm sure you can think of the words that I mean. Those are the ones that they find most offensive, and I think that that's a really interesting shift because those weren't on George Carlin's list of the seven words you can't say on television. And now, the F word, for example, in our most recent survey shows up as number 13 on the list.
CODY GOUGH: 13?
BENJAMIN BERGEN: Yeah, there's a whole host of worse words in English according, again, to younger Americans. And I think this is maybe a good thing. I mean, why is the F word offensive? Well, it's offensive because you learned as a child you weren't supposed to say it. You were maybe punished. It was censored. You saw parents chastising other parents or something for using it around kids.
You learn those lessons early on, but there's nothing intrinsically bad about that particular word, whereas slurs, they're used to cause harm, right? They are derogatory terms. Their work is to offend someone. Their work is to minimize someone, and so if younger Americans find that the act of trying to harm someone is itself offensive, but that words themselves, even if they relate to things that we don't really like to talk about in public, are less so, maybe that's a change in the right direction.
ASHLEY HAMER: Speaking of how offensive words change with time, I want to tell you about an amazing book we wrote about on curiosity.com. It's from 1785, and it's called A Classical Dictionary of The Vulgar Tongue. It's exactly what it sounds like. Its author, Francis Grose, created the repository after being inspired by Samuel Johnson's Great Dictionary of the English Language published a few years earlier. Johnson, for obvious reasons, left out a lot of slang words and phrases he didn't think were worth including.
Grose thought that was a mistake. After all, swear words say just as much about our culture as the more proper words in our vocabulary. So he created his own book, which the British language expert, Susie Dent, says was, quote, "the first real underground dictionary compiled on evidence from the streets rather than the pages of literary works", end quote. So what was considered foul mouthed in 1785. Well, there are some phrases that will sound familiar.
Grose was the first to record the phrases, fly by night, birds of a feather, and cat call to name a few. But others are kind of hilarious. Double jug refers to a man's bottom. An owl in an ivory bush is a person wearing a frizzy wig. Cake is a foolish man, and cascade is a vulgar term for vomiting. There's also an admiral of the narrow seas, which is, quote, "one who from drunkenness vomits into the lap of the person sitting opposite him", end quote. And call me childish, but my very favorite is this one that refers to a personal servant, fart catcher.
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CODY GOUGH: Well, intrinsically, maybe their origins are to offend. What happens when a word with maybe a really incendiary origin is just co-opted by people that just think the word is fun to say? Does that come up in your research?
BENJAMIN BERGEN: Does that happen? Yeah, I haven't seen much science on that. There are different ways, of course, that a potentially incendiary word gets co-opted. The one that's been best studied is when the people who are targeted by that word decide to take it over and say, hey, hold on, you're calling us this, and we don't like it. So instead of allowing you to have the power over that word, we're going to use that word for ourselves, and we are going to take the power away.
CODY GOUGH: I think I know what you're talking about. For the LGBT community, right, they kind of took back the word queer, which originally meant odd or strange, and then became derogatory, and now, it's in the name. LGBTQ, like that's what the Q stands for. So they took it back, and they have ownership of it.
BENJAMIN BERGEN: Exactly, and there's some science showing that that's effective. So when you see someone who identifies as the group that's being targeted by the word, when you see them and hear them using that word for themselves, that changes how bad you think the word is. You now start to think, oh, well, maybe that's not such a bad word, and so we know that works. Now, it doesn't work in every case.
There are very specific words. According to millennials, the most offensive word in the English language is a word that starts with n and is a slur, and that word has sometimes been co-opted by the community that it targets, and that has kind of been effective and kind of not been effective, and there continues to be a lot of debate both within that community and outside of it about how appropriate that is. So this is not a panacea, right? But it has worked in cases like queer. As for the question of whether other people using that word, just as a neutral or a general word on the playground, for example, whether that works. I don't know of any science on that, unfortunately.
CODY GOUGH: Interesting. Yeah, I'm just curious about if you're an eight-year-old, maybe you don't understand the context of it, but you're still going to use it anyway. But you're not studying eight-year-olds, right?
BENJAMIN BERGEN: No, it's very hard to run studies where you bring eight-year-olds in and then swear in front of them. The parents tend not to sign up for those studies.
CODY GOUGH: Not so good?
BENJAMIN BERGEN: No.
CODY GOUGH: Well, let's talk about parenting. Where do kids learn these swear words other than the playground, and is it really bad if a parent swears a lot around their kid? Is there any research on that development of it over the years?
BENJAMIN BERGEN: Right, so there's been some good longitudinal studies looking at kids, where they develop these words. In almost all cases, kids are learning profanity from other kids, and that's from other kids on the playground. It's from older kids. It's from kids with older siblings. No matter how much we hate to believe it. We parents are not cool, and kids do not want to talk like us.
They don't want to be like us, especially when it comes to these norm-violating activities. These things, like swearing, which are about identifying themselves as different from their parents or as part of a generation or as defying authority. When it comes to language like that, what they hear from their parents is almost the opposite of what they want to do. And so there was one example of this.
There were two psychologists at Yale, Paul Blume and Lois Blume, who decided to experiment with their kids, and they decided to introduce a new swear word that they would use at home just to see if they could introduce it and get their kids to start using it. So every time they would normally say a swear word, they said the word flip. So they'd stubbed their toe, ah, flip, and they would use it like you would use a swear word.
So, oh, I can't believe this flipping letter that I got in the mail, and their experiment was a huge failure. The kids did not adopt those words at all. They didn't care. They weren't paying attention. What their parents said was to be avoided. So whether parents swear at home or not probably does more to create an atmosphere, sort of a linguistic atmosphere. Like, how casual are we at home?
How do we express emotions, that sort of thing, than it does to train kids on specific words. Now, so there's another more important question that you asked, right? Which is profanity harmful to kids early on, right? And as far as we can tell, there's one type of language use around kids that clearly causes harm, and that's verbal abuse.
So if you tell a child that they're worthless, if you tell them that they're unloved, if you threaten them with physical harm, those types of language behaviors we've seen in lots and lots of studies correlate with negative health outcomes for the kids, like psychological health outcomes, increases in depression, anxiety, difficulties in school. That's bad. Now, that can be accompanied by profanity.
You can tell a child that he or she is worthless. I mean, you shouldn't, and I hope no one does, but it is possible to do that using profanity. It is also possible to do that not using profanity, and there's no evidence that using profanity in that increases the harm. Moreover, there's no evidence that just using profanity around kids by itself not in the context of abuse causes harm. So like if I come home, and my basketball team that I'm rooting for, because it's the playoffs, and it's an important time, lost a game in the fourth quarter.
And I'm upset about it, and I swear about it in front of my kid. There's no evidence that that causes any sort of harm. The kid is going to learn something about me. Something about the language that I use. Maybe they'll be exposed to a word in that context, but there's no evidence that it decreases their intelligence, that it decreases their vocabulary size, that it makes them more aggressive, nothing.
CODY GOUGH: So we can be perfectly smart and well-adjusted and still used to wear words. In fact, it can provide the benefits of pain relief and maybe establishing an environment of comfort or an atmosphere of rapport with a person. But how do other people perceive people that swear, and does that match with the reality of what those people are actually like?
BENJAMIN BERGEN: Great, so it depends. It's not the case that, if you swear, people will always judge you in a particular way. It turns out that it depends on what that perceiver's beliefs are about the situation that you swore in. So let me give you an example. If you go to a comedy club, and you see someone standing up there, and they're talking about something taboo because that's what a lot of comedians talk about, and they're swearing. How are you going to judge that person?
Studies show that you're going to think that they're funny. You think that they're honest. You think that they are connected to their emotions. They're experiencing strong emotions in that moment, which probably they are. They're standing up in front of a bunch of people and worried about whether they're going to be funny and so on. Now, that exact same person, you see them the next morning in the supermarket, and they drop a bunch of eggs, and they start swearing. How are you going to judge that person?
Well, you're probably going to judge them differently. Studies show that because you believe that the supermarket is not an appropriate place to swear that you believe that there are these social rules about what you're supposed to do with language in the supermarket. Now, all of a sudden, you're going to think that they're unhinged, that they don't follow the social rules, and maybe they're not to be trusted on the basis of that. You're not going to think that they're funny. So it really matters what context you're in. That's how you can predict how people are going to react.
CODY GOUGH: Well, there's also research that might suggest that people who swear more are perceived as maybe less educated. Is there any correlation between the amount that somebody swears and their education level?
BENJAMIN BERGEN: Right, no, so that's a very hard question to answer because it's hard to get people from lots of different education levels to sign up for surveys like this. As far as we can tell, if there's any correlation at all between education, intelligence, vocabulary size, if there's any correlation between those things, and people's likelihood and ability to swear, it's a positive correlation. So people who report swearing tend to be slightly more educated. They tend to have slightly better access to their vocabularies.
Now, there are lots of caveats on this, right? This is within the populations that you're able to easily access. So this is like vocabulary size within college-age adults or within people who fill out a survey like this, but there's no evidence of that inverse correlation, that negative correlation where the suspicion is that people are less educated or less intelligent when they swear more. That doesn't show up at all in any study that I've ever seen.
CODY GOUGH: Interesting. I feel like perhaps women are held to a different standard? I remember my sister was given a much harder time when she swore. It wasn't ladylike. Have you noticed a difference in perception in the genders?
BENJAMIN BERGEN: There are studies on this too. So it's very hard to figure out how much men and women actually swear in their real lives, because you can imagine, how would you run that study? You go put microphones in locker rooms. I don't know what you'd do, right? But as far as we can tell, women and men, when they are in same gender groups, swear about the same amount, which is really interesting.
That said, you're exactly right, that public judgment about swearing, so when a woman or a man swears in a public context, those will differ. And there's a belief, like you said, that women should be more conservative with language. Not everyone holds it, holds that belief. Not everyone acts on that belief, but on average, that belief exists. It's, on average, held just as strongly among women as it is among men, and it results in differences in judgment.
So you're right that a female stand up comedian, for example, who swears is slightly less likely to be judged positively when she swears than a male counterpart would. So there are effects there, and that's not just about swearing actually. A curious fact is that this is true about language in general. Women are expected to be more conservative with language.
So they're judged more harshly when they use contractions, or when they use newly-invented slang terms that aren't offensive. There's sort of this expectation that women will be the conservators, the caretakers of language, and it's of course not just language either. You can think about lots of other domains in cultural expression where women are expected to be more conservative.
CODY GOUGH: Any idea why?
BENJAMIN BERGEN: Well, now--
CODY GOUGH: That's another podcast.
BENJAMIN BERGEN: Yeah, that's sort of a-- yeah, that enters into the realm of social psychology and anthropology. I would guess that this is probably part of our cultural beliefs about what the roles of women and men are in a society.
CODY GOUGH: And that's cultural beliefs because you said that women hold those same biases, not just men. So it's not just men saying, women, this is your place. It's everyone having this bias.
BENJAMIN BERGEN: That's right. Again, on average, so not every person--
CODY GOUGH: But wow.
ASHLEY HAMER: Well, it's true that men and women swear about the same amount. There are a few differences. A study of Myspace pages found that American men and boys were much more likely to use strong swear words than girls, although that wasn't true of users from the UK. Other studies show that women are more likely to use milder swear words, while men prefer stronger ones.
In fact, research shows that male authors are twice as likely as female authors to use the F word, and there's a similar ratio in speech too. A study from New Zealand found that female college students swear slightly less than their male counterparts, but male college students tend to curse a lot less in, quote, "purpose oriented, more structured conversation", while women generally maintain their level of swearing in most contexts. That's right, fellas, whether we're out at the club or at work recording a podcast, women do not give a--
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CODY GOUGH: Everybody wins.
ASHLEY HAMER: One more time, that's thrivemarket.com/curiosity.
CODY GOUGH: That makes me wonder about the way swear words are evolving. We're in a global economy. Globalization is big. We're in the internet age. Everyone is connected. And in different cultures, words mean radically different things. You can drop an F-bomb in the UK or in Scotland. And you can watch their television shows and they say those there. That's not nearly as taboo as it is in the US. So how do we handle that in this global world? How do I know what words to avoid saying if I'm having a conversation with somebody in another country?
BENJAMIN BERGEN: Yeah. This is the same problem, like you said, that we have in every aspect of our lives that reaches out to other languages and other cultures, right? So when you're branding a new car or a new soda or whatever, you've got to make sure that in every market that it's going to go into, it doesn't mean something dirty, right? The story about the Chevy Nova is illuminating, right? So the Chevy Nova of this vehicle, in Spanish, of course, that means doesn't go, right, nova. Well, maybe not the best choice.
So how do we negotiate this? I think the only way to negotiate it is on a case by case basis, right? You just have to know, OK, now I'm reaching out-- now I'm in Brazil. I shouldn't do the A-OK gesture because the A-OK gesture in Brazil means something very different. The circle that you make with your fingers it's kind of like their middle finger. OK, so maybe don't do that so much down there. But that's only something that you can learn on a case by case basis. You couldn't predict that because in 99% of the world, it's not an offensive gesture.
CODY GOUGH: When I signed up for my Xbox 360 account, I tried to enter my first name as Cody, which is my first name. It would not take. It said that this is a profanity or offensive language. I searched for the word Cody on Google in every language I could find, Urban Dictionary. I could not find anything on it. It was the most frustrating thing.
Where am I not allowed to go and say my name is Cody? Like that's what I want to know. So if there's a listener that knows why my first name is so horrible, please write us in at podcast@curiosity.com because I'm still upset about it, quite frankly. This is like 10 years ago.
So speaking of globalization in different contexts, there's also the whole thing you mentioned, George Carlin's seven dirty words before. The FCC doesn't actually have a list of words you can't say. Do you think this is good or bad?
BENJAMIN BERGEN: Well, the FCC has been empowered, and the Supreme Court has confirmed that it has this power, to fine or come up with whatever penalties it wants to protect children. And it has included profanity as something that could potentially harm children. Now there's no science backing this up.
But given that it has that power and given that it exerts that authority on broadcasters, television, radio, it seems like it ought to at least give some guidelines to broadcasters to tell them, OK, so here is a red line that you cannot cross. And then here are some squishy lines and you can use this word in this context, depending-- because just using the we know it when we see it rule, it encourages limit testing and it affords the FCC the possibility to make judgment calls that are maybe inequitable.
So hey, broadcaster A, we treat you differently from broadcaster B. And I've talked to media outlets who believe that they're treated differently just because they fall one way or the other politically or culturally or whatever by the other.
CODY GOUGH: That's not so great. But at the same time, they need a little bit of wiggle room because of the changing context of language.
BENJAMIN BERGEN: Sure.
CODY GOUGH: Right?
BENJAMIN BERGEN: Sure.
CODY GOUGH: I mean, something somebody said 20 years ago, if that's written in law, you can't say this, well then how can I talk about LGBTQ if I'm not allowed to say the Q on the air because it was offensive 30 years?
BENJAMIN BERGEN: That's right.
CODY GOUGH: I'm also noticing this. I've been in podcasting for a long time. I don't know if you're familiar with the iTunes terms of service with their podcasts, but they have similarly very vague guidelines regarding what's explicit. And there are countries, I believe India is one of them, where if you say that your podcast is clean and something is deemed explicit in it, you can have that podcast banned entirely from the country. And that's a fifth of the planet, so that's not good. But it's harder than ever, really, to please everybody. Does this mean we should all be tiptoeing around, do you think?
BENJAMIN BERGEN: Yeah. Well, this is-- again, this is above my pay grade, but it's absolutely true that across cultures, across languages, you're going to find radically different beliefs about how bad bad words are. You mentioned Scotland where you can get away with, as far as I can tell, almost anything. France, Germany are very similar.
But now go to parts of Afghanistan or other places that have Sharia rule, well now all of a sudden blasphemy is a capital offense, right? So we're not even talking about your podcast getting banned, these are really serious consequences. And so what do you do about it? I think this is the same question that we have to ask when we're talking about cross-cultural communication in general, and I don't know what the--
CODY GOUGH: Are you presenting any of your research to lawmakers or has there been any interest from policymakers in the science of swearing?
BENJAMIN BERGEN: No.
CODY GOUGH: Not yet?
BENJAMIN BERGEN: I know. I think people-- I think we're at a place-- we're at a time and place where there are probably bigger, more pressing issues to be dealt with. I'm not going to solve global poverty. I'm not going to address climate change. Those are the things that policymakers should be spending their time on.
CODY GOUGH: I have a suggestion for you. If you want to study online swearing with kids, why don't you just boot up the latest Halo game or Call of Duty because that's where you're going to hear more profanity than probably anywhere else on the planet.
BENJAMIN BERGEN: No doubt. Well, and this is-- we were talking around this earlier, but that's the biggest change in profanity, it is that it is so accessible. You can pull out your phone, get on social media, and you'll see the F-word 100 times before breakfast. And that changes your reaction to those words. So if it's so pervasive a word that every other sentence has it in it, then can it really be that bad a word?
Well, certainly it reduces your physiological reaction to it. We know that increased exposure to these words inures people to them. They don't have the same impact anymore. And that's part of the reason I think why younger generations of Americans just don't find the words that offensive anymore. I mean, there's a four-letter word that refers to feces that in my generation-- I'm in my 40s-- that when I was a kid was a bad word. That was not a word you would say in school. Now my freshman don't even realize that it's offensive. They think of it as just-- it's just a word. It just means stuff.
CODY GOUGH: How interesting.
BENJAMIN BERGEN: Or darn or something like that. And in surveys, it shows up it's less offensive than words that are not at all profanity at all. So these changes are happening, at least in part, I think, because of the change in how people are exposed to language, including most, and maybe most importantly, the internet.
CODY GOUGH: I've thought about this with the President of the United States because President Bush didn't really swear, but I think he maybe dropped HE-double-hockey-sticks or something. President Obama did swear once or twice, not superfluously but when it seemed appropriate. And now, of course, President Trump certainly no stranger to foul, I guess generally considered inappropriate language. Do you think that our political leadership is leading the charge a little bit in this, or do you see that that's particularly shaping public opinion?
BENJAMIN BERGEN: I think what's maybe changing is the likelihood that political leadership will use profanity in public and, second, that it will be noted and amplified. I think that as long as there have been powerful, ambitious people, there has been a strong likelihood that those people swear in private. I mean, you say Obama didn't swear much. That's true in public. But I lived in Hawaii for a good decade. He's from Hawaii. We're now in Chicago.
He worked with labor. He plays basketball. Are you telling me that he doesn't swear at home? Like are you telling me that he doesn't open up Twitter, see some mention that he dislikes when he's sitting on the couch with Michelle and let out a little? No. So I think what's changing is the likelihood that political leaders will use those words in public, either because they want to do work with them, right?
Someone, a senator or a congressperson, reacts on the floor of Congress to express a strong emotional reaction to something using profanity. That is more likely now. I think political leaders may be a little bit more comfortable in public using private language, using informal language, in part, because they're communicating informally via their thumbs to the world in real-time. That feels more informal.
I think that's what's changing, is how it gets externalized, how it gets revealed to the world. I don't think that there's a big change in how much they use it in their private lives. And is that leading the charge? I think it's doubtful. I don't think political leaders oftentimes are cultural innovators or cultural leaders. I think that they're more reflections of what people are doing, what people want than they are active innovators in that arena.
CODY GOUGH: I've actually noticed in radio, why do people with public jobs, or the public speaking jobs, why do they seem to swear so much? Do you have any data on that?
BENJAMIN BERGEN: So there's no cross-job data, but yeah, nearly every person in, not just broadcasting but also journalists will tell me, yes, you should see the newsroom.
CODY GOUGH: Teachers too, probably.
BENJAMIN BERGEN: Teachers, yeah, sure. I think part of what's going on is that what makes a person more likely to swear? Well, if they're really into language-- I mean, language is language, right? And people who are curious about the effects of language, creative with language, interested in how language can produce the desired outcomes, the things that they want to do with it, those people might be more likely to swear strategically or creatively or pervasively. And so what occupations do those people who are really into language go into? Well, oftentimes they're teachers. Oftentimes they're journalists or broadcasters and so on. This love for words.
But in addition, there are certain types of work environments that increase the likelihood that people will swear. So when you've got a bunch of people who work together, it's not like you've got a different crew every day, but it's the same people every day. You develop informal, very close relationships with the people that you work with. Second, you have times when you are not outward facing. You've got times just to yourself. And third, it's relatively high pressure. So you maybe have deadlines, maybe you have a lot of work to do, maybe it's really hard work. Those are the circumstances that seem to breed lots and lots of profanity.
And you see it most in contrast in those occupations where you've got both internal and external time. So salespeople, they have their sales meetings, blah, blah, blah. They swear, swear, swear. And then all of a sudden, now they're customer facing and they've got to be prim and proper and buttoned up. Teachers, journalists. Realtors have told me that this is the case in real estate offices. And actually, I wouldn't need them to tell me that. I mean, coffee is for closers, right? Like mechanics.
Where else do you really see a lot of swearing? Oh yeah, brokers, people selling stocks and stuff like that. You've got this internal time. You've got the external time. You see that contrast in behavior. So yeah, journalists are, as far as I can tell, among the most foul-mouthed occupations that there is.
CODY GOUGH: I've got one final question for you. We wrap up every episode with the curiosity challenge. And I'm going to ask you a random trivia question about something I learned on curiosity.com. The first real life scan of a barcode happened at a Marsh Supermarket in Troy, Ohio in June 1974. It's the first barcode use ever. Do you know what product was scanned?
BENJAMIN BERGEN: That's a good question. So my dad actually used to make software for barcode readers. That doesn't help me at all. I'm going to guess. It was Twinkies.
CODY GOUGH: That's a good guess because Twinkies are small. But the reason this product was picked is to demonstrate how small the barcode could be. So the first item scanned was actually a pack of Wrigley's Juicy Fruit gum.
BENJAMIN BERGEN: Oh, there you go.
CODY GOUGH: Yeah, fun fact for you.
BENJAMIN BERGEN: Yeah.
CODY GOUGH: Super random for the day. And so you have a question for me.
BENJAMIN BERGEN: OK, I brought you a trivia question. So Joel Silver is a film producer. He produced The Matrix movies, Die Hard, Lethal Weapon. He's kind of a big deal. OK, so when he was in high school, he wrote the first rule book for a sport. That sport is now played actively by more than 5 million Americans. What sport did Joel Silver create the rulebook for in high school? What sport?
CODY GOUGH: So 5 million Americans isn't that many Americans. I want to say something like street hockey or dodgeball. Let's go with dodgeball.
BENJAMIN BERGEN: It's a good guess. It's Ultimate Frisbee.
CODY GOUGH: Oh, no way, of course.
BENJAMIN BERGEN: Yeah, he was a high schooler in Maplewood, New Jersey. And yeah, he was one of the first generation that took those Frisbee baking company pie tins, started tossing them around and wrote down the rules for the sport.
CODY GOUGH: That's a phenomenal trivia question.
BENJAMIN BERGEN: Thanks.
CODY GOUGH: Thanks so much for joining me on the Curiosity Podcast. We'll have links to What the F, What Swearing Reveals About Our Language, Our Brains, and Ourselves in the show notes. And it was really nice talking to you.
BENJAMIN BERGEN: Hey, it's my pleasure.
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ASHLEY HAMER: Gravity's pulling me into the extra credit question. This week's question comes from Benyamin who wants to know this, if light has no mass and the force needed to act on an object depends on its mass, then how is it that light could be caught or bent by the gravity of a massive star or black hole? The answer could very well blow your mind, and it's coming up after this.
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AUTOMATED VOICE: Alexa.
ASHLEY HAMER: Play my flash briefing.
AUTOMATED VOICE: Here's your flash briefing from curiosity.com.
CODY GOUGH: Hey, we've got three stories from curiosity.com to help you get smarter in just a few minutes. I'm Cody Gough.
ASHLEY HAMER: And I'm Ashley Hamer.
CODY GOUGH: Well, that was cool. You could learn something new in just a few minutes every day with our new daily podcast from curiosity.com.
ASHLEY HAMER: Every day, Cody and I bring you the top stories from Curiosity. And Amazon Echo users, you can listen every day as part of your Flash Briefing.
CODY GOUGH: So you just heard us use the Flash Briefing. That gives you a quick overview of news and other daily audio clips from lots of different media outlets.
ASHLEY HAMER: It's kind of a daily routine for while you're getting ready for work or school, or maybe while you're cooking dinner or winding down at the end of a busy day.
CODY GOUGH: Yeah, to listen to your flash briefing, just say your smart speakers name, give me my flash briefing, or tell me the news. And now you can add our daily episodes to your flash briefing.
ASHLEY HAMER: There are two ways to add us. First, go to alexa.amazon.com in a web browser or open the Amazon Alexa app on Android or iOS. Then go to Settings, then Flash Briefing, then hit Get more flash briefing content.
CODY GOUGH: Search for Curiosity and you should see Curiosity Daily from curiosity.com. Hit Enable skill and you're all set. We'll also put a direct link to our flash briefing skill in the show notes of this episode. That's probably the fastest, easiest way to find it. You can enable the skill and learn something new every day in audio form.
ASHLEY HAMER: This is a very exciting, new feature for curiosity.com. So if you know anyone with an Amazon Echo, then please tell them about our new skill. It'll really help us keep bringing you a smart, successful podcast. And we'll do what we can to help you learned something new every day.
CODY GOUGH: Again, that's the Curiosity Daily from curiosity.com. And you can hear it on the Amazon flash briefing.
ASHLEY HAMER: Let's take this extra credit answer at light speed or a little slower than that. Benyamin wanted to know how light could be bent by the gravity of massive objects even though it has no mass. First of all, it's true that particles of light, which are called photons, have no mass. It's also true that Newton's second law of motion, illustrated by that old standby F equals ma, deals with the relationship between an object's mass and the amount of force needed to accelerate it.
But when it comes to the gravity of massive stars and black holes, Newton's laws aren't enough. You need Einstein. Einstein's general theory of relativity says that gravity isn't a force. It's a curvature in the fabric of the universe known as space time. One popular analogy to explain this uses a ball placed in the center of a trampoline. If you put a bowling ball on the trampoline, it'll cause a bigger dip than, say, a golf ball, just like a massive object will bend spacetime more than a smaller object.
If you roll a golf ball from one edge of the trampoline toward that bowling ball, the warping of the trampoline fabric will make the golf ball take a detour around the bowling ball. That's what happens around massive objects in space. We say their gravity is bending light, but it's actually bending the fabric of the freaking universe. That causes the light's path to bend, just like the warping of the trampoline bent the path of that golf ball. You can see some really wild examples of this in our article about gravitational lensing on curiosity.com.
CODY GOUGH: That's it for this week. Next week, we're going to do something a little different, and it's an episode you will not want to miss. We promise.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah, we're going to talk all about [BLEEP]
CODY GOUGH: And we're going to clean out Ashley's mouth with soap and water.
ASHLEY HAMER: I'm Ashley Hamer.
CODY GOUGH: I'm Cody Gough. Stay curious.
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SPEAKER: On the Westwood One Podcast Network.