S
Shaant
Guest
The universal language we pretend not to use.
Photo by Nong on Unsplash
The first time I truly appreciated the impact of a word was not in a poem. I was seven years old in my grandmotherโs dusty backyard in India, kneeling down with ravaged palms and a budding shame. A lizard had run across my foot.
Stunned by the rapid motion of the creature, I uttered a single sharp English word, one I had heard my uncle say when he smashed his thumb with a hammer.
The air went quiet in a way that feels distinct from simply becoming silent; like it turned sour. My grandmotherโs humming stopped.
The single syllable, foreign and harsh, thumped between us like a physical hit. I had not given anyone a name. I had not insulted her. I had just given the sound of me screaming in reaction to flailing in fear, and I had broken an unspoken law I wasnโt aware of.
That gross feeling, the heat of breaking a taboo, is a feeling that never really left me. It made me question what puts the sin in sound and letters, and what allows two words and groups of letters to represent the same idea, but rather than horrible, is just a polite use of words.
I learned early that some words are knives and others are spoons
When I was a kid, language was a minefield. My friends and I had a complete vocabulary of macaronic substitutes, hissing โshootโ or โfudgeโ in the schoolyard, letting a tiny murmur of sensation brand us as rebels. Even though those hissing substitutes were hollow blows, the real words, unaltered, were currency.
I felt like I held a dangerous secret when I learned a real word, a trace of rebellion. We exchanged words with whispers, and we knew they werenโt interesting because of the meaning. They were interesting because of their prohibition.
So here is the teacher who is telling us to stop being silly, but if we said the real word, an unabridged version of what we meant, specifically the word for feces, her face would constrict in a different kind of annoyance. This wasnโt about our foolishness, it was about our corruption. We were using a spoon on a job that had to be done with a knife.
This distinction was something I took with me all over the world. When I came to the United States to do my masters, I found that the rules were different, but the game was the same.
My American friends would drop a book and say โshitโ casually, a word which would have subjected me to a week of scolding back home. But they would wince at the word โcunt,โ which in some British and Australian circles I had been in since, was exchanged with a rough, friendly affection.
It was never about the actual meaning. It was about the collective agreement or invisible boundary a community creates around certain sounds.
It made me think that we werenโt swearing about the things we were swearing about. We were swearing about the rules. It was an act of tiny, ridiculous rebellion. It was a declaration and a way to communicate that in this moment, my frustration is more important than your discomfort.
I once witnessed something similar in a corporate meeting. A project was falling apart due to a dumb, entirely avoidable mistake, and all that polite corporate jargon wasnโt doing anything to allow the sheer horror and panic of the event to shine through.
Then, a senior engineer, someone whom I respected profoundly, leaned back in his chair, rubbed his temples, and stated calmly, โWell, this is a proper clusterfuck.โ
The tension in the room melted away. The word was like a release valve. Yes, it was vulgar, but it was also the truthfully honest, provably accurate description of our predicament. It cut through the pretense and identified failure for what it was.
In that moment, the taboo word was not a limitation in vocabulary; it was the only word sufficiently precise for the emotional truth of the situation.
The shock of a swear word is a painkiller for the brain
It was science, at last, that provided me a framework for the feeling of exhilaration that I experienced at the meeting. I read some studies on swearing and how swearing was connected with pain tolerance. There were studies of people that had their hands in ice water, and if those people were encouraged to curse, then they could keep their hands in the ice water for longer.
The idea is that cursing triggers a fight or flight response, and our bodies release adrenaline that gets us through the situation. It makes complete sense to me. When I stub my toe in the dark, the guttural โfuckโ that comes out is not a thoughtful choice. It is a biological reaction, or a verbal uppercut to the pain.
The cursing stimulus came from an area of the brain different than other language-based thoughts, from a very primal area of emotion and reflex.
My father has never cursed. He is a quiet man determined to be disciplined and controlled. But one afternoon, while attempting to fix our rust-bucket of a car, the wrench slipped and he smashed his knuckle against the engine block.
When he let out a noise, it was a strangled, furious roar. The present-tense curses in our native tongue that spilled from his mouth were so violent and passionate that they sounded like they belonged to another man. I was terrified.
And then, just as quickly, it was over. He shook his hand, took a deep breath, and returned to work. Iโm sure the pain is still present. But the emotions that attached to the pain were gone. The words had achieved their purpose.
He had absorbed the noise, raw, unguided pain, and put it into a measurable fit of objectionable sound, and blasted it into the atmosphere. In that moment, swearing was not a sign of lack of control. It was the act of keeping it.
We are denying ourselves this resource at our own cost. We tell kids to use their words, though only the clean, approved words. We ask them to convey deep frustration, moments of rage or pain, with the exact same words they used to ask for more potatoes.
It is emotional straightjacket. There is nothing that can really replace the secret sauce of a swear. Saying โoh f fudge!โ after losing a large contract does not satisfy the itch.
Swear words take on equity based solely on how tabooed they are in our society. If everyone in the public sphere started saying โfudgeโ to the same degree of hostility, the new word would become ours and we would have to invent a new one.
We need the taboo for the release to have the same effect.
We are not cursing with words, but with intent
This is where things get sticky. A word itself is neutral. It is a vessel. You could wield the same word as a weapon or a weld based on who was wielding it and their intent.
There is a chess player friend of mine who calls me a โbastardโ when I beat him, always with a grin. There is intent there. I have also seen that word spat in anger to injure and delegitimize.
The issue is not the word. The issue is guilt, intention, and malice. I learned this lesson the hard way.
In fintech, the pressure and timelines and expectations are everywhere. The language on and around the trading floor is known to be blue, i.e., a constant stream of profanity. It isnโt that we are angry, but more intense, as if living in a state of perpetual pathos or shell shock, trying to maintain adrenaline.
I fit right in quickly, adjusting. Then, I started thinking of the words as white noise in the moment, struck for life on high stakes. I brought that habit home as well, with language I had no longer considered, casual or comfortable.
My girlfriend at the time, never said anything. She was modern, educated, didnโt get shocked easily. But one evening, after a particularly long day, I dropped something and cursed, the same way I would have at work.
There was no one there to hear it but her. And I saw it, just a flicker in her eyes, a tiny wince.
It wasnโt that she took offense to the word itself. It was that the version of me that used it so flippantly was a version she didnโt know.
The word itself wasnโt the issue. My lack of awareness about the wordโs impact on her was. I had no intention of causing harm, but it was a type of recklessness that cared little if anything.
I was at the dinner table with a knife and using it to butter bread, and I had no idea I was dragging the knife down the plate.
This is the tightrope we walk. The words that unite us in a shared context of rebellion or at a stressful worksite can also separate people in moments of intimacy.
It is all about context.
The cultural anthropology-enthusiast in me sees taboos, or the taboo words, as the canary in the coal mine of a societyโs anxieties. There was a time when blasphemy was considered the biggest evil in religious times. And then, a little later, when the social context changed to a focus on public health, vulgarities related to bodily functions became taboo.
Today, I would argue that the last really powerful taboo words are the slurs, which comprise a specific category of words that have been manufactured to exterminate humans.
Their power does not arise from a general sense of naughtiness, but rather from a particular, historic burden of violence and hatred.
When you use slurs (not in a very particular reclaimed context), you are, outside of a polite rule, invoking the history of the pain.
The words we fear reveal what we value most
My grandmother never learned English. She never knew the literal definition of the word that shocked her that afternoon in the courtyard, but she understood the spirit of it.
She heard the disrespect for the place she worked so hard to keep peaceful and orderly. Her prohibition had nothing to do with the word but everything to do with the disorder it had come to represent.
We police language so carefully because it is the neck of the woods of our culture. It is how we shape the discussions with young children about what is permitted, what is valued, and what is counted as forbidden. The taboos are the walls around our virtues.
But walls can also serve as prisons. The fear of a word can give it authority it never deserved.
I think about the school board meetings where angry parents were more upset about a curse word in a book than the violent ideas it might describe. We deprioritize the symbol and focus on the substance.
I become like the people I sometimes met in the American South, who would freak out over โgoddamnโ and not think anything of โoh my God,โ and not even realize the linguistic irony.
Taboo has ceased to mean anything and has rather become a performance, a way to signal our own piousness without having to go through the harder work of genuine kindness or understanding.
What I see as the most significant aspect of profanity is that it claims the special distinction of being a reflection of human inventiveness. We are tireless in our mutinous ingenuity.
When one word is captured and sanitized by the mainstream, we simply create another. We need these words. We need the pressure release. We need the emotional shortcut.
We need the ability, in an instant of either great pain or great joy, to reach for something more robust than polite society allows. A universe devoid of any taboos would be a universe devoid of this particular emphasis tool.
It would be a (figuratively) flatter, quieter, and I think, less honest universe.
The aim is not to remove these words, or to live in a world of all people speaking in a sterile, inoffensive monotone. The aim is to understand them. To understand why they hold power, when that power is helpful, and when it is regrettable.
To understand the difference between using a word in order to share your suffering and using a word to impose suffering on someone else.
The most rich vocabulary is not the one that eliminates taboo words. It is the one with a full vocabulary, with an understanding of the weight of the words and the meaning of their history, and the wisdom and compassion to choose the right word at the right time.
A word is nothing but a sound until we agree it is something else.
Profanity, Cursing, and Why Taboos Matter was originally published in Ride the Wave on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
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