Swearing and Power

Steven Pinker lassos up a whole rodeo of bad words and swearing at The New Republic. His arguments largely concern the connotative nature of swear words for creating an affective reaction in the reader or hearer and are a pairing-down of the broad treatment in The Stuff of Thought.

There is an oddity, though, in his treatment of the word "fuck" from an evolutionary psychology perspective. The problem of parasitism has been put forward as a driver for the evolution of sex because sexual recombination is a good diversity pump for immunological competence in the face of a rapidly changing threat environment. So it is natural that Pinker would invoke this theory of sex to try to get a handle on why sexual terms might carry taboo weight down through history. But the argument falls somewhat flat in the most common way "fuck" is used: "fuck you." He rightly points out that there is a symmetry with "damn you" but with the unmodern religious nature of "damning" replaced by the up-to-date invocation of taboo sexual terminology. "Eat shit" has about the same level of nastiness as "fuck you" but is more clearly tied to the problem of parasitism.

Yet, the idea that our connotations are tied to the icky and emotionally fraught aspects of sex (he even invokes parental investment theory at one point) strikes me as less likely than seeing the word as exactly the kind of power word that the 70s feminists saw in "cunt." "Fuck you" is a power phrase that is tied to non-voluntary sex and rape. Rape (and the protection of females from rape) must have had a profound role in the environmentally adaptive environment that backgrounds our psychological makeup. The fact that "fuck you" was most often used between men until recently (I suspect) bears this out. It is ungrammatically asserting that the receiver of the phrase is somehow going to receive the profane act in a passive role. It demeans them with a conveniently short and phonologically plosive imprecation.

True, the term "fuck" has common currency these days but still resonates with a more animalistic reference to sex when used in that fashion: "What have those two been up to? They were fucking" as compared with "They were having sex" (clinical) or "They were making love" (euphemistic and 70s-ish).

So do we linguistically sort and invent terms over time to find optimal curses that carry the right level of phonological, semantic and pragmatic properties? Absofuckinglutely.