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The Seven Words You Can't Say On Television
Why are some words rude and others aren't? Why can launching into expletives be so shocking - and sometimes so amusing?In this hilarious extract from his bestselling "The Stuff of Thought" Steven Pinker takes us on a fascinating journey through the world of profanities, to show us why we swear, how taboos change and how we use obscenities in different ways. Why do so many swear words involve sex, bodily functions and religion? What are the biological roots of swearing? Why would a democracy deter the use of words for two activities - sex and excretion - that harm no one and are inescapable parts of the human condition?Taboo language enters into a startling array of human concerns from capital crimes in the Bible to the future of electronic media. You'll discover that in Quebecois French the expression 'Tabernacle' is outrageous, that 'scumbag' has a very unsavoury origin and that in a certain Aboriginal language every word is filthy when spoken in front of your mother-in-law.Covering everything from free speech to Tourette's, from pottymouthed celebrities to poetry, this book reveals what swearing tells us about how our minds work. (It's also a bloody good read).
96 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2008
19 people are currently reading
1555 people want to read
About the author
Steven Pinker
71 books10.7k followersSteven Arthur Pinker is a prominent Canadian-American experimental psychologist, cognitive scientist, and author of popular science. Pinker is known for his wide-ranging explorations of human nature and its relevance to language, history, morality, politics, and everyday life. He conducts research on language and cognition, writes for publications such as the New York Times, Time, and The New Republic, and is the author of numerous books, including The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, Words and Rules, The Blank Slate, The Stuff of Thought, The Better Angels of Our Nature, The Sense of Style, and most recently, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress.
He was born in Canada and graduated from Montreal's Dawson College in 1973. He received a bachelor's degree in experimental psychology from McGill University in 1976, and then went on to earn his doctorate in the same discipline at Harvard in 1979. He did research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for a year, then became an assistant professor at Harvard and then Stanford University. From 1982 until 2003, Pinker taught at the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, and eventually became the director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience. (Except for a one-year sabbatical at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1995-6.) As of 2008, he is the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard.
Pinker was named one of Time Magazine's 100 most influential people in the world in 2004 and one of Prospect and Foreign Policy's 100 top public intellectuals in 2005. He has also received honorary doctorates from the universities of Newcastle, Surrey, Tel Aviv, McGill, and the University of Tromsø, Norway. He was twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, in 1998 and in 2003. In January 2005, Pinker defended Lawrence Summers, President of Harvard University, whose comments about the gender gap in mathematics and science angered much of the faculty. On May 13th 2006, Pinker received the American Humanist Association's Humanist of the Year award for his contributions to public understanding of human evolution.
In 2007, he was invited on The Colbert Report and asked under pressure to sum up how the brain works in five words – Pinker answered "Brain cells fire in patterns."
Pinker was born into the English-speaking Jewish community of Montreal. He has said, "I was never religious in the theological sense... I never outgrew my conversion to atheism at 13, but at various times was a serious cultural Jew." As a teenager, he says he considered himself an anarchist until he witnessed civil unrest following a police strike in 1969. His father, a trained lawyer, first worked as a traveling salesman, while his mother was first a home-maker then a guidance counselor and high-school vice-principal. He has two younger siblings. His brother is a policy analyst for the Canadian government. His sister, Susan Pinker, is a columnist for the Wall Street Journal and the author of The Sexual Paradox and The Village Effect.
Pinker married Nancy Etcoff in 1980 and they divorced 1992; he married Ilavenil Subbiah in 1995 and they too divorced. He is married to the novelist and philosopher Rebecca Goldstein, the author of 10 books and winner of the National Medal of the Humanities. He has no children.
His next book will take off from his research on "common knowledge" (knowing that everyone knows something). Its tentative title is: Don't Go There: Common Knowledge and the Science of Civility, Hypocrisy, Outrage, and Taboo.
He was born in Canada and graduated from Montreal's Dawson College in 1973. He received a bachelor's degree in experimental psychology from McGill University in 1976, and then went on to earn his doctorate in the same discipline at Harvard in 1979. He did research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for a year, then became an assistant professor at Harvard and then Stanford University. From 1982 until 2003, Pinker taught at the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, and eventually became the director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience. (Except for a one-year sabbatical at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1995-6.) As of 2008, he is the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard.
Pinker was named one of Time Magazine's 100 most influential people in the world in 2004 and one of Prospect and Foreign Policy's 100 top public intellectuals in 2005. He has also received honorary doctorates from the universities of Newcastle, Surrey, Tel Aviv, McGill, and the University of Tromsø, Norway. He was twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, in 1998 and in 2003. In January 2005, Pinker defended Lawrence Summers, President of Harvard University, whose comments about the gender gap in mathematics and science angered much of the faculty. On May 13th 2006, Pinker received the American Humanist Association's Humanist of the Year award for his contributions to public understanding of human evolution.
In 2007, he was invited on The Colbert Report and asked under pressure to sum up how the brain works in five words – Pinker answered "Brain cells fire in patterns."
Pinker was born into the English-speaking Jewish community of Montreal. He has said, "I was never religious in the theological sense... I never outgrew my conversion to atheism at 13, but at various times was a serious cultural Jew." As a teenager, he says he considered himself an anarchist until he witnessed civil unrest following a police strike in 1969. His father, a trained lawyer, first worked as a traveling salesman, while his mother was first a home-maker then a guidance counselor and high-school vice-principal. He has two younger siblings. His brother is a policy analyst for the Canadian government. His sister, Susan Pinker, is a columnist for the Wall Street Journal and the author of The Sexual Paradox and The Village Effect.
Pinker married Nancy Etcoff in 1980 and they divorced 1992; he married Ilavenil Subbiah in 1995 and they too divorced. He is married to the novelist and philosopher Rebecca Goldstein, the author of 10 books and winner of the National Medal of the Humanities. He has no children.
His next book will take off from his research on "common knowledge" (knowing that everyone knows something). Its tentative title is: Don't Go There: Common Knowledge and the Science of Civility, Hypocrisy, Outrage, and Taboo.
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Displaying 1 - 23 of 23 reviews
April 13, 2018
An interesting foray into the habit of human beings to swear, including the analysis of the grammatical elements of "taboo" language. Too short for my liking, as I could spend days reading just about this stuff, it provides enough information to feel satiated - and amused - at how the "offensive" part of our language works.
March 14, 2017
Named after a famed monologue by comedian George Carlin, this short 2008 work by Steven Pinker delves into the linguistic basis and evolution of swearing. It turns out that swearing seems to be controlled by the basal ganglia, which means that, like music, it often lives on even in states of aphasia beyond basic language and sentence construction. That means it's hardwired, and it relates to religion, cleanliness and sex, evolving towards the latter as the former ceased to have the same pull it had in the past. Why do we do it? Well, it turns there are a number of very good reasons for creating oaths and taboos in our social/professional development and the Church and its paraphernalia was right there, on hand to support us in the past. Now we have to use the law quite often, or the law plus oath, to create the sense of solemnity.
Pinker is always erudite and readable, and here picks just the right size of book to whet the intellectual appetite, so to speak. The use of swearing, its power in circumstances and lack of power in others, is discussed here, leaving us with the sense that while we are right not to fall back into the overly restrictive codes that stifled expression, we also need to have some sense of what purposes we have subverted in the meantime by being unable to use the same strictures on the imprecations that have been confined to our basal ganglia.
One point he makes is that in the past religion provided the gravity that, say, swearing on the life of one's child might replicate now. There was a code in place that one would not break easily, just in case there really was an afterlife whose pitch we could be queering with some petty selfishness... Meanwhile the interjections that we all know and love came from potentially dangerous health-related situations. A pile of shit was a possible source of plague, after all. Sexual acts carried, and continue to carry, more risks than we might be really considering in the heat of the moment, whether physical, psychological or merely philosophical. Swearing is also a manner of creating camaraderie or shared tone, such as in a mining camp or military units.
In linguistic terms, it is amazing how much you can tell about a person from their choices of words and their deployment of swear words. Indeed someone using a refined tone with a single swear word draws the appropriate attention to whatever is being highlighted, while someone who swears with every second word numbs their audience and loses trust. To avoid swear words altogether in a swearing environment is like a musician joining a jazz band and trying to play without syncopation. It just won't sound right. Then again, swear words in a mouth that doesn't generally use them is also something exceedingly strange-sounding. These are some solid reasons for all of this, and Pinker sketches out the issue with rigour and a touch of humour. And brevity.
Pinker is always erudite and readable, and here picks just the right size of book to whet the intellectual appetite, so to speak. The use of swearing, its power in circumstances and lack of power in others, is discussed here, leaving us with the sense that while we are right not to fall back into the overly restrictive codes that stifled expression, we also need to have some sense of what purposes we have subverted in the meantime by being unable to use the same strictures on the imprecations that have been confined to our basal ganglia.
One point he makes is that in the past religion provided the gravity that, say, swearing on the life of one's child might replicate now. There was a code in place that one would not break easily, just in case there really was an afterlife whose pitch we could be queering with some petty selfishness... Meanwhile the interjections that we all know and love came from potentially dangerous health-related situations. A pile of shit was a possible source of plague, after all. Sexual acts carried, and continue to carry, more risks than we might be really considering in the heat of the moment, whether physical, psychological or merely philosophical. Swearing is also a manner of creating camaraderie or shared tone, such as in a mining camp or military units.
In linguistic terms, it is amazing how much you can tell about a person from their choices of words and their deployment of swear words. Indeed someone using a refined tone with a single swear word draws the appropriate attention to whatever is being highlighted, while someone who swears with every second word numbs their audience and loses trust. To avoid swear words altogether in a swearing environment is like a musician joining a jazz band and trying to play without syncopation. It just won't sound right. Then again, swear words in a mouth that doesn't generally use them is also something exceedingly strange-sounding. These are some solid reasons for all of this, and Pinker sketches out the issue with rigour and a touch of humour. And brevity.
December 5, 2012
Easy introduction into neurolinguistic and psycholinguistic studies, written in an approachable tone turning it much less academic than it seems to be. Humorous and while there are some technicalities that are a bit trying, the overall content is very easy to understand.
Read
August 10, 2011A fabulously fun little book. Beautifully argued, informative, and (as always when it's Pinker) bloody hilarious. Plus, with so few pages, you have absolutely no excuse not to read it.
November 27, 2011
Short and worth the read.
Had various interesting curiosities about the grammar, history, use, and the different contexts of swearing. What I liked best was the rudimentary notes from neuroscience, i.e. the amygdala connection: why someone today will never be in a position to feel dated plays and novels as they reacted to in their day, or, similarly, why there is such a difference for the reader of nigger and the n-word (or even n*gger), even if we all know the word to which the latter phrase refers.
Had various interesting curiosities about the grammar, history, use, and the different contexts of swearing. What I liked best was the rudimentary notes from neuroscience, i.e. the amygdala connection: why someone today will never be in a position to feel dated plays and novels as they reacted to in their day, or, similarly, why there is such a difference for the reader of nigger and the n-word (or even n*gger), even if we all know the word to which the latter phrase refers.
October 19, 2009
Although part of the book "The Stuff of Thought", which I'm currently reading, I loved reading this book (as it was a gift from a colleague)... It truly nails the topic of (the fun in) swearing and profanity, and tells us why we do it and feel the way we do about it...
Truly wonderful book (and chapter in the even more wonderful 'The Stuff of Thought')
Truly wonderful book (and chapter in the even more wonderful 'The Stuff of Thought')
October 12, 2021
Pinker notes that "the seven words you can never say on television refer to sexuality and excretion: they are names for feces, urine, intercourse, the vagina, breasts, a person who engages in fellatio, and a person who acts out an Oedipal desire". But taboo words go beyond references to sexuality and excretion; they have religious references, they deal with death and disease, they make references to the marginalised and despised. And taboo words serve a variety of purposes - as a weapon to force a disagreeable thought on someone and force them to give you attention (in the most unpleasant way possible), to provide a sense of catharsis when expressing strong emotions, as a way of describing or conveying something in a creative and memorable way (Lyndon Johnson describing a Kennedy aide: "he wouldn't know how to pour piss out of a boot if the instructions were printed on the heel.")
Seven Words is a short read. It is mildly entertaining in some parts (Yiddish curses are amazing, like: "May all your teeth fall out but one, so you can have a toothache.") and has some interesting anecdotes. Like Rep Doug Ose's failed attempt to ban profanity on the airwaves via the poorly drafted Clean Airwaves Act. And how the late linguist Jim McCawley wrote several papers analysing the grammar of English taboo expressions under the tasteless pseudonym Quang Fuc Dong, which are still references today as Quang (1971) or Dong, Q.F.
I did enjoy the little snippets on the evolution of the English language. Like how 'damned' become 'damn' when "the insubstantial -ed got swallowed in pronunciation and overlooked in perception, as it did in ice cream, mincemeat and box set" - who knew?? Or how "scumbag" originally meant "condom" or "jerk" came from "jerk off".
But having been socialised to avoid taboo words for the most part, it's a little overwhelming to read a 100+ pages that's just packed to the gills with them. And having finished the book, I'm not exactly raring to read The Stuff of Thought. Bill Bryson might be a more absorbing pick.
March 15, 2022
You can rest assured that Pinker is an excellent writer. His vocabulary is extensive which makes it hard to read for a non-native speaker, but this can be the beauty of it, you'll be "reaching for" the dictionary at almost every page turn. I'm only giving it 3 because the book itself - while amusing - did not add much to my life, did not move me closer to my goals or help me in any way. I learned way more about swearing and some of its origins than I ever wished. I'm not too into linguistics and I guess I'll leave the rest of the Pinker books for those that are really interested in a given book's topic. This was fairly short, the kind that can be done in 1-2 weeks if you only read a few minutes on the toilet or before going to sleep. But I didn't make any notes or feel the need to highlight anything. I'll likely forget about its teachings and move on, just like I had read an article online about swearing and cursing. So in essence: writing quality is excellent - value extracted (for me, personally): not much.
November 18, 2022
This is a short investigation into the hows and whys of swearing in English. It delves into the historical evolution of swearing tries to explore why we feel how we do about swearing.
The etymological investigation into swearing is somewhat interesting, however I didn't expect it to take up so much of the book. It is a bit of a whistle-stop tour and I would probably have been more interested with a bit more detail, and also if the book was framed that way.
The book is framed more as a discussion over censorship and prudishness, and I expected more of a discussion on this, but it probably didn't even make up 10% of the text.
So approach with caution... It deals more with linguistic history and even then does so lightly. If you want a discussion on the history of bad language censorship (or even *why* these words can't be said on TV) then you will be disappointed.
The etymological investigation into swearing is somewhat interesting, however I didn't expect it to take up so much of the book. It is a bit of a whistle-stop tour and I would probably have been more interested with a bit more detail, and also if the book was framed that way.
The book is framed more as a discussion over censorship and prudishness, and I expected more of a discussion on this, but it probably didn't even make up 10% of the text.
So approach with caution... It deals more with linguistic history and even then does so lightly. If you want a discussion on the history of bad language censorship (or even *why* these words can't be said on TV) then you will be disappointed.
June 19, 2017
I love Steve Pinker's writing, and this book was no exception - very interesting and entertaining at the same time.
March 7, 2018
Lots of lists but amusing and interesting nonetheless. A nice quick read.
February 9, 2019
I’m nearly certain most of you already know what the banned words on TV are. Nicely presented analysis of how we got from darn to fuck in a couple of generations...
October 2, 2020
3.5 🌟
Some sections were more interesting than others for me.
Some sections were more interesting than others for me.
November 1, 2022
Quite entertaining. Some interesting linguistic points in here; I particularly enjoyed the origins of some of the words. An interesting socio-cultural study about why and how we swear.
Want to read
April 6, 2023to-read
December 24, 2013
A fascinating survey of swearing in English: where it comes from, what it means and doesn't mean, why we use it and why we should or should not. Well worth the read.
Pinker verduidelik heel netjies hoe vloektaal in Engels werk: waar dit vandaan kom, wat dit beteken, hoe dit gebruik word en hoekom dit goed én sleg is. Vir die Afrikaanse leser klink heelwat aspekte baie bekend: 'n verwerking om vloektaal in Afrikaans te beskryf, klink na 'n bak plan (lees reg!).
Pinker verduidelik heel netjies hoe vloektaal in Engels werk: waar dit vandaan kom, wat dit beteken, hoe dit gebruik word en hoekom dit goed én sleg is. Vir die Afrikaanse leser klink heelwat aspekte baie bekend: 'n verwerking om vloektaal in Afrikaans te beskryf, klink na 'n bak plan (lees reg!).
January 30, 2011
All you wanted to know about bad, bad words and why we can't keep our tongues away from them. Smart, hilarious and educational (I've learnt cock got itself two words in Japanese - chin chin. I think I got myself a favourite toast there;))
Want to read
January 9, 2014Looks like a good follow-up to Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing
August 2, 2011
Short but insightful psycholinguistic analysis about why we swear.
June 28, 2012
Intressant, vissa kapitel mer än andra.
June 6, 2012
Excellent analysis of swearing from an academic point of view. A fxxking good book! Makes me want to read the whole bloody The Stuff of Thought!
July 16, 2013
Really interesting, and nice style - lots of information but still feels interesting. Funny and insightful.
Want to read
February 16, 2014On 2014-02-16 it was not available for Kindle.
Displaying 1 - 23 of 23 reviews