Five Different Ways of Swearing

Steven Pinker has a new book out (thanks to Tyler).


Related;
Q&A With Pinker;

(9) I was wondering whether you have ever experienced such a high from a scientific insight or discovery, such a luminous instance of what the poet W.H. Auden called "the Vision of Dame Kind," that you thought to yourself: "Ah, how wonderful. Everyone should have a chance to feel this way at least once."

When I was working in visual cognition with my former grad student (now Brown professor) Michael Tarr, we were puzzled that the time people took to recognize shapes was linearly related to their orientation (slowest for upside-down, a bit quicker when they were on their side, faster still when they were at 45 degrees, fastest of all when upright), suggesting that people mentally rotate an image of the shapes to the upright. But our subjects did not show this pattern at all for mirror-reversed versions of the shapes--in that case, every orientation took the same amount of time. At first we though that people use different strategies for normal and mirror-reversed shapes, when it dawned on me that you could always rotate a mirror-image onto its normal version in the third dimension around an oblique axis (e.g., as when you flip your right hand from palm-down fingers-up to palm-up fingers-right), and that the rotation is always exactly 180 degrees. If our subjects intuitively figured out the optimal rotation axis in every case, they would produce exactly the pattern of data we obtained. When Mike programmed an animation in which a shape alternated with a misoriented version of itself, we instantly saw it rock through the shortest-path rotation (in the picture-plane for normal shapes, in depth for the mirror-reversed ones), confirming that the brain effortlessly calculates the optimal 3-D kinematics. It's tremendously gratifying when a seemingly ugly pattern of data suddenly reveals itself as the predicted outcome of an elegant underlying process.

10 questions for Judith Rich Harris

Pinker's Thinkers

Of thought and metaphor;

"As it turns out, people swear in five different ways. That's why it took me a while to figure this out," he says.

"The subject matter of swearing is something that people don't like to have taken lightly. Sex is a big deal. An atmosphere in which you bring up sex at the drop of a hat seems to many people to remove some of the inhibitions about thinking about sex. Casual speech about sex occurs in an atmosphere that would tolerate casual sex itself and there are a lot of reasons why people get upset about casual sex."

Using sexual terms in swearing, something like motherf---er, evokes revulsion over the implied depravity.

In addition to sex, Pinker lists four taboo subjects that dominate swearing: religion, excretion, despised groups, and disease and infirmity.