7. Dr. Benjamin Bergen — What the F: What Swearing Reveals About Our Language, Our Brains, and Ourselves
The Michael Shermer Show
Michael Shermer
4.3 • 1K Ratings
🗓️ 16 October 2016
⏱️ 102 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Dr. Benjamin Bergen is a professor of cognitive science at the University of California, San Diego, and in his new book he explains why profanity is so appealing to us. Let's face it, we all swear. Whether we're happy or mad, uttering a four-letter word seems to be a natural occurrence for most of us. But why do we swear, even when we know we're breaking cultural taboos? Why are some words off limits in certain countries or deemed offensive in past centuries but are considered perfectly tame in others? What does all this g*ddamn swearing tell us about our language and our brains? Bergen has the answers as he illuminates the controversial and complex nature of profanity and its relationship on our culture.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is your host, Michael Sherman, and you're listening to Science Salon, a series of conversations |
| 0:10.4 | with leading scientists, scholars, and thinkers about the most important issues of our time. |
| 0:17.0 | How did you come to be interested in profanity and curse words and all that? |
| 0:24.8 | You're a cognitive scientist at UC San Diego. |
| 0:27.1 | You study language and cognition. |
| 0:29.3 | What's the connection to profanity? |
| 0:31.3 | Yeah, well, I've always been fascinated |
| 0:33.3 | about how we're able to transmit ideas |
| 0:37.2 | through time and space by flapping our lips |
| 0:40.2 | or by twiddling our thumbs. |
| 0:42.4 | And historically, I've been interested in kind of the rational side of things. |
| 0:47.5 | You know, I've got some, I'm a philosopher and so I see a cat on a mat and I want to tell you about that. |
| 0:54.2 | How do I do that? |
| 0:56.1 | But as I started to turn towards the more emotional side of language, |
| 1:00.4 | like how do we convey strong emotions that we're experiencing in a moment? |
| 1:04.6 | The obvious first place to start was those words that we use to express the strongest |
| 1:08.1 | emotions and that elicit the strongest emotions in other people. |
| 1:10.9 | And so I started to dig a little bit |
| 1:13.2 | into the science surrounding that, what's happening |
| 1:16.1 | in our brains that causes us to swear, |
| 1:18.1 | or that happens as a response to hearing other people swear. |
| 1:22.0 | What makes words profane in a society over time, what's profane |
... |
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