Why do swear words exist?
Moment of Um
American Public Media
4.4 • 1.5K Ratings
🗓️ 6 December 2023
⏱️ 5 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Words are wonderful! Pickle, bubble, and hullabaloo are all super fun to say. But some words can be hurtful, like swear words. So if we aren’t supposed to say them, why do swear words exist? We asked linguist Carolin Debray to help us find the answer.
Got a question that seems unan-swear-able? Send it to us at BrainsOn.org/contact, and we’ll dis-cuss the answer.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | From the brains behind brains on, this is the moment of um. Moment of Um, um, comes to you from APM Studios, I'm Clara. |
| 0:20.0 | Um. |
| 0:22.0 | Um. day of the week, because it's my day to clean the house, and I love cleaning. |
| 0:35.1 | My friends call me cleaning Clara. |
| 0:37.4 | Today I'm cleaning the living room, and I realize that the furniture arrangement is feeling |
| 0:42.4 | a little stale, but I came up with a brilliant |
| 0:46.0 | plan to really rejuvenate the room. The only thing left to do is to move the couch. Just got a lift with the legs. Okay, deep breath. |
| 0:58.0 | One, two, three. Oh, I'm doing it. Almost there. |
| 1:04.0 | O'O! My toe! |
| 1:08.0 | Razzle fraset! |
| 1:09.0 | That felt better. My Grandpa always says that when he stubs his toe. He told me it's better to say a silly |
| 1:16.2 | made-up word when you hurt yourself or get frustrated instead of using real swear words. |
| 1:21.2 | Because real swear words are rude and could upset people. |
| 1:25.0 | Although, wait a second. |
| 1:27.6 | Why do we even have swear words if we can't say them? |
| 1:31.2 | My friend Teddy was wondering about this too. |
| 1:35.0 | It's interesting you can see that swear words exist in almost every language that we know and that we have studied and in all these |
| 1:45.2 | languages they actually are very similar so they stem from topics that for |
| 1:50.1 | some reason across different societies we have decided that are taboo so that we shouldn't talk about openly. |
| 1:55.8 | I'm Carolyn Debray and I'm a linguist and I work at the University of Barcelona in Switzerland. |
| 2:02.4 | So for example certain topics such at the University of Basel in Switzerland. |
| 2:03.0 | So for example, certain topics such as toilet use, |
... |
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