Why Are Bad Words Bad?

Hey, Vsauce. Michael here. When you call customer service and hear this, "to ensure quality service your call may be monitored or recorded," they're not kidding. Over the last year, the Marchex Institute analysed more than 600,000 recorded phone conversations Americans made to businesses in the United States.

Turns out, people from Ohio were the most likely to use curse words - the 'A' word, the 'F' word, and the 'S' word. Washington state residents were the least likely to use bad words. But what makes a word bad? Oh, be careful because etymologically speaking, even the word 'bad' can be considered a bad word.

It began in Old English as a derogatory term for an effeminate man. Eighty percent of swear words overheard in public in 1986, 1997, and 2006 were essentially the same. One third of all counts included the top two - the 'F' word and the 'S' word. Slate's brilliant Lexicon Valley podcast purported that these 10 words makeup about 0.7% of the average English speakers daily vocabulary, which means socially unacceptable words are used almost as often as socially descriptive words.

First person plural pronouns account for about 1% of the words we say every day. When a bad word is bleeped, it is covered with a 1 kilohertz sine wave, which sounds like this. Son of a ... By the way, the symbols and squiggles that are used to represent a bad word have a name. They're called grawlixes. They were named by Mort Walker in his seminal "The Lexicon of Comicana." He names a lot of things, but most of them show stuff; they don't hide stuff.

Why the need to hide bad words, especially if we all pretty much know what's being said? Well, there is no one single reason bad words are bad. Steven Pinker, in his excellent lecture on the topic, delineates five types of swearing. First of all, some words are bad on purpose. They are created and/or used with the intent to hurt others.

He calls this "abusive swearing," using words to insult, humiliate, objectify, or marginalise disfavoured people. Now, if that disfavoured person is God, we're talking about supernatural swearing, which was particularly taboo in Victorian times. It was believed that casually or vainly referring to God would physically injure God himself, literally.

So, at the time, people were forced to come up with euphemisms, like "Zounds!" and "Gadzooks!", which originally meant "God's Wounds!" and "God's Hooks!", referring to the nails driven through the hands of Jesus. Historically, swear words often came from things we were afraid of, things we perceived as dangerous, stronger than us and mercurial. Such as death, disease and infirmity, sex and sexually transmitted diseases, as well as body fluids, germy, gross effluvia.

Words for those gross things became gross and bad in and of themselves, uncouth to speak. But not all words for gross things are socially unacceptable, which brings us to Pinker's second type of swearing - emphatic swearing. Emphatic swearing is where the taboo-ness of bad words becomes quite practical.

You wouldn't usually use those words, but when you really want to convey that your current emotions matter more to you than proper social conduct, you can use them. Dysphemism. A euphemism is a kind, acceptable word that allows you to talk about something unpleasant while simultaneously letting everyone know you totally get that it's unpleasant and want to respect that.

For instance, if you want to be professional, you wouldn't say s***. You might say 'defecate'. If, on the other hand, you really want to drive home just how unpleasant the experience was, dysphemisms can help out a lot. It wasn't a bag of canine defecation you found on your front porch; it was a s*** bag of hot dog s***.

Both of these words refer to pretty much the same thing, but they have different levels of social acceptability, and that's very helpful. It means word choice allows us to not only refer to things in the real world but also to how we feel about them. If both these words had the same level of social acceptance, we might even have to find new, badder words so as not to lose the power language currently has to express emotion, repulsion, and disgust.

But when it comes to two words referring to the same thing, but with different levels of social acceptance, who decides which one's good and which one's bad? Well, historically, many of the bad words we use today are the result of class differences. In medieval England, the lower-class Saxons spoke a Germanic tongue while the upper-class Normans spoke a language related to French and Latin.

English, as we know it today, contains many consequences of their differences. The lower class worked with animals, and from them, we get animal names. The upper class only ate the animals, which is where the names of the meat come from. Today's swear words are similar. Defecation stems from fancy pants Latin, whereas the less classy s*** is Germanic.

There's also idiomatic swearing, where nothing is being emphasized. No dysphemism is meant; instead, it's an easygoing type of swearing that shows an atmosphere is casual. Bad words can be used; we're all close here. It's okay to swear; we're all cool. Cathartic swearing is a bit different.

It gives us "lalochezia," the medical term for the relief swearing provides when you're in pain. In the brain, swearing seems to involve different regions than regular language, which may explain why people with aphasia caused by brain damage struggle to comprehend or construct spoken words but yet are fluent at swearing. Or why people with coprolalia control normal language just fine, but involuntarily utter profanity, an obscene words.

It turns out swearing may be centralized in the limbic system, along with the motions. Many animals make automatic noises when in pain or threat to startle or intimidate attackers, or to let others know what's going on. In humans, bad words are great for this purpose. Their taboo-ness makes them special. People wouldn't use them otherwise, so they are great alarms.

Swearing is changing. Some bad words are being used more and more frequently. Of the seven words, George Carlin said you could never say on television, today, every second, 22 of them are sent out on Twitter. So, what will swearing look like in the future?

It probably won't go away altogether; it's too useful. But the words we don't like will likely change. History has shown that as disease becomes less scary and sex and the supernatural more personal, words related to them become less taboo and more common; whereas words that were common in the past are increasingly unpleasant.

Perhaps, in the future, spurt not by runaway political correctness but by wider knowledge, words like "schizo," "mental," "aspy," or even "depressed" will take the square stage. Or, as John McWhorter ventured, words centered around class and the gap between opportunity and disadvantage will become more taboo. Salt of the Earth, trash, chav, pikey, urban as a pejorative.

When McKay Hatch started a "No Cussing Club" at his school, his campaign became the target of so many online jokes and insults for being lame or anti-free speech. On his book, he literally subtitled his own name "the most cyberbullied kid in the world." People care about this stuff.

Is it censorship to tell us what we can and cannot say or is it a safety seal, ensuring certain dysphemisms don't get worn down to a quotidian bluntness like every other word? Or is that badness of bad words a boundary, a moving boundary of what we reject - sometimes arbitrary, sometimes irrational, but always moving in the direction of acceptance moving forward?

Crime and inequality have existed ever since they could. But when N.W.A released a reaction, in the form of a song with a bad word in the title, "F*** the Police," the Federal Bureau of Investigations released a statement against the song. It was the only time, up until then and since, the FBI has ever issued an official statement about a work of art.

Bad words have power. If you wanna push for change, you'll need something to push. If everything's fine, nothing's cool. So, bad words are the precipitate of a larger reaction - the process of us slowly becoming what we want to become. That's some deep s***. And as always, thanks for watching.