12/18/2023 0 Comments Curse or wowmatrix 2017It ended up debunking the poverty-of-vocabulary myth. Jay was the co-author of a 2015 study, published in Language Sciences, that tested the ability of people to generate words beginning with a given letter. “Any language scholar knows otherwise.”ĭr. “This is the ‘poverty of vocabulary’ myth, that people swear because they lack the right words due to impoverished vocabulary,’’ Dr. Cursing is coping, or venting, and it helps us deal with stress.”Ĭurse words can help you more accurately communicate your emotions, which contradicts the folk belief that people use profanity because they lack vocabulary skills. “We can express our emotions, especially anger and frustration, towards others symbolically not through tooth and nail. “There must be evolutionary advantages to cursing, or we would not have evolved to do it,” said Timothy Jay, an emeritus professor at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts who has written extensively about profanity. ![]() There are clear benefits to using profanity, but when profanity targets demographic groups, it can foster prejudices, Dr. Bergen wrote in his book, slurs are the exception. In both cases, swearing improved performance. During bicycle and hand-grip exercises, researchers asked subjects to repeat curse words and neutral words while pedaling against resistance and squeezing a hand dynamometer, then recorded their results. Stephens conducted, currently under review, tested the effect of swearing on strength. “This leads to stress-induced analgesia - being more tolerant of pain.”Īnother study Dr. “For pain relief, swearing seems to trigger the natural ‘fight or flight’ stress response, as well as increased adrenaline and heart pumping,” Dr. Who knew four letters could be so soothing? Researchers concluded that swearing had the effect of reducing sensitivity to pain. ![]() Not only that, swearing also made participants feel like the pain wasn’t as intense. Participants who repeated a swear were able to keep their hand submerged in the ice water for almost 50 percent longer than those who repeated a neutral word. He then asked them to submerge a hand in ice water for as long as they could, while repeating a word from either list: a swear word or a neutral one. Then they were asked to come up with a list of neutral words to describe a chair (like wooden, for example). Stephens asked subjects to come up with a list of words, including swear words, that they might use if they hit their thumb with a hammer. There’s emphatic swearing, for instance, which is meant to highlight a point, and dysphemistic swearing, which is meant to make a point provocatively. In “ The Stuff of Thought,” Steven Pinker, a cognitive scientist and a professor at Harvard, listed a few functions of swearing. Without their being censored, all of the words we designate by a first letter and “-word” would just be average terms. The paradox is that profane words are powerful only because we make them powerful. ![]() For the sake of modern discussion, both words are defined as profanity: vulgar, socially unacceptable language you don’t use in polite conversation. A curse implies damning or punishing someone, while a swear word suggests blasphemy - invoking a deity to empower your words. Swearing and cursing are often used interchangeably, but there’s a subtle difference in their origins. “It’s an affliction of its own creation.” Bergen, a professor of cognitive science at the University of California, San Diego. “The reason that a child thinks the F-word is a bad word is that, growing up, he or she was told that it was a bad word, so profanity is a cultural construct that perpetuates itself through time,” said Dr.
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