Swear!ng is g*od f*r you The amaz!ng sc!ence of bad language

Review by New York Times Review

In the 1960s, a chimpanzee named Washoe learned how to sign. Shortly thereafter, as Byrne tells us in this entertaining and thought-provoking book, she learned how to swear. Roger Fouts - now a respected primatologist; then a lowly research assistant - was tasked with potty-training Washoe, who lived with researchers almost as if she were a human member of their family. Eventually, Washoe internalized the notion that "dirty" (the sign for feces) was shameful outside of the toilet. Soon, "dirty" became her favorite insult. "Dirty monkey," she signed at the macaque that scared her. "Dirty Roger," she signed at Fouts when he refused to let her out of her cage. The potty-mouthed Washoe may help us understand what happened when early humans learned to lob the idea of excrement at one another instead of the real thing. Swearing, Byrne argues, helped us begin to form stronger societies. Today, a well-placed curse word at work can help colleagues bond; studies have also found that swearing, curiously, often indicates that someone is less likely to become physically violent. Perhaps it's a little like the way toddlers finally, blessedly, learn to use their words instead of their fists, or their teeth. Your enjoyment of this book will be strongly correlated to your level of tolerance for summaries of psychological studies. (Mine is high.) Regardless, Byrne's enthusiasm for her esoteric subject is contagious, damn it. A chapter toward the end explores the complications of swearing in a second language, endorsing the intriguing idea that you don't truly know a foreign tongue unless you understand how to curse in it. Swearing suggests that you've absorbed a culture, including its taboos, a trickier accomplishment than it may seem. Consider, for example, the poor souls who translated "Pulp Fiction" into Spanish, a language in which there is no word quite as offensive and as adaptable as our beloved English F-word. "I'm not necessarily encouraging people to swear more," Byrne writes, "but I do hope you might give it the respect it [expletive] deserves." MELISSA DAHL is a science writer for New York magazine and the author of "Cringeworthy."

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [March 25, 2018]

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Review by Booklist Review

Let's get this out of the way. There's plenty of coarse language to be found here, especially in the introduction, perhaps to get readers adjusted to what they'll encounter down the road. Byrne differentiates between types of swearing, American style versus British (what's the difference between tosser, twat, and wanker?), historical bad language (oaths, swears, and curses) versus modern unsayables (racist, sexist, and homophobic language), and touches on how various taboos in different cultures create swear words. Exploring multiple facets of swearing, including pain, workplace usage, gender (men curse as a tool and when joking, women swear primarily as an effective device in their arsenal), and cursing in other languages, Byrne crafts an enthusiastic case for bad language. Among the other impeccably researched topics covered, there's a particularly touching exploration of Tourette's syndrome and how it stands apart as an executive function disorder. For those who enjoyed What the F: What Swearing Reveals about Our Language, Our Brains, and Ourselves (2016), Byrne's immensely readable first outing will be a real fucking treat.--Jones, Courtney Copyright 2017 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Science writer Byrne aims to give the practice of swearing "the respect it fucking deserves" in this shallow study, but doesn't quite hit the mark. Attempting to show how swearing has evolved from a linguistic "shortcut" into a "powerful instrument" with physiological benefits, Byrne describes a number of experiments in neuroscience, psychology, and animal behaviorism. In one such experiment, volunteers were asked to hold their hands in buckets of ice water and researchers found that swearing enabled the participants to endure the pain for a longer period of time. Byrne suggests that swearing can help lessen both physical and social suffering, and that "stronger swear words are stronger painkillers." She also begins to discuss the topics of women's use of foul-language and swearing in the workplace, but fizzles out. ("Swearing really can break down barriers," she writes. "But of course, even among workmates, swearing and abuse aren't always taken well.") Readers probably won't be surprised to find out that British women are as likely to swear as British men, that women's use of fuck has increased fivefold since 1990, and that swearing helps people "communicate emotions." Given the book's subtitle, the science here underwhelms and the flippant way that Byrne handles it may have readers employing their own choice vocabularies. Agent: Carrie Plitt, Felicity Bryan Associates (U.K.). (Jan.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

In this engaging and often irreverent work, scientist and freelance writer Byrne explores swearing and the many ways that it is actually good for us. She describes why and how we swear and presents an interdisciplinary view of swearing using a variety of lenses: historical, psychological, physical, anthropological, social, and linguistic. This book includes fascinating details on the effects of swearing on pain tolerance, profanity in the workplace and by women, chimpanzees who were taught to swear, and cussing in a second language. (Byrne also thoroughly explains why her chapter on Tourette's syndrome does not actually belong in this book.) Each chapter includes historical context on the topic, up-to-date research findings, and illuminating case studies, all focused on the many benefits of using foul language. The chapter on the workplace shows that swearing can encourage collaboration and unity. Byrne's style is conversational, entertaining, and appropriate for the general public. However, since the work is well researched and documented, it will also be valuable to scholars. VERDICT A thoroughly enjoyable option for readers from a variety of disciplines, including neuroscience and communications.-Theresa -Muraski, Univ. of Wisconsin-Stevens Point Lib. © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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[From the Introduction] When I was about nine years old, I was smacked for calling my little brother a 'twat.' I had no idea what a twat was - I thought it was just a silly way of saying 'twit' - but that smack taught me that some words are more powerful than others and that I had to be careful how I used them. But as you've no doubt gathered, that experience didn't exactly cure me of swearing. In fact it probably went some way towards piquing my fascination with profanity. Since then I've had a certain pride in my knack for colourful and well-timed swearing: being a woman in a male-dominated field, I rely on it to camouflage myself as one of the guys. Calling some equipment a piece of shit is often a necessary rite of passage when I join a new team. So when I discovered that other scientists have been taking swearing seriously for a long time - and that I'm not the only person who finds judicious profanity useful - I was fucking delighted! I first began to realise there was more to swearing than a bit of banter or blasphemy when I happened to read a study that involved 67 volunteers, a bucket of ice water, a swear word and a stopwatch. I was working in a neuroscience lab at the time and that study changed the course of my research. It set me on a quest to study swearing: why we do it, how we do it, and what it tells us about ourselves. For example, I'm definitely not the only person who uses swearing as a way of fitting in at work. Research shows that swearing can help build teams in the work place. From the factory floor to the operating theatre, scientists have shown that teams who share the same lexicon of swearing tend to work more effectively together, feel closer, and be more productive than those that don't. These same studies show that managing stress in the same way that we manage pain - with a fucking good swear - is more effective than any number of team building exercises. Swearing has also helped to develop the field of neuroscience. By providing us with a useful emotional barometer, swearing has been used as a research tool for over 150 years. It has helped us to discover some fascinating things about the structure of the human brain, such as its division into left and right hemispheres, and the role of cerebral structures like the amygdala in the regulation of emotions. Swearing has taught us a great deal about our minds, too. We know that people who learn a second language often find it less stressful to swear in their adopted tongue, which gives us an idea of the childhood developmental stages at which we learn emotions and taboos. Swearing also makes the heart beat faster, and primes us to think aggressive thoughts while, paradoxically, making us less likely to be physically violent. And swearing is a surprisingly flexible part of our linguistic repertoire. It re-invents itself from generation to generation as taboos shift. Profanity has even become part of the way we express positive feelings - we know that football fans use 'fuck' just as frequently when they're happy as when they are angry or frustrated. That last finding is one of my own. With colleagues at City University, London, I've studied thousands of football fans and their bad language during big games. It's no great surprise that football fans swear, and that they are particularly fond of 'fuck' and 'shit.' But we noticed something interesting about the ratio between these two swearwords. The 'fuck-shit' ratio is a reliable indicator of which team has scored because, it turns out that 'shit' is almost universally negative while 'fuck' can be a sign of something good or bad. Swearing amongst football fans also isn't anywhere near as aggressive as you might think; fans on Twitter almost never swear about their opponents and reserve their outbursts for players on their own team. Swearing is one of those things that comes so naturally, and seems so frivolous, that you might be surprised by the number of scientists who are studying it. But neuroscientists, psychologists, sociologists and historians have long taken an interest in bad language, and for good reason. Although swearing might seem frivolous it teaches us a lot about how our brains, our minds and even our societies work. This book won't just look at swearing in isolation. One of the things that makes swearing so fucking amazing is the sheer breadth of connections it has with our lives. Throughout this book I'll cover many different topics, some of which may seem like digressions. There are plenty of pages that contain no profanity whatsoever but, from the indirectness of Japanese speech patterns to the unintended consequences of potty training chimpanzees, everything relates back to the way that we use bad language. Is this book simply an attempt to justify rudeness and aggression? Not at all. I certainly wouldn't want profanities to become commonplace: swearing needs to maintain its emotional impact in order to work. We only need to look at the way that swearing has changed over the last 100 years to see that, as some swearwords become mild and ineffectual through over-use or shifting cultural values, we reach for other taboos to fill the gap. Where blasphemy was once the true obscenity, the modern unsayables include racist and sexist terms as swearwords. Depending on your point of view this is either a lamentable shift towards political correctness or timely recognition that bigotry is ugly and damaging. Excerpted from Swearing Is Good for You: The Amazing Science of Bad Language by Emma Byrne All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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