WTF! Swearing and the Development of Human Language

A response to Swearing is Good for You: The Amazing Science of Bad Language by Emma Byrne

by C. R. Hallpike (February 2018)

Screaming Man, Christian Worthington, 2012

 

 

ost of us, when confronting some particularly obstinate piece of DIY furniture, for example, know the satisfaction of letting rip with some fruity swear-words, so it is reassuring to learn that laboratory experiments confirm that swearing really does diminish sensations of pain. But Byrne’s thesis is more important than merely showing that swearing can be beneficial in various ways, since she argues that swearing has been an integral part of human evolution, especially in the development of language, from ancient to modern times:

 

little attention is given to non-Western cultures: Japan, for example, which apparently ‘suffers’ from an almost complete lack of swearing, deserves a whole chapter to itself. But Westerners are often making the ethnocentric assumption that what is normal for them must also be normal for everyone else, a constant and universal feature of human nature itself, whereas in fact it may just be a product of social and cultural factors, and I will show that this is the case with swearing.

 

—drit, ‘ordure, ‘excrement’. While disgust at faeces is a cultural universal, disgust in itself is not sufficient to generate swear-words. Pus, vomit, and decomposing flesh are also disgusting but play only a minimal part in the vocabulary of swearing, while the human genitals in and of themselves are not considered disgusting at all, nor is sexual intercourse. We should be clear then that the notion of pollution is not based narrowly on disgust, and the central meaning of impurity or ‘dirt’ has plausibly been said to be ‘the organic aspect of man’ (Dumont 1970:50), ‘the irruption of the biological into social life’ (Parker 1990:63). When it comes to swearing we are dealing with complex cultural categories, not with simple psychological reactions like anger, frustration, or hostility.

 

 

If we can’t observe the development of swearing directly, what we need is a society with brains and social structures somewhat like our own, but that are only just beginning to use language. Thankfully, at least one example does exist, in the shape of the chimpanzees who have been taught to use sign language over the years (p.120).

 

were not in their wild state, but reared in Western homes and, since chimpanzees do not have the vocal apparatus for human speech, Washoe and the other apes (including those trained by Professor Fouts) were taught American Sign Language. We may accept that they were able to produce strings of a few signs to communicate with their human guardians in rudimentary ways; however, to describe these chimpanzees, as ‘a society with brains and social structures somewhat like our own, but that are only just beginning to use language’ is more than a little wide of the mark. A few chimpanzees living in a human household do not constitute a ‘society’ of any recognizable type, and certainly not one in any way resembling the foraging bands of early man; after five million years of evolution chimpanzee brains are in many ways significantly different from our own (ours are three times larger, for example), and most linguists would likely deny that the chimpanzees in question were actually beginning to use language in the sense of acquiring grammar.

 

sexual or scatological signs either as abuse or as exclamations of pain or frustration. It must also be emphasised that Byrne says nothing at all about signs referring to sexuality and the genitals in the chimpanzees’ training either, but sexual modesty, like excretory modesty, is not found among wild chimpanzees or bonobos, and while junior male chimpanzees may conceal their copulation from alpha males this is merely from fear of reprisals. In human society, however, sexual modesty is a cross-cultural universal, as to a considerable extent excretory modesty is also. Where then might early humans have got the idea that sex and excretion were ‘dirty’ in the first place, since this association is unknown to animals? Even the evolutionary psychologist must surely falter when asked how potty-training could have worked among our ancient ancestors. It would seem, then, that the idea that excretion and sex are dirty could only have been communicated by some sort of language, which must therefore already have existed, and that swearing must if anything have been a consequence and not a cause of this process.

 

had no swear-words whatever: the words they used for faeces, sexual intercourse, penis, vagina, and so on were at the same level of propriety as the words for house, tree, pot, woman, and so on. In relatively simple cultures of this type there is no such thing as a slang or ‘coarse’ vocabulary that is distinct from a proper or formal or polite one. So it would have been quite bizarre for a Konso man to say suda, ‘sexual intercourse’, if he dropped a rock on his toe, and his response would actually have been a cry of pain, something like ‘Aieee!’. It is therefore impossible in these societies to use what we may call ‘biological’ words with the necessary shock value to intensify speech in the way that we do when swearing. Intensification of speech is achieved simply by emphasis and intonation.

 

The Konso and the Tauade seem in fact to be typical of primitive societies—small scale, non-literate, societies based on kinship, gender and age, without political centralisation or money—in lacking swearing in our sense of the word. In the 888 cultural categories listed in the Outline of Cultural Materials published by the Human Relations Area Files (Murdock et al. 1961), a world-wide survey primarily concerned with primitive societies, there is no category concerned with swearing, and it does not occur in the indexes of the many ethnographies from various parts of the world in my own library. Bergen (2016) in his survey of swearing cited by Byrne does not mention any primitive societies either and, while it is notoriously hard to prove a negative, it seems reasonable to conclude that swearing is not a primordial human trait at all, but a relatively late cultural development. This may be associated with literate society in particular, because these societies are especially likely to develop distinctions between ‘coarse’ and ‘polite’ discourse and enforce sexual and excretory modesty with particular severity. Blasphemy, too, which is a fertile source of swearing, is not a cross-cultural universal either. It could not exist among the Tauade because their only supernatural beings were evil spirits whom it would have been pointless and probably dangerous to abuse, and ancient culture heroes at the beginning of time who had turned to stone long ago. Waqa was the Sky-God of the Konso, who was a moral deity who punished sinners and sent the rain to the good, so that it would have been unthinkable for them to blaspheme his name and I never heard of anyone doing so. It would seem that blasphemy is more likely to develop in literate societies with official priesthoods and formal religious institutions.

 

Insult, however, is quite a different matter from swearing because in this instance the whole purpose is to give offence, and it is not necessary to use swear-words in order to do so although, of course, they are extremely useful for this. Among the Tauade and the Konso we do indeed find the same basic taboos concerning sex and excretion as seem to occur all over the world. Among the Tauade, for example, (Hallpike 1977:248) the typical insults were of the following types, using standard vocabulary in each case:

 

Eat my/your faeces
Eat my/your pig’s/dog’s faeces
Lick my/your wife’s vagina/anus
Drink my/your husband’s semen/urine
Come and copulate with my/your pig

 

 

Bacon (1959) which found that foraging cultures tend to stress assertiveness and independence rather than the compliance which is typical of agricultural and pastoral norms (1968:37). Marshall says of the !Kung, ‘Altruism, kindness, sympathy, or genuine generosity were not qualities that I observed often in their behaviour’ (1976:350). Howell observes of the Chewong of Malaysia, ‘Although they do not compete, they do not help each other either . . . It is a rare sight to witness someone asking someone else for assistance. Similarly, offers of assistance are also rare (1989:30). Holmberg says of the Siriono, ‘Unconcern for one’s fellows is manifested on every hand’ (1969:260), and Gardener says of the Paliyans that they ‘work and live in parallel rather than in joint fashion and exhibit little cooperation outside their rather loose nuclear families’ (1966:394). Woodburn says that ‘The Hadza are strikingly uncommitted to each other; what happens to the individual Hadza, even close relatives, does not really matter very much’ (1968:91). And Balikci says of the Netsilik Eskimo that their bands were permeated by suspicion and hostility: ‘Practically any minor or trivial event could produce a quarrel and lead to overtly aggressive behaviour’ (1970:173). In these types of society swearing would not forestall violence but would be much more likely to provoke it, and hunter-gatherers have perfectly effective means of preserving the peace, such as gift-exchange, public ridicule, ostracism, and mutual avoidance.

 

It seems likely that a major reason for this relative lack of solidarity is that hunter-gatherer bands do not regularly interact with other bands, so that group solidarity is not a very relevant value. In pastoral and agricultural societies, however, with much larger populations, these are divided into groups which do have to interact constantly with each other, such as lineages, residential groups within settlements, age-groups, and working parties, and these sorts of groups do indeed tend to have strong norms of friendliness and co-operation between their members. For example, I was once sitting with a group of Konso men who were digging the grave for one of their ward members who had just died, and among whom just these norms of friendliness and co-operation applied. Grave-digging is carried out by neighbours, not kinsfolk, and the dead man’s family give them liberal quantities of beer, so these are actually very social occasions with plenty of laughing and joking. They were asking me if we had lions, or elephants, or leopards, or rhinos in England, to which I had repeatedly to answer ‘No’. Finally, exasperated by this, the grave-digger, who was working naked to preserve his cotton shorts, pointed to his penis and said ‘Do you have these in England?’, and we all fell about laughing. If this had occurred in one of the public assembly places, especially with women present, it would have been considered grossly indecent, but in a friendly group of men it did indeed work as a form of joking relationship and solidarity enhancement. Again, a group of men and boys would often gather in the doorway of my hut in the evening, and if one of them broke wind we would play the game of ‘Who’s the farter?’, where one of the men would pull some straws from the thatch and the boy who drew the short straw would be given a good-natured pummelling.

 

To sum up, therefore, joking about taboo subjects such as sex and excretion among single sex groups especially may have been a social lubricant from the most ancient of times, but swearing needs at least three conditions: tabooed subjects, a special coarse vocabulary to refer to them that is considered impolite, and a willingness to tolerate its use on certain occasions or situations. The second and third of these conditions are missing in many primitive societies in particular, so it seems fair to conclude that swearing is highly unlikely to have featured in the conversation of our early ancestors and been an essential stimulus of language, or to have been a constant phenomenon throughout history. On the contrary, far from being an ancient relic of our Palaeolithic past, it appears to have been a much later product of social and cultural complexity.

 

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References
 

Balikci, A. 1970. The Netsilik Eskimo. New York: Natural History Press.

Bergen, B.K. 2016. What the F. What swearing reveals about our language, our brains, and ourselves. Basic Books.

Byrne, E. 2017. Swearing is Good for You. The amazing science of bad language. London: Profile Books.

Southwestern Journal of Anthropology, 22. 389-415.

Hallpike, C.R. 1977. Bloodshed and Vengeance in the Papuan Mountains. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Holmberg, A.1969. Nomads of the Long Bow. The Siriono of Eastern Bolivia. New York: Natural History Press.

Howell, S. 1989. Society and Cosmos. The Chewong of Peninsular Malaysia. 2nd edn. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Murdock, G.P. et al. 1961. Outline of Cultural Materials. 4^th ed. New Haven: Human Relations Area Files.

Parker, R. 1990. Miasma. Pollution and purification in early Greek religion. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

 

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Do We Need God To Be Good? (2017), Ethical Thought in Increasingly Complex Societies: Social Structure and Moral Development (2016), On Primitive Society: and other forbidden topics (2011), and How We Got Here: Bows and Arrows to the Space Age (2008).

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More by C. R. Hallpike.