PROFANITY: THE GNOSTIC AFFRONT OF THE SEVEN WORDS YOU CAN NEVER SAY ON TELEVISION

Profanity remains a mystery to psychological science as we have little understanding as to why obscene speech tends to cluster around body-related subject matter. However, recent work in the areas of Terror Management Theory and disgust psychology suggest that the offense of profanity may be due to the fact that profanity highlights the animal nature of the human body, which, in turn, implicates profanity as a death/mortality reminder. If so, profanity might be experienced differently in Christian populations depending upon the degree to which the body is viewed suspiciously, a lingering influence of Gnostic thought within the Christian tradition. This paper presents empirical research that attempted to assess these associations. Overall, the data was found to be consistent with the notion that profanity may function, particularly in some Christian communities, as a Gnostic affront, as an insult to a creature aspiring to be more than an animal. The whole problem with this idea of obscenity and indecency, and all of these things-bad language and whatever-it's all caused by one basic thing, and that is: religious superstition ... that the human body is somehow evil and bad and there are parts of it that are especially evil and bad, and we should be ashamed. Fear, guilt and shame are-built into the attitude toward sex and the body. (George Carlin, 2004, Interview with Associated Press). Whether it is called profanity, swearing, or vulgarity, obscene or taboo language is a ubiquitous feature in human life. One can hardly get through a workday, TV show, or movie without hearing swearing of one kind or another. And yet, profanity remains a mystery to psychological science. We have little understanding as to why obscene speech tends to cluster around body-related subject matter (Pinker, 2007). However, recent work in the area of Terror Management Theory suggests that the offense of profanity might be due to the fact that profanity highlights the animal nature of the human body, which, in turn, implicates profanity as a death/mortality reminder. If so, profanity might be experienced differently in religious populations depending upon the degree to which the body is viewed suspiciously, a lingering influence of Gnostic thought within the Christian tradition. Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television: The Mystery of Profanity There is little scientific consensus as to why profanities tend to cluster around specific themes. Consider, for example, the paradigmatic inventory of profanity: George Carlin's famous list of "The Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television." Commenting on Carlin's list, the psychologist Steven Pinker (2007, p. 326-327) has noted the following: The seven words you can never say on television refer to sexuality and excretion: they are names for feces, urine, intercourse, the vagina, breasts, a person who engages in fellatio, and a person who acts out an Oedipal desire. But it's not only sexuality and excretion that are implicated in profanity. Pinker goes on: But the capital crime in the Ten Commandments comes from a different subject, theology, and the taboo words in many languages refer to perdition, deities, messiahs, and their associated relics and body parts. Another semantic field that spawns taboo words across the world's languages is death and disease, and still another is disfavored classes of people such as infidels, enemies, and subordinate ethnic groups. But what could these concepts--from mammaries to messiahs to maladies to minorities--possibly have in common? Pinker suggests that these semantic clusters can be united by noting that profanity generally creates a strong negative emotion. More specifically, many profanities appear to be associated with the psychology of disgust and contamination. Urine, feces, blood, and other bodily effluvia are both routinely referenced in obscene speech as well being reliable disgust elicitors (Haidt, McCauley, & Rozin, 1994). …