Introduction
Profanity is more than just "dirty language"; it consists of precise communication structures centering on fundamental claims for recognition. Benjamin K. Bergen argues that profanity is a complex political and neurobiological project that tests the limits of tolerance. Understanding its role requires setting aside moralizing in favor of analyzing the mechanisms that give certain words the power to destabilize the social order. In the age of artificial intelligence, profanity serves as a seismograph of the tensions between nature, culture, and power.
Bergen: The Semantic Core of Profanity
According to Bergen, the semantic core of profanity revolves around four indelible axes of the human condition: the sacred, sexuality, excrement, and social hierarchy. The Holy, Fucking, Shit, Nigger principle indicates that taboos are not arbitrary—they mark areas where the tension between nature and norms requires censorship. In the act of swearing, three orders converge: the referential (reference to a taboo), the pragmatic (a tool for building solidarity or inflicting pain), and the somatic-neural, which triggers physiological reactions beyond conscious reflection.
Profanity acts as a mirror of social hierarchies and anxieties. While the Russian mat is based on sexual transgression, modern English reserves its greatest power for identity-based slurs. This proves that linguistic taboos always signal fundamental conflicts over power and recognition.
Basal Ganglia and Phonology: The Neurological Source of Swearing
Neurobiological analysis reveals that swearing utilizes an evolutionarily older brain infrastructure—the basal ganglia. This subcortical speech pathway operates independently of analytical centers, explaining why individuals with aphasia can often still swear. However, our speech is monitored by an internal language editor (the right inferior frontal gyrus), which instinctively inhibits taboos, protecting our social identity from "slips."
The power of profanity also lies in its phonology. English taboo words are often closed syllables ending in a stop consonant (e.g., fuck, shit), allowing the sound to be "spat out" with maximum affect. Profanity creates its own sub-grammar, exemplified by vulgar minimizers (e.g., you know dick). In such constructions, classical logic yields to expressive function, and the sentence becomes a pure gesture of contempt.
Slurs and Symbolic Power: An Attack on the Right to Recognition
Slurs represent the most aggressive form of profanity, striking at the fundamental right to be recognized as human. They trigger dehumanization mechanisms that modify social behavior. Contrary to popular myths, exposure to profanity itself is not harmful to child development—research indicates that trauma is generated by contexts of violence and neglect, not the words themselves. Language has merely become a convenient proxy indicator for regulatory institutions.
Profanity is capitalized upon by power systems as high-cost signals of a willingness to break norms. Their moderation by algorithms reveals a technocratic aporia: AI systems must adjudicate between Western racial taboos and Arabic religious taboos. By applying reductionist filters, global platforms become a new normative sovereign, often ignoring the dense fabric of local meanings and the processes of reappropriation (reclaiming) words by marginalized groups.
The Ethics of Risky Speech: Responsibility Online
Modern ethics of risky speech requires distinguishing between a vulgar safety valve and a dehumanizing slur. Profanity is a seismograph of tension—where its intensity rises, a sense of being unheard usually pulses beneath. In a world where algorithms censor speech and corporations shape the boundaries of expression, will profanity gain new power as a tool of resistance? Will we manage to develop a system where artificial intelligence distinguishes an insult from irony, and where censorship does not stifle the authentic voice of suffering and dissent? Or perhaps a future awaits us where language, scrubbed clean of profanity, becomes merely an empty facade masking unresolved conflicts and inequalities?
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