I Swear: The Sacred and the Profane in Language and Law
Swear words have a unique linguistic power. Swearing in public is illegal in many countries and profanity is a major target for censorship in the arts and entertainment industries. What gives swear words their potency? The sounds in these words may play an important and underappreciated role. In the first part of this talk I will describe a systematic cross-linguistic investigation of phonetic patterns in profanity. We find a common pattern – across disparate languages (e.g., Hebrew, Hindi and Hungarian), swear words are less likely than control words to contain sonorous sounds called approximants (sounds like l, r, w or y). Moreover, native speakers of various languages (e.g., Arabic, Chinese, Finnish and French) judge foreign words less likely to be swear words if they contain one of these sounds. We also find that sanitized versions of English swear words – so-called “minced oaths” like darn instead of damn – contain significantly more approximants than the original swear words. This revelation of the non-arbitrary form of swear words is important for understanding how swear words fulfil their psychological and social functions. In the second part of the talk, I will discuss swearing in a different context – the courtroom. In countries such as Britain and the United States, court witnesses must publicly declare that they will provide truthful evidence, either by swearing an oath or by making an affirmation (a sort of “minced oath” that removes reference to God). I will present evidence that people associate choice of the oath with credible testimony; and that participants, especially religious participants, discriminate against hypothetical defendants who take the affirmation, judging them more likely to be guilty. Given entrenched cross-cultural distrust of non-believers, the antiquated ritual of swearing an oath has important judicial implications.