It was just about a year ago we ran a bit of our interview with Indiana University Professor of English, Michael Adams. Professor Adams had just published his latest book, “In Praise of Profanity” where he made this point: “Profanity is socially useful because it is socially risky.”
For those of us at Vox Populi Registry, the company responsible for dotSucks domain names on the Internet, Professor Adams’ view really resonated. Among our registrants, too!
Today, that view was given added emphasis by an article in the New York Times under the headline: “The Case for Cursing.” That, too, caught our eye. In the piece, reporter Kristin Wong assembled a group who, along with Professor Adams, would be a great set of “Academic Advisors” to the registry — if we had a set of “Academic Advisors.”
Absent that, each makes a compelling case for the significant social value of words like, well, sucks.
Benjamin Bergen, a professor of cognitive science at the University of California at San Diego made the point clearly with just the title of his book: “What the F: What Swearing Reveals About Our Language, Our Brains and Ourselves.” In the article, he confirms that “swearing reveals our emotional state” and adds that the power in the word is accentuated by society’s tsk-tsking of their use.
Steven Pinker, a cognitive scientist at Harvard, made his point in his book, “The Stuff of Thought.” He agrees with a key point we have been making since the launch of the registry: swearing is a point of emphasis; it is punctuation.
Next up in Ms. Wong’s article was Richard Stephens, a senior lecturer in psychology at Keele University in the UK. Stephens has concluded that swearing is not only empathetic, it is a prophylactic. In his view, swearing can help withstand pain. As the Telegraph put it earlier this year: “Muscle strength and stamina can be boosted by turning the air blue, and researchers suggest cursing could help a cyclist summon up the extra pedal power to climb a hill, or a tennis player hit the ball a little harder.”
Finally there was Timothy Jay, emeritus professor, psychology at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. His research yields to key take-aways. The first is that swearing is not a sign of less intelligence, but of more. As language fluency goes up, he said, so does the ability to swear. That might be enough to make one proud, but there is a bit more. It seems that there is a positive link between that ability to swear and personal honesty. Who knew?
Look where we net out. At dotSucks we are in the vanguard of language that is honest, emphatic and palliative. All for the registration price of a single domain name. An excellent value.
