Number of words: 467
Theubiquity and power of swearing suggest that taboo words may tap into deep and ancient parts of the emotional brain. Words have not just a denotation but a connotation: an emotional coloring distinct from what the word literally refers to, as in principled versus stubborn and slender versus scrawny. The difference is reminiscent of the way that taboo words and their synonyms differ such as shit and feces, cunt and vagina, or fucking and making love. Long ago psycholinguistics identified the three main ways in which words connotations vary: good versus bad, weak versus strong and active versus passive. Hero, for example, is good strong, and active; coward is bad, weak, and passive; and traitor is bad, weak and active. Taboo words cluster at the very bad and very strong edges of the space, through there are surely other dimensions to connotation as well.
Are connotations and denotations stored in different parts of the brain? It’s not implausible. The mammalian brain contains, among other things, the limbic system, an ancient network that regulates motivation and emotion, and the neocortex, the crinkled surface of the brain, which ballooned in human evolution and which is the seat of perception, knowledge, reason, and planning. The two systems are interconnected and work together, but it’s not far-fetched to suppose that words denotations are concentrated in the neocortex, especially in the left hamispere, whereas their connotations are spread across connections between the neocortex and the limbic system, especially in the right hemisphere.
A likely suspect within the limbic system is the amygdale, an almond-shaped organ buried at the front of the temporal lobe of the brain (one on each side) which helps invest memories with emotion. A monkey whose amygdales have been removed can learn to recognize a new shape, like a striped triangle, but has trouble learning that the shape foreshadows an unpleasant event like an electric shock. In humans the amygdale “lights up” – it shows greater metabolic activity in brain scans – when the person sees an angry face or an unpleasant word, especially a taboo word. Well before psychologists could scan the working brain, they could measure the emotional jolt from a fraught word by scrapping an electrode on a person’s finger and measuring the change in the skin conductance caused by the sudden wave of sweat. The skin response accompanies activity in the amygdale, and like the activity recorded from the amygdala itself, it can be triggered by taboo words. The emotional flavouring of words seems to be picked up in childhood: bilingual people often feel that their secong language is not as piquant as their first, and their skin reacts more to hearing taboo words and reprimands in their first language than in their second.
Excerpt from’The seven words you can’t say on television by Steven Pinker.’