Surely You're Fucking Joking, Dr. Pinker!
In the middle of Steven Pinker's talk at Town Hall last night, the lecture morphed into some surprisingly blue comedy. We'll warn you now: what follows is adult language content.
Talking about an FCC ruling (on Bono's infamous "This is really fucking brilliant!" live outburst after winning a Golden Globe award), Pinker noted that the way the FCC saw it, Bono was employing "fucking" as an adverb modifying the adjective "brilliant" -- but "did not describe sexual or excretory organs or activities" -- and so his usage didn't fall under the prohibition against obscene speech. The ruling on the field: no fine.
To close this loophole, Pinker added, Republicans Doug Ose and Lamar Smith introduced House Bill 3687 (which hopefully will be known to history as "the Deadwood Bill") -- and the next PowerPoint slide quoted its text:
"The term profane, used with respect to language, includes the words shit, piss, fuck, cunt, asshole and the phrases cock sucker, mother fucker and ass hole, compound use (including hyphenated compounds) of such words and phrases with each other or with other words or phrases, and other grammatical forms of such words and phrases (including verb, adjective, gerund, participle and infinitive forms.)"The point to this Tourettic discharge was that language isn't just words, but reflects human nature, and contains insights into the way our brains work. Cursing, using profane and obscene language, gets things done. (Typically by involving your brain's right hemisphere, the basal ganglia, and the amygdala.) Specifically, it creates involuntary negative affect -- used on you, it pisses you off or pushes your fucking buttons or grosses your shit out. And it seems to be related to a mammalian startle reflex -- as when you uselessly swear at the idiot who just cut you off or cast aspersions on your hammer's lineage. Instead of (or in addition to) yelping or leaping into the air, we swear, and the reflex reaches fulfillment. Or we swear, and advertise to imaginary onlookers (or predators) that we're more angered than injured, and shouldn't be approached.
Our question to Pinker is -- inspired by Hendrick's gin at Liberty afterwards -- why is it the anapestic "motherFUCKer" when yelling at some douchebag and the trochaic "MOTHerFUCKer" when yelping in pain? Is the involuntary expression more likely to be "sung" out?
Explaining all this, Pinker kept flashing up a seemingly endless stream of obscenity on the screen, and the audience started to get a little hysterical with nervous laughter. We were looking around to see if anyone had brought kids to see the famous Harvard psychologist speak, but no one stalked out. This was Part 2 of his talk; Parts 1 & 3 were more decorous, sadly, so we'll cover them after the jump.
Pinker began the talk with a ruthless PowerPoint onslaught that never let up; oddly, for a psychologist, he wasted no time in warming up the audience, launched straight into the meat of his lecture, and violated the cardinal PowerPoint rule of never "reading" from your slides.
We suspected he was using his slides as his primary notes -- when quoting anything, he'd click through it line by line, reading each line as it appeared. On the plus side, if you were deaf, you wouldn't have missed a moment. It got to be punitive trying to keep up with the spoken-and-written data flow. We finally had to stop paying attention to the screen and just listened to him talk.
In Part 1, he discussed how when we take language apart we see a "basic human physics" that underlies its structure. It's not the physics you learn in high school, but it works well enough for getting around in the world.
Matter is either amorphous stuff or countable units. Space is three-dimensional, but we frequently treat objects in terms of the "most important" dimensions they have. Built into nouns are emphasized and suppressed categories of shape (a CD is circular -- we'd never refer to one as a very short cylinder, but it is). Through prepositions, you see that we have notions of boundary("after dark" is really "after daylight," but we're speaking of dark as a boundary separating night from day).
In tenses, we learn that "time" is built around our three seconds of present awareness, with the past covering everything from four seconds ago to the Big Bang, and the future stretching from four seconds into the future to the death of the universe. We also see (via words like "stretching") that we conceive of time as a line. The past is considered experienced and factual; the future is amorphous and in some ways subject to our will. Lastly, speaking of will, we believe in agency -- things cause other things to happen.
In Part 3, Pinker explored the use of indirect speech ("If you could pass the guacamole, that'd be awesome"). His argument is that it's a necessity for a number of reasons. Given that there are three major social relationship structures -- dominance, communal, and reciprocal -- indirect requests allow someone to respond without bringing dominance into play. Also, in cases where the speakers are not sure of each other's values, it allows "space" for negotiation without offense being taken, like when you're trying to bribe your way out of a speeding ticket.
What's remarkable about that kind of offense -- "What kind of person do you think I am?" -- is that it depends on what's called mutual knowledge. The offense rises from person B knowing that person A thinks he or she is that kind of person, and knows person A knows they do. It looks like, psychologically, we react less strongly to "sins of omission," where both people may have the same individual knowledge (a bribe is being offered), but it isn't made explicit that both people agree that a bribe is appropriate.
