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Power Trip
The Power of the F-Bomb
As scientists have proved, and an awkward encounter with Gwyneth Paltrow has reaffirmed: love it or hate it, the F-word is mighty
Sometime in the mid-’90s, I was sitting in a spa chair for my weekly mani pedi when a milky-pale woman settled into the chair beside me. Her existence hardly registered until she held up three bottles of nail polish, all variations of nude pink. “Which for my fingers and which for my toes?” she asked.
Slightly annoyed that a stranger was talking to me, I looked at the three bottles of seashell nude held in the stranger’s pink, pale hand. Then I looked at her face. It was Gwyneth Paltrow.
“Most people match their fingers and toes,” I said, meeting Paltrow’s sad, slow, loris gaze, “but I think you can do whatever the fuck you want.” And I returned to reading my New Yorker.
You might consider me rude for dropping the F-bomb on Gwyneth Paltrow. You might be right. But some people would look at my shiny, naked “fuck” and see something other than mere gutter talk. They might, for example, read my fuck as a sign of my intelligence, a coping mechanism, a marker of my identity as a New Yorker or proof of my honesty. Neuroscientists, sociologists, and cognitive scientists love to research why humans swear, and however disparate their copious studies, these researchers seem to have reached one unassailable conclusion: humans swear because, on some very primal levels, bad words are good for us.
Melissa Mohr, author of Holy Sh*t, a history of human cursing, explains that when children learn about swearing, they learn from other people’s reactions. “If a child says a swear word, all of the adults gasp, and the child internalizes it, like, ‘Oh that’s a powerful word.’ That’s how it gets wired and encoded in your brain.” It’s this gasp that teaches children that bad words are different, and this difference is etched deeply in our brains.
Unlike most other language — which is stored in cerebral cortex, the brain’s center for higher learning — curse words are stored in the limbic system, our most basic, lizard brain level. This storage explains why people with neurological issues like Tourette’s Syndrome, or who have…
