Swearing Is Good for You by Emma Byrne

Author:Emma Byrne
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2017-10-09T16:00:00+00:00

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“You damn dirty ape.”

(Other) Primates that Swear

When did swearing begin? Were swear words part of our first vocabulary or was bad language a later invention, an expansion pack to this ability called language? Sadly, we can’t go back to observe our early ancestors to see how swearing developed. Prehistoric cultures don’t leave written records and, by the time writing comes along, swearing always seems to be well established already.

It’s my hypothesis that swearing started early, that it was one of the things that motivated us to develop language in the first place. In fact, I don’t think we would have made it as the world’s most populous primate if we hadn’t learned to swear. As we’ve seen, swearing helps us deal better with our pain and frustration, it helps to build tighter social groups, and it’s a good sign that we might be about to snap, which means that it forestalls violence. Without swearing, we’d have to resort to the biting, gouging, and shit flinging that our other primate cousins use to keep their societies in check.

If we can’t observe the development of swearing directly, what we need is a society with brains and social structures somewhat like our own, but that are only just beginning to use language. Thankfully, at least one example does exist, in the shape of the chimpanzees who have been taught to use sign language over the years.

Professor Roger Fouts, founder of the Chimpanzee and Human Communication Institute in Washington state, has spent his career adopting chimpanzees and studying their behavior. He taught an extended family of chimpanzees to use sign language, and watched as they passed that language on to their children in turn.

It was this extended family of apes that first convinced me that chimpanzees can do more than simply communicate; they spontaneously learned to swear. These apes were taught language (and toilet trained) by Professor Fouts. In the process of picking up both language and taboos about bodily functions, the sign they used for excreta took on a special power. Like the human swear word “shit,” the sign DIRTY and the idea it conveyed became taboo. At the same time, DIRTY became a sign that the chimpanzees used emotionally and figuratively, also like the way you or I might use “shit.” If Roger made them angry they would call him “Dirty Roger,” the way we might say, “Roger, you shit.” Unlike their wild cousins, these chimpanzees would throw the notion of excrement instead of throwing the stuff itself.

But it can be hard to convince people that chimpanzees can communicate with humans, let alone swear. And that’s partly because of one of the most famous chimpanzee experiments of all time.

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