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Informationen zum Autor John H. McWhorter teaches linguistics, American studies, and music history at Columbia University. He is a contributing editor at The New York Times and host of Slate's Lexicon Valley podcast. McWhorter is the author of twenty books, including The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language , Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America , and Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English . Klappentext A New York Times bestseller One of the preeminent linguists of our time examines the realms of language that are considered shocking and taboo in order to understand what imbues curse words with such power-and why we love them so much. Profanity has always been a deliciously vibrant part of our lexicon, an integral part of being human. In fact, our ability to curse comes from a different part of the brain than other parts of speech-the urgency with which we say "f&*k!" is instead related to the instinct that tells us to flee from danger. Language evolves with time, and so does what we consider profane or unspeakable. Nine Nasty Words is a rollicking examination of profanity, explored from every angle: historical, sociological, political, linguistic. In a particularly coarse moment, when the public discourse is shaped in part by once-shocking words, nothing could be timelier. Leseprobe *1* DAMN AND HELL: ENGLISH'S FIRST BAD WORDS In a book about profanity, it's almost awkward that our tour begins with damn and hell, in that most of us don't sense these words as truly, well, dirty. We may still include both in a standard list of "four-letter words" formally classified as unsuitable for the drawing room. For many, damn is the first we might list, just as we are likely to start with apples when asked to name fruits. We sense damn, as well as hell, as in some sense "bad." Yet in our times, they really aren't. The Cusses That Aren't When I was about eight, I asked my father what dam-un meant, assuming that was how one pronounced the damn I had seen in writing. Dad said, "It's a word you use when you're really, really angry." The result was that I went away supposing for years afterward that there was a word dam that you used as a kind of everyday, salty exclamation, and a less commonly used word pronounced dam-un that you used when truly irritated. That is, I was well aware of the word that sounds like dam, as the one bandied about quite often by my parents and others, even when kids were within earshot, for reasons much less extreme than being "really, really angry." In no sense did I classify it as an especially naughty word, even if I knew that I wasn't allowed to say it yet. Gradually, of course, I realized that there was no separate word dam-un. But the gap between my dad's formal parsing of the word, as a genuine obscenity, and the libertine reality of how he-and even President Nixon, as we'd learn-used it was instructive. For an obscenity, damn, like hell, was used with curious comfort and frequency. Nor was this freedom a product of the countercultural 1960s, after which we all let our hair down in so many ways. My father was born in 1927, and Richard Nixon was not exactly a flower child. Damn and hell have been profanity-lite for a very long time. As far back as the 1880s, publishing magnate Joseph Pulitzer (whose name appears during my typical workday not once but twice in being doughtily imprinted upon both Columbia University's journalism school building as well as a public school I live near) was known to favor damn. He was especially fond of jamming it into words that hadn't expected it, in a fashion more familiar today with locutions such as "abso-fucking-lutely," resulting in the likes of "indegoddampendent." A young woman recounting h...
