I don't know that I've ever read a really good account of the hows and whys of swearing. It seems to me the idea that we're mistaken that swear words are taboo completely misses the fact that we defined these words as taboo to start with. I think restricting children from swearing is in part to give more power to swear words, because as adults we find it useful to have these powerful words. Teaching children that swear words aren't taboo seems to be teaching them a definition at odds with rest of society and would deprive them of a useful set of words if it succeeded, which I doubt it would. In fact teaching kids that swear words are just words is exactly the kind of lie this essay is talking about.
This is basically right. The words are taboo because it's useful to have taboo words, so the culture deliberately makes them so.
Taboo words are useful because they transcend politeness. If a normally civil person comes into your dinner party and tells you that the fucking ceiling is about to fall down, you get moving. You don't waste time looking around for the ironic smile. You don't reproach the person for speaking out of turn.
But it goes beyond simple cultural coding. The neurologists say that there's a physiological basis for swearing: the brain is wired to do so under certain conditions. Under extreme or sudden distress, swearing helps us cope, and the reverse is probably also true: swearing helps to work you into a rage or a panic. That's one very good reason why we tell kids not to swear and correct them when they do: It's a way of calming them down, and of teaching them to be calm, and of encouraging them to reserve their moments of adrenaline-surging fury for appropriate times.
Now that is insightful. I think you're saying that, when a program gets into an unstable state of stress and confusion, it throws exceptions... and vice versa.
The spectrum of motivations for the pressure we put on kids to not "swear" includes "being polite" and "being polite" is related to communication skill. There is a quote attributed to Mark Twain which equates politeness with something which prevents people at the dinner table from killing each other.
I wouldn't quite say unequivocally that those are lies, or at least that true love is a lie.
The poem True Love by Nobel Prize Winner Wislawa Szymborska replies better than I can:
True love. Is it normal /
is it serious, is it practical? /
What does the world get from two people /
who exist in a world of their own?
Placed on the same pedestal for no good reason, /
drawn randomly from millions but convinced /
it had to happen this way - in reward for what? /
For nothing. /
The light descends from nowhere. /
Why on these two and not on others? /
Doesn't this outrage justice? Yes it does. /
Doesn't it disrupt our painstakingly erected principles, /
and cast the moral from the peak? Yes on both accounts.
Look at the happy couple. /
Couldn't they at least try to hide it, /
fake a little depression for their friends' sake? /
Listen to them laughing - its an insult. /
The language they use - deceptively clear. /
And their little celebrations, rituals, /
the elaborate mutual routines - /
it's obviously a plot behind the human race's back!
It's hard even to guess how far things might go /
if people start to follow their example. /
What could religion and poetry count on? /
What would be remembered? What renounced? /
Who'd want to stay within bounds?
True love. Is it really necessary? /
Tact and common sense tell us to pass over it in silence, /
like a scandal in Life's highest circles. /
Perfectly good children are born without its help. /
It couldn't populate the planet in a million years, /
it comes along so rarely.
Let the people who never find true love /
keep saying that there's no such thing.
Their faith will make it easier for them to live and die.
When I call them lies, I didn't mean to say they don't exist, or that two people can't be happy, in love and monogamous forever.
But we certainly misrepresent to children the prevalence of this sort of thing.
Look at fairy tales and movies. To a child, _all_ people grow up, meet their perfect true love, marry them and stay together forever. As for the damaging part of the lie, of course there's no need to work at a relationship because the match is just so perfect.
That's why I started out saying "working at love" - make sure to tell kids that things don't magically turn out happily ever after. Tell them that lots of marriages end because of things like money, selfishness, infidelity, and boredom.
There are a lot of things about my marriage that are worse than when I was single, but there are a lot of things that are a whole lot better. On balance I'm way ahead, but we both work at it every day. It's worth working at because of how great it is. And that's a truth worth telling.
Aside from good analysis, the beginning is full of humorous gems. I'm not sure if the humor is accidental, or if the author picked humorous examples deliberately.
I'm sure it's intentional. Pinker's written many excellent books for laypeople which are full of great, fun examples. And the books themselves are great. He has a knack for explaining new, interesting ideas in an engaging way.
Swear words seem to be such a necessary part of language that I'm pretty sure new ones would arise if we ever completely legitimised the old ones. When you wake up at 2 am and discover that your balcony is on fire(^), it's nice to know that your language has a word set aside specifically for situations like that.
In the last few decades, it seems that the C-word has become more taboo even as the F-word has become less so, thanks to the efforts of feminists who like to bitch about it. (Come to think of it, "bitch" seems to have got slightly more taboo during my lifetime as well, for similar reasons.) And then there's a whole new class of newly-taboo words like the N-word -- admittedly nobody shouts that word when they hit their finger with a hammer just yet, but perhaps they will in the future.
(^) That happened to me the other week. I can't remember exactly what I said, but it was neither intelligent nor graceful.
