Bad language is intrinsically different to other language. (Translators welcome)


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送交者: Wood 于 2008-01-30, 13:27:26:

http://www.newscientist.com/channel/being-human/mg19626352.100-the-science-of-swearing.html

Mind your language
Bad language is intrinsically different to other language. The strongest evidence for this comes from instances of stroke patients whose brain damage has left them unable to speak but who retain the ability to swear. A particularly sad case was the 19th-century French poet Charles Baudelaire, who suffered a stroke at the age of 45. According to cognitive neuroscientist Sebastian Dieguez of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, who studied Baudelaire's case this year, the only vaguely meaningful sound the great poet uttered from then on was Cré nom!, short for Sacré nom de Dieu! (something like "goddamn"), an expletive that so offended the nuns who were looking after him that they banished him from their hospital and called in a priest to perform an exorcism (Frontiers of Neurology and Neuroscience, vol 22, p 121).

Baudelaire's stroke damaged the left hemisphere of his brain, a feature common to all foul-mouthed but otherwise speechless stroke patients. This has prompted neurologists to speculate that swear words are stored in the brain's right hemisphere. In fact, they suspect that all formulaic expressions, including other taboo words, prayers and song lyrics, reside in the right, while propositional language - in which words are combined according to grammatical rules - is stored in the left.

That's not all, though. Unlike most language, which is produced and processed in the cortex, the most recently evolved outer layer of the human brain, swearing involves the more ancient emotional network, the limbic system. Brain scans reveal that when people hear expletives, a structure that forms part of this system, known as the amygdala, is activated almost instantly. Intriguingly, when you stimulate the limbic system of a macaque monkey, it produces emotional vocalisations, a finding that has led Diana Van Lancker Sidtis at New York University to argue that these angry grunts and shrieks share neurological underpinnings with human profanity. "An emotional impulse can structure a vocalisation with a large amount of energy and intensity, and in humans that is used communicatively," she says. While monkeys appear to shriek, humans channel that energy through words.




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