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In Iancu v. Brunetti, the U.S. Supreme Court recently decided, on free speech grounds, that Erik Brunetti should have the right to trademark his clothing line FUCT.

Robert Barnes' Washington Post story ("Supreme Court sides with ‘subversive’ clothing designer in First Amendment case", 6/24/2019) notes that "justices on both sides of the court’s ideological divide worried that the ruling went too far". Justice Stephen Breyer's opinion, "concurring in part and dissenting in part", cites neurological evidence for what might be a constitutionally defensible form of "linguistic regulation" [emphasis added]:

[S]cientific evidence suggests that certain highly vulgar words have a physiological and emotional impact that makes them different in kind from most other words. See M. Mohr, Holy S***: A Brief History of Swearing 252 (2013) (Mohr) (noting the “emotional impact” of certain profane words that “excite the lower-brain circuitry responsible for emotion,” resulting in “electrical impulses that can be measured in the skin”). These vulgar words originate in a different part of our brains than most other words. Id., at 250. And these types of swear words tend to attract more attention and are harder to forget than other words.

To avoid exciting those electrical impulses, Justice Breyer adds two additional asterisks to the title of Melissa Mohr's book, which OUP renders with one asterisk as Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing.  As for the origins of "vulgar words" in the brain, Mohr indeed tells us on p. 250 that

Scientists have found that swearing most likely originates in the right hemisphere of the brain, and within that half, in the “primitive” part of the brain, the limbic system. The right half of the brain [which] is responsible for nonpropositional or automatic speech, which includes greetings, conventional expressions such as 'not at all,' counting, song lyrics, and swearwords. Propositional speech—words strung together in syntactically correct forms to create an original meaning—occurs in the left hemisphere.

But the evidence for this conclusion is weak, in my opinion. It seems to consist (almost?) entirely in the observation that when the dominant (usually left) hemisphere is out of commission, for whatever reason, the right hemisphere has limited abilities to initiate speech, including some cussing among other things. She notes that

Medical literature abounds with cases such as that of a man whose entire left hemisphere was surgically removed due to cancer, leaving him with the ability to say 'um,' 'one … three,' and 'goddammit.'

This tells us that the non-dominant hemisphere can usually say only a few stereotyped and overlearned things, and those badly . It doesn't tell us that the right hemisphere is in control when someone with an intact brain produces a filled pause like "um", counts to three, or cusses — the fact that the non-dominant hemisphere can cuss doesn't mean that the dominant hemisphere can't.

Mohr goes on to tell us that "Swearing, though, is a combination of left and right brain, executive and lower functions". And her endnotes for the quoted section cover a lot more than cussing:

Jay, Why We Curse, 33–62; Steven Pinker, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature (New York: Viking, 2007), 331–37; Diana Van Lancker Sidtis, “Formulaic and Novel Language in a ‘Dual Process’ Model of Language Competence,” in Formulaic Language, ed. Roberta Corrigan et al. (Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2009), 2:445–72; Diana Van Lancker Sidtis, “Where in the Brain Is Nonliteral Language?” Metaphor and Symbol 21, no. 4 (2006): 213–44.

As for the stuff about "the lower-brain circuitry responsible for emotion", Mohr's quote on p, 250 continues

The limbic system, particularly the amygdala, records the emotional content of words—their connotations, as opposed to denotations. The amygdala “lights up” during brain scans when subjects read taboo words, and this increased activity can also be measured through the skin with electrodes.

But my understanding of amygdala activity (and associated galvanic skin response) is that things are more complicated than that. For example, Bagshaw et al., "The GSR of monkeys during orienting and habituation and after ablation of the amygdala, hippocampus and inferotemporal cortex", Neuropsychologia 1965, tells us that

In an effort to locate within the brain those systems essential for orienting and habituation, monkeys with lesions in the temporal lobe were tested for galvanic skin responses to a repeated pure tone stimulus and to a novel tone.

Normal animals showed habituation of the GSR within 30 trials with distinctive reoccurrence of response to the novel tone. Animals with bilateral amygdalectomy had decreased GSR reactivity to both tones, whereas those with hippocampectomy and inferotemporal isocortex lesions had normal records.

Consideration of this result in light of previous findings of a defect in behavioral habituation after amygdalectomy leads to the suggestion that the orienting reaction is involved not in the generation of reaction to novelty but, rather, in its registration in the central nervous system.

Those monkeys' amydalas were reacting to novel tones, not to taboo words. The role of the (left and right) amygdalas is complicated, but it's just not true, as Justice Breyer implies, that we can distinguish "certain profane words" from other words simply by amydala responses or associated GSR readings. (And taboo words can be used to emphasize positive-valence reactions as well negative-valence ones.)

For a recent survey of the neurology of cussing, see Shlomit Finkelstein, "Swearing and the brain", in The Oxford Handbook of Taboo Words and Language, 2018. Finkelstein punctuates this 41-page review with eleven general  "lessons":

Lesson I: The right cortical hemisphere enables swearing.
Lesson II: Intact prefrontal cortex guards against swearing.
Lesson III: The right basal ganglia support automatic speech and swearing.
Lesson IV: The cingulate cortex is implicated in coprolalia.
Lesson V: Lesions in the prefrontal- and limbic-CSTC circuits are implicated in swearing.
Lesson VI: The cerebellum contributes to swearing.
Lesson VII: Studies of AD reinforce the role of the frontal cortex and the limbic system in swearing.
Lesson VIII: The neurotransmitters dopamine and serotonin play a role in swearing.
Lesson IX: The hormones vasopressin and testosterone are involved in swearing.
Lesson XI: Bilateral IFG collaboration is necessary for inhibiting swearing.

Mohr's introduction begins

It was the last word my grandmother ever said to me. She was suffering from advanced Alzheimer’s disease and didn’t speak at all as I helped her eat her lunch or even when I showed her family photos. I’m not sure she recognized me. When I took her for a walk outside in her wheelchair, though, she found her voice. I wheeled her over a crack in the sidewalk and her chair bumped. Out it came—“Shit!” This from a woman who, even when she was feeling particularly frustrated, had rarely gone further than “Nuts!” or “Darn it!” She relapsed into silence for the rest of my visit.

In 1866, the French poet Charles Baudelaire was laid low by a stroke. He lost his ability to speak, except for one phrase he repeated so often that the nuns taking care of him threw him out of their hospital: “Cré nom!”—short for sacré nom de Dieu. Today, the English equivalent to this would be the mild goddamn or damn, but in 1866 “Cré nom!” so unforgivably offended the nuns that they could explain Baudelaire’s outbursts only as the result of satanic possession.

Mohr concludes from this that:

Embedded deep within the brains of Baudelaire and my grandmother, remaining even when other language had been stripped away, were swearwords.

But Finkelstein's Lesson XI on inhibition is crucial here — the problem for Baudelaire and Mohr's grandmother was not simply that they retained the ability to cuss, but that they had lost to ability to decide not to, or perhaps the ability to judge whether to decide not to.  (Note also that there are contexts where lack of cussing is communicatively marked…)

Anyhow, to return to Justice Breyer's argument, I'm skeptical that neuroscience is going to provide a basis for determining that "highly vulgar words have a physiological and emotional impact that makes them different in kind from most other words". The physiological reactions to word perception involve responses from a complex network of brain regions, and interpreting these responses is at least as complicated as the problem of communicative interpretation in the absence of any physiological recordings, requiring us to disentangle contextual probability, interactional appropriateness, emotional valence, socio-political associations, and more.

As for the idea that "These vulgar words originate in a different part of our brains than most other words", the cited evidence about hemispheric abilities, if accepted as a criterion for distinguishing acceptable from unacceptable vocabulary, would lead us to ban registration of trademarks involving "nonpropositional or automatic speech, which includes greetings, conventional expressions such as 'not at all,' counting, song lyrics, and swearwords."

[Some addition background on the court case is here.]

June 26, 2019 @ 10:51 pm · Filed by Mark Liberman under Language and the law

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