Expletive Delted - 05 edition

Ruth Wajnryb is an applied linguist researcher and writer. She has a weekly column in The Sydney Morning Herald in which she explores linguistic topics.

Prologue Until quite recently swearing was a subject largely ignored by those who investigate the nature of language. Well perhaps ''ignored'' is going too far. Let's say interest was lacking. Not a lot has changed since twelve years ago when Timothy Jay one of the few serious researchers in this field wrote ''If all science on language stopped now we would know very little about dirty word usage or how dirty word usage relates to more normal language use.''This lack of interest becomes glaringly obvious when you consider the massive amount of literature that has been generated analyzing discrete linguistic elements such as the past-tense inflection of ''-ed'' or present tense third-person singular final ''-s.'' While I'm happy to own up to my bias as an applied (that is not pure) linguist and while I'm loath to cast aspersions on other linguists' areas of expertise (we're a small academic community and we have to live together peaceably) I need to ask here: Is there really any competition between swearing and the bits we put on the ends of verbs as topics for study? If you didn't vote for swearing this is where you get off.Bus stops here!The absence of research interest in swearing is itself intriguing. In 1975 the Australian linguist B. A. Taylor published a serious study of abusive language in the Australian context. He began his paper thus: If English were...a Germanic language spoken in Northern Delaware and particularly if it were the language of some indigenous tribe it is pretty certain that some enterprising anthropologist would long since have recognised and described the subsystem of taboo language contained within it. Taylor and I share a partiality to the anthropological device for I frequently invoke the services of the Visiting Anthropologist from Mars. Taylor goes on to say that because En- glish is the language of most of the world's linguists the subsystem of taboos on which swearing is based has been largely ignored or where analyzed undertaken in the spirit of fun and not as a serious endeavor.Nearly thirty years on the situation has improved -- a little. Yet the fact remains that I don't need two hands to count the number of dedicated books on the subject. One explanation may be found in the sociolinguist Erving Goffman's reference to ''the most conventionalized and perfunctory doings we engage in...[that] traditionally have been treated by students of modern society as part of the dust of social activity empty and trivial -- routine formulae-fillers.''Others have commented on the academic avoidance of this domain of language. Australian researcher Angus Kidman treats as preposterous the notion that swearing is intuitively obvious and requires no further examination. He criticizes studies that treat swearing as nothing more than a linguistic category of words and fail to see that it is a culturally driven speech act. He claims that the very fact that different word labels are used in different varieties of English (''swearing'' in Britain and Australia; both ''swearing'' and ''cursing'' in the United States) should tell us that we're not simply talking about an undifferentiated invariant category of words.Researcher Richard Dooling bemoans the lack of available access to the relevant literature: The Library of Congress classification system does not provide a selection of books...on swearing or dirty words. A researcher...must travel to the BF of psychoanalysis the PE of slang the GT of anthropology the P of literature and literary theory the N of art the RC of medical psychiatry and back to the B of religion and philosophy. Such a disorderly journey around the library shelves provides Dooling with the evidence that words such as ''shit'' are ''inextricably bound up with almost everything.''The fact that this area of research continues to be undervalued as an academ