And now a few words about filth

Why do we curse? That's the question posed by Steven Pinker in The New Republic. We thought of this recently looking at the blog of a design shop we admire, who are recruiting with a lovely photo of their team, tan, relaxed, all flipping the bird at the camera. At once, we get the message. These guys are hip. Cutting edge. Sooo not uptight. How can a single photo, or ucking gesticulation, give us such pause?

Pinker's article first points to the hypocrisy of it all. We mean, really--you can say fertilizer, or manure, or dung, excrement, maul, guano, mulch, cowplop or even buffalo chips--but don't you dare utter hit, hitter, or hithead, or you're rude. Even the words themselves carry different weight at different times. Bono dropped a feringing expletive at the Golden Globe Awards in 2003, and the FCC decided not to fine NBC because--get this--Bono used the F-bomb as an adjective, not a verb.

So why do hit, iss, uck, unt and ole make us uncomfortable, but the terms excretion, urine, copulate, vagina and anus don't?

As Bono might say, Pinker offers an ucking brilliant answer--and something worth noting for marketers. Some words have "strange emotional power" that "tap into deep and ancient parts of the brain." Pinker takes a biology field trip into the limbic system, the neocortex, and a few other wires in our heads before pinpointing a little amygdala organ in the front of our skull as the culprit. Seems we have a little gland-thing that causes deeply emotional and involuntary reactions to certain stimuli, such as a saber-tooth tiger eating your mother, or perhaps, when you read uck you. As a test, we think that even removing the first letters of vulgar profanity will make you uncomfortable. Try to read this, other ucker, and see if you get issed off if we call you a ock ucking hit-faced amygdala-organ hit-head. Do you feel any emotion?

Maybe it all started back in the last Ice Age, when the word UCK! meant "OGG, RUN THERE'S A WOOLLY MAMMOTH STAMPEDING RIGHT AT YOU!" So "uck" got hot-wired into the brains of all those who survived (and who ran really ucking fast).

It's all fascinating--and points out that language, and art, and design, can pull us in emotional ways that we can't constrain. Marketers and advertisers might toy around with new ways to grab attention beyond the obvious cuss word or sexual image. But be gentle about it. After all, when thinking about ucking, we just lose control.