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Coming soon, a linguist's guide to obscenities

by jmberger | July 10, 2007 at 08:20 pm | 374 views | 2 comments

The National Science Foundation is paying more than $200,000 for a study whose results may be unprintable.
The grant's title, "Expressive Content and the Semantics of Contexts," doesn't sound exciting, until you figure out what "expressive content" means.

Christopher Potts , a linguist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, will catalog and analyze the use of obscenities, vulgarities, and racial epithets as well as titles and honorifics. All are words or phrases that express emotion, or whose absence can convey an emotion, such as disrespect.

Potts will chart when and how these words are used in books, television, movies, records of ordinary conversation, and other discourse. He aims to discover the laws of emotionally expressive language, in the same way a physicist might chart the movement of planets in order to discover the laws of gravity.

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Kaitlin

at 14:45 on July 12th, 2007

good stuff:

jmberger, thanks for posting this. Sounds like a pretty f***ing interesting study, if you ask me. :)

Keep up the great work--in the future a little introductory paragraph detailing your interest in the story or how you came across it is just a good way to prime readers for highlighted passages. Awesome having you on board!

jmberger

at 15:07 on July 12th, 2007

Well, in this case, the sad but glamorous truth is I was scouring press releases in search of story ideas and came across this one... We'll have to dress that up when they start filming "All The President's F---ing Men."