Student Expelled from School for Dirty Linguistic Observation

A high school student in Indiana has been expelled from school because he made a linguistic observation using profanity.

The tweet in question was “F*** is one of those f*** words you can f*** put anywhere in a f*** sentence and it still f*** makes sense.”

Austin Carroll’s tweet may use profanity, but it does offer linguistic insight into one of the most commonly used word in the English language. The tweet he made was invariably true in that the word is incredible versatile and can be used in virtually every part of speech.

The faculty of the school makes the claim that Austin tweeted from a school computer, while he claims that it was made at home. Regardless of where he tweeted, there is an issue of privacy of online accounts and whether the school has a right to punish a student for using profanity on the internet.

From a linguist’s perspective however, I cannot help but feel saddened that this student is being expelled for promoting linguistic knowledge, no matter how profane it may be, linguistics deals with language as a whole, and a teenager in high school that is able to understand the intricacies of this commonplace word shows some level of linguistic interest!

-Rickey Lu

Source: voxy.com

WTF?! Cursing Is Firmly Embedded In The Brain

We’ve all been guilty of it before –whether you’re raging at the f*$@#!ing a-hole who cut you off on the interstate (everyone’s a bad driver except you, right?) or cursing yourself for stabbing your finger with the knife while cutting vegetables: “S#&@*!, MY FINGER IS GONE!” or maybe even slipping the colloquial “f-bomb” during an important work meeting: “So Robert’s f!@#$%ing analysis is not up to par with company standards…” –you’re fully aware that swearing has become a part of your daily speech, or as researchers like to call it, a part of your “formulaic language”.

The term was coined by researchers at the communicative sciences and disorders at New York University. They suggest that the emotional component of swear words allows for increased memory retention. In fact, it was observed that patients with brain injuries often retain their ability to recall swear words, even when other words elude them.

Even more interesting, a 2009 study on the correlation between pain tolerance and swearing suggests that swearing makes it easier to bear pain. Participants were told to repeat a curse word while submerging their hands in a tub of ice water; those who didn’t repeat the curse word experienced more pain.

Timothy Jay, a psycholinguist, notes an interesting observation: “A lot of people don’t realize that swearing represents an evolutionary leap, in that it allows us to be verbally aggressive without being physically aggressive.

Sadly, though, the positive aspects of cursing get very little attention.

Source: voxy.com