The Swearing Instinct

Steven Pinker writes about swearing in The New Republic.

I think this is the most interesting part:

As secularization has rendered religious swear words less powerful, creative speakers have replaced them with words that have the same degree of affective clout according to the sensibilities of the day. This explains why taboo expressions can have such baffling syntax and semantics. To take just one example, why do people use the ungrammatical Fuck you? And why does no one have a clear sense of what, exactly, Fuck you means? (Some people guess "fuck yourself," others "get fucked," and still others "I will fuck you," but none of these hunches is compelling.) The most likely explanation is that these grammatically baffling curses originated in more intelligible religious curses during the transition from religious to sexual and scatological swearing in English-speaking countries:

Who (in) the hell are you? >> Who the fuck are you?

I don't give a damn >> I don't give a fuck; I don't give a shit.

Holy Mary! >> Holy shit! Holy fuck!

For God's sake >> For fuck's sake; For shit's sake.

Damn you! >> Fuck you!

The rest of the article is interesting too, though the sexual sociology stuff isn't as convincing. The opening gambit is fun, especially when it gets around to teasing out what part of speech "fucking" is. Surprisingly tricky!

Linguists are no doubt trying to work out a full theory of F-bar syntax. This seems to be a good start.