Cursing in America

Jay, Tim

doi:10.1075/z.57

Cited by 189 publications

(122 citation statements)

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“…The materials were 72 taboo words and 216 neutral words that were matched for mean frequency in Jay (1992) and mean length in letters and syllables but differed in mean obscenity on the Jay tabooness scales. The words occurred in 36 experimental lists and 24 filler lists (see Table 4 for typical examples).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Relations between emotion, memory, and attention: Evidence from taboo Stroop, lexical decision, and immediate memory tasks

et al. 2004

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474This study demonstrates six interrelated effects of emotion on attention and memory. The main one is the taboo Stroop effect: When people name the color of randomly intermixed taboo and neutral words, color-naming times are longer for taboo than for neutral words (Siegrist, 1995). The taboo Stroop effect shares characteristics with two other effects, known as the clinical and the emotional Stroop effects. The clinical Stroop effect occurs when patients with a particular affective disorder (e.g., spiderphobia) name the colors of words that are either phobia related (e.g., web) or phobia unrelated (e.g., wet): Colornaming times are longer for the patients than for the normal controls, but only for the phobia-related words (e.g., Dalgleish & Watts, 1990;Mathews & MacLeod, 1985;Richards & Millwood, 1989;Watts, McKenna, Sharrock, & Tresize, 1986). However, unlike taboo Stroop effects, which are robust across experimental contexts and are not confined to individuals suffering from clinical disorders, clinical Stroop effects (for a review, see Williams, Mathews, & MacLeod, 1996) are often small, difficult to replicate (see MacLeod & Hodder, 1998), context specific (e.g., readily observable with blocked, but not with randomly intermixed, emotional and unemotional words; see Richards, French, Johnson, Naparstek, & Williams, 1992), and variable (e.g., holding for some types of clinical traits and emotional disorders, but not for others; see Matthews & Harley, 1996).A closer relative of the taboo Stroop effect is the emotional Stroop effect, the fact that people take longer to name the color of unpleasant words (e.g., grief, fail, fear, and death) than that of neutral words (see, e.g., Sharma & McKenna, 2001;Whalen et al., 1998). Unlike taboo Stroop effects, time pressure (240 msec or less between prior response and subsequent color word) may be essential for observing emotional Stroop effects (see Sharma & McKenna, 2001). Moreover, the label emotional Stroop effect may be inappropriate: Repeated failures to demonstrate emotional Stroop effects for pleasant words suggest that negative affect, rather than emotionality per se, may underlie emotional Stroop effects (see McKenna & Sharma, 1995;Richards & Millwood, 1989). Despite these complications, clinical and emotional Stroop effects have stimulated development of a global resource theory of emotion and attention, which we will outline next in order to frame the general issues that motivated the present experiments.Under the theory, emotional reactions "soak up processing resources" (Bower, 1992, p. 17), and clinical and emotional Stroop effects occur when limited-capacity attentional resources are allocated to threatening stimuli, thereby reducing resources available for processing and responding to other stimuli (e.g., font color). If one applies this basic logic to taboo words, by attracting attentional resources, taboo words will slow down color naming, rela- This article reports five experiments demonstrating theoretically coherent effects of emotion on memory and a...

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Relations between emotion, memory, and attention: Evidence from taboo Stroop, lexical decision, and immediate memory tasks

et al. 2004

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“…The authors found that taboo fluency was negatively correlated with the personality traits Agreeableness and Conscientiousness, and positively correlated with Neuroticism. The use of the word "cunt" by English speakers has been found to be linked to both age and gender (Jay 1992). Recordings of public use of taboo words revealed that children under the age of 12 years used the word very rarely in public, that even adults used it infrequently (Jay 1992) and that female speakers avoided the word (Jay 2000).…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

“Cunt”: On the perception and handling of verbal dynamite by L1 and LX users of English

Dewaele

2018

Multilingua

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"Cunt" is currently one of the most offensive words in the English language and is usually censored in the English press and media. The present study looks firstly at differences between 1159 first (L1) and 1165 foreign (LX) users of English in their perceived understanding of the word, its perceived offensiveness and their self-reported frequency of use. Secondly, it considers the relationships between the dependent variables and a number of psychological, sociobiographical and linguistic profile variables. The findings suggest that LX users are less sure about the exact meaning of the word, underestimate its offensiveness and use it less frequently than L1 users. Links between understanding of the word and its perceived offensiveness vary for L1 and LX users. High levels of Extraversion, Neuroticism and Psychoticism were linked to more frequent use of the word, as were lower levels of education, a younger age, being a male and working in a swearing-rich environment for both L1 and LX users. Variation in the group of LX users was linked to age of onset of acquisition of English, context of acquisition, self-reported oral proficiency, frequency of use of English and having lived in an English-speaking environment.

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“…They certainly have been a pervasive part of conversational English in the latter half of the 20th century in North America (Arango, 1989;Black, Stratton, Nichols, & Chavez, 1985). Although American and Canadian English speakers are not generally indiscriminate users or approvers of taboo language (Jay, 1992)-no society is-it is nonetheless an important aspect of contemporary communication (Black et al, 1985;Hall, Nagy, & Linn, 1984). Because it is widely heard among native speakers, mature language learners could benefit from classroom discussions devoted to examining the use and significance of obscene language, at least in broadly based contexts.…”

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confidence: 99%

“…The connotations of obscene words are, like those of most words, products of the sociolinguistic rules that help to shape a speech event and that influence the verbal behavior between a speaker and a listener (Foote & Woodward, 1973;Jay, 1981Jay, , 1992de Klerk, 1991;Sagarin, 1968;Selnow, 1985).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Swearing: A "Bad" Part of Language; A Good Part of Language Learning

Mercury¹

1995

TESL

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Cursing in America

Cited by 189 publications

References 0 publications

Relations between emotion, memory, and attention: Evidence from taboo Stroop, lexical decision, and immediate memory tasks

Relations between emotion, memory, and attention: Evidence from taboo Stroop, lexical decision, and immediate memory tasks

“Cunt”: On the perception and handling of verbal dynamite by L1 and LX users of English

Swearing: A "Bad" Part of Language; A Good Part of Language Learning

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