Posts tagged “swearing”

ChittahChattah Quickies

  • [from Dan_Soltzberg] Power Players and Profanity: Talking About Talking Dirty on NPR [Bob Sutton: Work Matters] – The author of "The No Asshole Rule" talks about the role of profanity in work culture and leadership, and his recent interview on the topic for NPR All Things Considered
  • [from julienorvaisas] How facts backfire [The Boston Globe] – Researchers at the University of Michigan found that when misinformed people were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts, they found, were not curing misinformation. Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation even stronger. Instead of changing their minds to reflect the correct information, they can entrench themselves even deeper. The general idea is that it’s absolutely threatening to admit you’re wrong,” says political scientist Brendan Nyhan, the lead researcher on the Michigan study.
  • [from julienorvaisas] Eerie relic of science history [Boing Boing] – [It's worth reflecting on the ethical boundaries of recruiting every once in awhile – though the Milgram study's ethical lapses went well beyond the use of questionable recruiting methods, of course.] This is the newspaper ad that recruited subjects for Stanley Milgram's obedience to authority experiments. As you can see, subjects were told they were being recruited to aid research on memory and learning. In reality, Milgram was studying how far down the path of evil average people would go, simply because someone in a lab coat told them to.

swearingfestival

swearingfestival is some event in SF to look at and experience swearing, of course. But lately I’ve been thinking about the silly words that we create to let us swear with out swearing.

Gosh instead of God
Gee whiz instead of Jesus Christ
Durn/dang instead of damn
Shucks or shoot instead of shit

And now we’ve got the network TV versions. My fave is jagoff (jagov?) for jackoff, appearing on NYPD, Law and Order (I presume), Third Watch, and the like. Anyplace you’ve got cops talking tough about the scum on the street.

It’s just so silly; you can say jagoff, but you can’t say jackoff?

I’m sure there are others I can’t think of right now.

Update: frigging, freaking, fricking all for fucking

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