Why are you cursing?
Science & Tech Why are you cursing? Photo illustration by Liz Zonarich/Harvard Staff June 2, 2025 4 min read Steven Pinker breaks down history of taboo words, different categories of swearing, and the meaning conveyed by a bleep Part of the Wondering series A series of random questions answered by Harvard experts. Steven Pinker, the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology, wrote a chapter on swearing for his book “The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature” (2007). The content of swear words varies from culture to culture, from language to language, and across time periods, as we see in the fact that damn and hell used to be highly fraught taboo words in English. Part of that has to do with the decline of religious sensibilities. In an era in which people literally thought that God was monitoring every word and were worried about spending eternity in hell, a curse that damned you to hell would have...