remain incredibly popular through the world,they've been translated into many different languages . i think sometimes that loses a little bit in translation because he made up so many words and it sort of throws the rhyme scheme off but i think his genius will endure. >> one rodriguez cumbria led the first european expedition of what is now the west coast of the united states. in september 15 42, he sailed into today's san diego bay . cabrillo national monument located near his landing point was erected in 1913 to commemorate his discovery. up next we continue our look at san diego's literary scene as we speak with local author benjamin bergen on why people use profanity and what it says about us and our language. >> the words themselves are

just said, it's the cultural belief surrounding the use of those words that gives them such power and good or bad, useful or not. the reason it has the effect it has on our bodies and our psyches is because these words are ones that we've been framed since childhood are special. our parents told us these are words you can't say in public, the sensors themselves are saying around us. we even got punished for them so we've learned these are really powerful, emotional words and this context in which we use them are emotional and we learned that through the substance of our language over a lifetime so the emotional reaction is systematic, sort of this bodily function so we get a quickening of the heart rate, we get sweaty palms, we get a release of adrenaline, all this happens and it's part of a fight or flight response.

this these things get activated in the brain and body and that produces the very effect that profanity has, it allows us to tolerate stress better, it allows us to set our hearts going for a moment and then get over it more quickly. there's a whole spate of things that happened when we use these very very special words. the premise of the book is that profanity is a type of human behavior that we should be studying for a couple reasons. firstof all because it has cognitive uses. i want to know what humans do, what arguments like, how do they get to be that way through the course of evolutionary time . and developmentally, it proves to be complementary. development is a real, legally universal dimension of experience and its worth understanding. but more than that, profanity is special when it comes to

language, we've got a lot of different things people speak for, we remember, we talk to ourselves but one thing that most languages are not good at is conveying emotion, evoking emotion. so as a result of that and as a result of the fact that it's taboo and there are all sorts of social constraints surrounding it, it works differently from the rest of language and that means there are scientific discoveries to be made about humans that you can only get by looking at the dirty side oflanguage . these words become profane over the course of many generations and centuries following a relatively common path that usually goes something like this: a start by meeting thing totally monday so maybe they refer to a donkey or they refer to hitting and then over the course of centuries, language

changesand they gain new meaning. that happens to every word , word like cell. cell used to refer to a place that could contain something and then it referred to the smallest biological unit and it now refers to the bikes in a pocket that you use and words change meaning so profane words are no exception. those meetings usually belong to one of four categories. they refer to religious concepts, the example of hell for example. they refer to sex, lots of profane words revolve around bodily functions or body parts involved in those functions or activities involving the upkeep of those bodily functions and bodily parts but finally words relating to other groups of people. and once it gains a meeting like one of those, then it's a candidate for being profane but that doesn't make it

profane. there are lots of words that are acceptable that are profane. there are words that you would use in medical contexts or as little kids that described excretion, bodily function and so on and there's this turn that happens and that turn has to do with people deciding that this word, they don't want to hear this word. profane words in english go away, they tend to be short. particularly stop consonants at the end. and maybe it has something to do with which people are using those words but sometimes a new generation of people will use a word with a new meaning and older people will decide we don't really like how you are using that word so the result is that there is a social agreement that we are not going to use these words. where going to punish people who do, were going to teach

them they can't and the consequences that a full generation of kids grow up thinking these are bad words. they are not intrinsically bad but a generation of kids rose up and they learn the consequences as a result. over the course of a lifetime , a word will eventually peter out so the words that we now think of as the strongest profanity in 100 years might not be anymore. in shakespeare's time, the f word wasn't so bad as it is now and it was a completely different word that served the same function, it was basically the f word of the day and it died out along with a host of other words like sounds, gadgets and tarnation, words that don't do anything for the modern era but at one time they would be. there are different degrees of profane this and taboo in words andyou can see this from survey data that if you

ask younger americans , you find that they are pretty reliable in which words they think are the worst words so for example, at the lowest level of profanity which is was kind of bad, you wouldn't say them around your grandparents but for example you have words like hell and shipped doesn't seem to bother younger americans as much . and as you move up you get words that relate to bodily function, then you get words relating to sex and the worst words according to americans nowadays are words that denigrate people by didn't of their race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation. those tend to be the worst words and if you look at a list of how offensive americans find words, it's going to be mostly populated, the top 10 or 15 will be slurs so that's something new.

that hasn't always been the case. we don't know exactly why this is happening but certainly is true that the way in which people connect with people is playing a role in it. the media landscape has changed, over the last 20 years is gone from a case where all the media that you consume was sponsored by someone. someone decided because the fcc regulates broadcast television and the npa a regulates movies, someone decided that word is not appropriate. and now that's not true. what you have to do is pull out your mobile device and participate in an online game. younger kids are exposed to so much language because it's from someoneelse's thumbs into their eyeballs, that they become inured to it . they see the f word 100 times before breakfast. the result of that, offensive

words are offensive anymore, it isn't intrinsically bad, it's just a word. a lot of people don't like it but there's nothing that directly causes harm to people. but younger adults notice that and they don't see anything particularly wrong with it. they find another word that you use that's unacceptable or that seems casual or that seems emotional or to make your point and they don't judge it as offensive. at the same time, that media is showing us how people who are very different might find offensive words to be harmful to them so one thing that i'm surprised talking to undergrads here is that the word retard, the word retard didn't use to be taboo, it didn't used to be profanity. when i was going up 40 years ago, it was a way to insult people but no one would come up to you and say that's what you just said and that's totallychanged .

when i asked 20-year-old why they find that word, why they call it the r word, why they don't want to hear it in the classroom, it's because of some video that they saw. they saw a video where they saw a post by some friends of theirs or friend of a friend that talks about how they have a brother who has down syndrome and how that word really hurt them. that sort of bubbling up of individual experience with language and specifically with slurs that younger americans get exposed to more now than say they would have 20 years ago, part of the reason that they find those words or slurs the most offensive nowadays. i think profanity has consequences. the more you use it, the less influence it has so we know this because when you look at the effect that profanity has on thebody , the effects of swearing on the body, people who swear more have less of

an impact each time they do it. there's a study that shows that swearing can alleviate pain. this is a recent group in prison, they had people coming to the lab and had this thing is not to harm them, the protocol is that there's this ice cold water and they stick their open hand into it, it hurts a lot and it's hard to do and they had to hold their hands in as long as they could . and they could do this either while swearing or the other half of the participants while they were just saying some other swearword and what the researchers found was the swear words, the ones who were randomly allowed to swear could hold their hands in 50 percent longer. so there's this pain relieving effect of swearing but if you then ask people how often do you swear in youreveryday life , that pain relieving effect was greater for people who swore more in their everyday lives so we

know there's effects on your body from swearing but there's also an impact on how other people perceive you. so there are social calls and the person who swears, for example, with the right text you can be perceived as funny. in the right context you can seem powerful. in the right context you can seem impressionable and in the right context you can seem horrible. in the right context you can seem out-of-control or unhinged and in the right context you can seem really emotional right now. particularly people who are excited, elated, whatever so the perception that on someone who swears is very much driven by the context, even the type of context where i think someone could get away with swearing is not the context where i think the

only reason would swear is if they don't know the social rules and therefore are a person who is not impressive so like everything that we do that social, swearing as complicated social consequence. the most important thing out of this book is that the human behavior that is scientifically valuable. i think that someone who studies language, i take it for granted that people will have the same attitude toward human behavior that i have. there's a wide variety of it. it's revealing in that it's not really to be judged so much as described and understood. and we can take a little of that view of profanity as well and it can go a long way because taking something as a scientific object of study, that leads us to give less control over our lives. i think a lot of people are stuck in this idea that this word is a harmful word.

we can't see this word or we will have a knee-jerk reaction. i think people are stuck on the idea that if i ever utter this word around my child, he's going to be harmed. there's not evidence for that type of behavior. i think allowing us to attach ourselves from our magical beliefs about these special words and instead treat them as a human behavior that we can understand and that we can manipulate for the good or bad, whatever we want to manipulate for, gives us more control. >> balboa park and its 1200 acres sit in the heart of san diego, initially called city park, it was decided the name should be changed after san diego was selected to host the 1950s panama california