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Indlæser... Swearing Is Good for You: The Amazing Science of Bad Languageaf Emma Byrne
Health & Medical (97) Indlæser...
Bliv medlem af LibraryThing for at finde ud af, om du vil kunne lide denne bog. Der er ingen diskussionstråde på Snak om denne bog. I wanted to love this book. I enjoy swearing, I love the cover, but the science writing in this is weak, padded and in some sections so weirdly spurious it casts into doubt other sections that aren’t. After reading Kat Arney’s Herding Hemingway’s Cats, I think I’ve been spoiled for good science writing, and it shows. I feel like I picked up a New Scientist feature, but in a really bad way. :/ I've been waiting months for this to come out; I swear like a sailor and my love of etymology and words in general draw me to books like these. This one was excellent. In the introduction Byrne sets the expectations for the reader; not all the chapters are focused on swearing specifically - or how swearing is good for you, but all the topics she discusses are topical to swearing, and all of them contribute to our understanding of why swearing can be fun, powerful, and offensive - often all at once! There is a lot of science here, written by a woman who is a scientist first and a writer second, and a lot of studies make up a good portion of the narrative, with humor to keep the reading easy. Even when the chapters aren't geared directly at the benefits of swearing, they are fascinating. In a slim volume of under 200 pages, she covers the interrelationship of pain and swearing, Tourette's Syndrome (a tragic, eye-opening chapter that she describes as 'the chapter that should not be in this book'), swearing in the workplace, other primates that swear (so good!), gender and swearing, and finally, swearing for the multi-lingual. All fully cited and fascinating. With citations/notes, a bibliography, and an index in the back. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and should have saved it as a suggestion for The Flat Book Society, dammit! Though I was never going to be able to wait that long to start reading it; luckily it was good enough to re-read someday soon, so perhaps it will find it's way to the voting list anyway. This is a lively, funny, informative book about foul language. Emma Byrne, a computer scientist specializing in artificial intelligence, has always loved a good swear. In this book, she lays out, using peer-reviewed science, why swearing and foul language is really good for you, for work teams, and society as a whole. A key "news you can use" bit is that swearing is a very effective pain reliever. Whether you've hit your thumb with a hammer, or are sticking your hand in a bucket of ice (part of a real study to test this effect), or being treated for cancer, swearing really, measurably, helps your ability to handle the pain. The bad news? If you're a woman, even if you're being treated for cancer, even your female friends will judge you for this, and may drift away. Swearing also figures prominently in building and maintaining good teams in a work environment. It's used as banter, as a a form of in-group bonding, in expressing frustrations and irritations in a form that, despite conventional ideas about swearing, in actual use is often not seen as hostile or aggressive. Gender differences show up in how women swear compared to men, what swear words they use, and in how people react to their swearing, but not really in how much women vs. men swear. Byrne also discusses swearing in other languages, changes in swearing over time, and, most fascinatingly, at least to me, swearing in chimpanzees, our closest relatives. Chimpanzees, of course, don't use language on their own, but some chimpanzees, including Washoe and others raised among humans as part of the same project, have learned sign language. They learn it, they use it, they create new words, and they teach sign to younger chimps. But to be raised with humans, they have to be potty trained. In the process of potty training, they learn that feces anywhere else is taboo--and the word they use for feces, in Washoe's case "dirty," comes to function for the chimpanzees the way a much larger variety of taboo-based swear words function for humans. This suggests, among other things, that swearing may go back to the origins of human language. This is, unquestionably, a book that is better to read or listen to, than to just read my review. My account of it is not nearly as good. Recommended. I bought this audiobook. This short (about 200 pages) look at naughty words covers a lot of ground: how swear words do or don't differ from other kinds of vocabulary in the way our brains handle them, the different functions of swearing in society, how men and women use bad language differently, even how apes who are taught to communicate with signs do something that looks a lot like spontaneous swearing. Mostly it's not terribly in-depth, and some of it covered ground I was familiar with already, but it was fairly interesting on the whole. Byrne's writing is casual, earthy, interestingly opinionated, and laced with humor. Although some of her sense of humor works better for me than others. Early on, there's a bit too much of the feel of "Hey, I'm writing a book about swearing! Look, I'm going to say 'fuck' every couple of paragraphs, isn't that entertaining?" Which can get old pretty fast, even from someone who claims to be pretty foul-mouthed normally. Still, it was mostly a fun read, but I did have one major problem with it, and it was a bit of a frustrating one at times. The author is British, but the copy of the book I have is an American edition. It seems pretty clear that it was edited a bit for the American audience -- with a few British terms and customs explained, and references to "soccer" instead of "football" for instance -- but Byrne is still very clearly writing throughout from a British perspective for a British audience. And as she herself points out, swearing is something that varies hugely from place to place and culture to culture, and a lot of the examples she uses and analogies she draws are very, very specific to the UK and hard to relate to for American readers. Or even hard to understand. I mean, if it weren't for Monty Python having given me at least a vague idea of what a blancmange is, there's a whole extended food analogy she uses in here that I doubt I'd have been able to make heads or tails of. Now, it isn't that British swearing isn't interesting, even to us famously parochial Americans. And I certainly do not remotely fault a British writer for writing a British book for British audiences. But I am looking a bit askance at her editors. Honestly, the less-than-half-assed attempt to translate this into something accessible for Americans just made the whole thing more confusing, as my brain kept trying to leap back and forth across the Pond while I was reading, unable to ever settle into either processing things from my own American POV or making an imaginative leap into pretending to be British for the duration. ingen anmeldelser | tilføj en anmeldelse
In a sparkling debut in the entertaining pop science vein of Mary Roach, scientist Emma Byrne examines the latest research to show how swearing can be good for you. She reveals how swearing has been around since the earliest humans began to communicate, and has been shown to reduce physical pain, to lower anxiety, to prevent physical violence, to help trauma victims recover language, and to promote human cooperation. Packed with the results of unlikely and often hilarious scientific studies? from the "ice bucket test" for coping with pain, to the connection between Tourette's and swearing, to a chimpanzee who curses at her handler in sign language-Swearing Is Good for You presents a lighthearted but convincing case for the foulmouthed. No library descriptions found. |
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Er det dig?Bliv LibraryThing-forfatter. |
Ответ: это надо видеть. Тем более что и у них существуют примечательные национальные особенности. Местная табуированная лексика вообще уникальна. Так в Голландии одним из самых злых считается оскорбление «переживший рак» (Kankerlijer). Ругательства на других языках могут так же ранить, лишь если чужой язык освоен до определенного возраста. А еще ученые считают, что не ругаться невозможно.