Just when you thought humans weren’t monkeys…

I read an article (of course I can’t find it to link now) about how animals sometimes have a warning call they use when they see a predator (think of squirrels making that chattering noise). Since animals use this type of call only when they see a predator but are safe from it, science thinks it’s a way of annoying and intimidating the predator and reducing its chances of getting ANY prey from that area. (Basically, “you can’t get me, ha ha ha ha ha”) Anyway, at the end of the article it mentioned that this behavior was analagous in the brain to when humans cuss (like at a bad driver or an opponent in sports). This sounds like something really similar.

Also: I had the same thing happen with students: they’d call stuff gay and then say that it wasn’t gay “like THAT.” They see it as a generic put down like how we call things “lame” and we don’t mean to insult the disabled. We dealt with this by saying that we never wanted students to use “gay” as a put down, period, b/c people might think it was “like THAT” even if it wasn’t. Because it is. But it’s hard to reason with people about what words mean or don’t mean, seeing as how words mean what we all agree they mean, haha!

Maybe you could start a guild that only uses shakespearean insults like “toe licker.”