Is there a name for the kind of sounds commonly found in profanities?

Question

Fuck. Shit. Bitch. Cunt. I remember reading somewhere -- a very long time ago -- that these "hard" sounds are virtually necessary in profanities. The explanation I roughly remember is that because these "hard sounds" are unmistakable, that is, because there is no half-hearting them in phonation, that lends to them to use in words that one wants to be unmistakable in intent, e.g, in profanities where one wants to intensify a phrase or rile someone up. I remember these being called fricatives.

Unfortunately I'm not a linguist, not even a fair amateur one, and when I went to check Wikipedia for the definition of fricative, I really couldn't make heads or tails of the lingo. I have no idea what those weird letters or the adjective "voiceless" mean. Moreover, I think I'm just plain wrong about those sounds being fricatives -- the examples I found on that page don't seem correspond very well to the hard sounds I mentioned above. My memory about what I read is obviously horribly dashed. Am I in fact correct in observing that profanities tend to have "hard" sound somehow, and if so, could someone give me a name for them so I can go about content I know something really cool?

Answer 1

The segments you have highlighted in those words are voiceless stops (or plosives), along with one voiceless affricate ("ch").

1. In deciding whether it is significant that these words have these types of consonants in them, one should consider how common voiceless stops are in words in general. I don't know of any sources offhand that can tell you that, but /p,t,k/ are very common consonant sounds in English.

2. Another thing one must be able to account for are the profanities that do not have a single voiceless stop or afficate: e.g. ass, douche, damn, hell, bugger, boobs, asshole, douchenozzle, and so on.

3. But above all, I think the following is extremely important to note: when I say fuck and shit, I often reduce the [k] sound to a glottal stop or an unreleased stop [k̚ ], and I almost always reduce the [t] sound to a glottal stop. (The same is true with cunt, but I feel uncomfortable telling people I "say" that word :) The glottal stop is basically the sudden absence of sound — it is the sound that occurs at the beginning of each syllable in "uh-oh" /ʔʌʔoʊ/. In any case, this is very normal and very common in American English — to the extent that one would generally consider a fully articulated stop in these words to be hyperarticulation. Why would we do this if a major driving force behind the structure of profanities is the very harsh and salient sound of voiceless stops and affricates? The glottal stop is possibly the least salient phoneme in English.

All that said, there could be something psychological going on, and something inherent about those sounds, but at the moment, it sounds like a coincidence to me.

Answer 2

I think the idea that profanities necessarily have stops ('hard' sounding letters) is unfounded. But to check for a given language you'd have to have a list of profanities, a list of all words, a list of stops in that language. And then you'd have to check that there are absolutely no profanities made of sounds none of which are stops, -and- that the percentage of stops in the profanities are significantly more than in words in the rest of the language.

Answer 3

I have heard of these referred to as mono-syllabic grunt words.