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CURSING IS A FUNDAMENTAL linguistic accomplishment, evidence of a speaker's origin that can defy more recent and willful selfinventions by way of language. Even speakers articulate in a second language will tend to curse in their native tongue. Hence the many foreign-language dictionaries devoted entirely to cursing as "insider" knowledge likely to elude the foreigner, the very key to linguistic authenticity. "Even if you've diligently learned all your verb conjugations, memorized French vocabulary, and successfully navigated the subjective tense, you still won't speak French like the natives," warns an advertisement for the Street French Slang Dictionary and Thesaurus.4 If cursing signals linguistic fluency, however, it is clearly also a breach of communicative propriety. In an illogic whose political usefulness Miranda begins to suggest, cursing is often characterized as both a failure of linguistic fluency and a deliberate injury. On the one hand, then, to know how to curse is to claim (or to be ascribed) cultural authenticity; on the other, however, to curse is to demonstrate an incapacity for - or a criminal departure from - proper, purposive speech.5
The dual and contradictory nature of cursing is illustrated most dramatically in coprolalia, the convulsive cursing that often accompanies the disorder known as Tourette Syndrome (TS) . The term "coprolalia" (from the Greek, kopros = "dung," lalia = "to chatter") was coined by Georges Gilles de la Tourette in 1885, after whom the syndrome is named. Although coprolalia entails the utterance of ordinary curse words, these utterances disrupt the patterns of normal speech. Indeed, they appear to issue from a different part of the brain: the timbre of voice is entirely different from usual speaking tones, and the eruption occurs at grammatical pauses or interstices.6 Coprolalics can often anticipate this eruption and even deflect or forestall it for a brief period. But the utterance represents a physical imperative that strains against and eventually overrides efforts to suppress it. The phenomenon of coprolalia is thus better described as vocalization than as speech or voice; that is, as a purely physiological impulse rather than volitional and meaningful communication. Nonetheless, coprolalia responds to linguistic convention to the extent that the vocalization contains recognizable (and recognizably offensive) words. This is what has made coprolalia so perplexing a feature of TS:...