I’m working on a larger piece about the accessory olfactory system and part of it has me introspective to the point of avoidance of others. So I’m going to post about it to clear my thoughts.
TRIGGER WARNINGS: profanity and the profane. This isn’t about good or bad, but about what it is and the categories it falls in. There are good and bad things here though, oh yes.
I’ve been puzzling over language and symbolic sensitivity. I have a different relationship with intensity thanks to tourette’s syndrome and language isn’t spared. When one is always intense inside the perception of intensity in language gets confusing. I’ll go straight to profanity and technical language about genitals and excretion. It never bothers me, it’s the sensitivity to others that I seem sensitive to. That negative empathy overload. I remember as a child riding my bike and just spewing out lots of forbidden words, and my father just going “I don’t think so!” like that’s a mature approach to your child. No understanding, just forbidden. And to this day I think my parents are full of shit.
There is a set of things that fall under profane that are hard to think about but important because I want to know WHY. They aren’t all popularly understood as profanity. Profanity in my experience are words of anatomy and action: fuck, shit, dick, pussy, ass, piss…
But the profane goes beyond that. The reasonable sensitivity to burning crosses and swastikas. The obsession of bigots with disgust and disease, like a homophobe that needs gay people to be more disease ridden. Or the hand-wringing and squeamishness that technical terms for reproductive anatomy brings.
Gendered language can fall in here too given the negative feeling that can be created here.
I don’t have this. What I have is an acute sensitivity to the feelings of others here for better or worse. Maybe my privilege is why I don’t have an equivalent for burning crosses and swastikas for myself, and maybe not. But it’s real and I want to write about what looks like the potential biological substrate for these things.
Right now I’m doing searches on vomerants, semiochemicals “social chemicals” that organisms make and detetect in their accessory olfactory systems, including things for predators and prey, a system we don’t have. Hopefully I have something useful to type.