What the F: What Swearing Reveals About Our Language, Our Brains, and Ourselves by Benjamin K. Bergen.
Basic Books, 271 pp., $27.99
In Praise of Profanity by Michael Adams. Oxford University Press, 253 pp., $17.95
Obscene language presents problems, the linguist Michael Adams writes in his new book, In Praise of Profanity, “but no one seems to spend much time thinking about the good it does.” Actually, a lot of people in the last few decades have been considering its benefits, together with its history, its neuroanatomy, and above all its fantastically large and colorful word list. Jesse Sheidlower’s The F- Word, an OEDstyle treatment of fuck that was first published in 1995, has gone into its third edition, ringing ever more changes—artfuck, bearfuck, fuck the deck, fuckbag, fuckwad, horsefuck,…