Month: September 2025

One of the lesser-known fields of psychology is ‘maledictology’ which, as the name suggests, examines how people express themselves emotionally by swearing. Swearing is studied in its neurological, psychological and social contexts.

Clearly, the decision to swear comes from the brain. It is hypothesised that swearing involves both higher-level cognitive functions, such as decision-making and language, and the subcortical system, which determines how the person will respond to stimuli in their environment.

In psychological terms, we learn how to swear as part of our normal psychological development in society. From childhood, we learn what the common swearwords of our culture are, and which circumstances prompt their use. Knowing what is, and isn’t, considered rude in different contexts is an essential element of a child’s psychosocial development.

Socially-based research examines the cultural markers that people, and societies, use to determine when a particular word is or isn’t appropriate.

Currently, maledictology remains very much a minority field of study, a contested ground between psychology and linguistics that struggles to find funding, suggesting that the taboo element of swearing permeates academia as much as any other field of endeavour. For those who are particularly interested, the academic journal Maledicta was published between 1977 and 2005.

Photo Source: https://www.tuw.edu/psychology/career-in-psychology-traits/

Luxembourg is a small European country tucked between France, Belgium, and Germany. Alongside French and German, its official language is Luxembourgish, a West Germanic language similar to several High German dialects, spoken by about three-quarters of the population. Of course, as so few speak it – fewer than 300,000 – Luxembourgers generally also speak French or German, and often both.

The tricky question of the difference between a dialect and a language raises its head here once again. Until the mid-twentieth century, Luxembourgish was considered a dialect of German, but following a rigorous process of standardisation it was promoted as an independent language in its own right.

Photo Source:  https://www.luxtimes.lu/yourluxembourg/luxembourgguide/luxembourg-s-capital-celebrates-30-years-of-unesco-status/29149917.html

The spell checker tool that is an integral feature of word processing programs like Microsoft Word has been a joy for bad spellers everywhere, but it has its flaws.

The ‘Cupertino effect’ is a term that was coined to refer to the spell checker’s annoying habit of occasionally replacing correctly spelled words that are not in its dictionary with a different, often wildly wrong, word. It is named after the fact that some older spell checkers used to replace the English word ‘cooperation’ with ‘Cupertino’ (a California city), because its dictionary had only the hyphenated variant, ‘co-operation.’

Most of the time errors like this are just a minor irritation, but when important documents aren’t carefully proof-read after running a spell check, embarrassing – and potentially even dangerous – errors can slip by. This can happen even more easily when people are writing in a language other than their mother tongue and may be relying more heavily on a spell checker.

Even with all the technology at our disposal, sometimes you just can’t beat the human touch!

Photo Source: https://slate.com/human-interest/2014/07/autocorrect-fails-how-and-why-to-turn-off-word-prediction-on-your-phone.html