Insufficiencies of Language

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Why is it that we talk so much? Why can’t we influence the way we speak and why do we use swearwords even when we don’t want to? These and other questions are the starting point of this book. So called bad language is dealt with, as is politeness, and possible reasons for our use of certain types of language like medical or legal jargon are investigated. From a biological point of view these phenomena seem to be rather harmful to the speaker sometimes, but once we adopt a memetic point of view they seem to make perfect sense. So after a brief introduction into both evolutionary biology and memetics, Edith Simmel explores certain peculiarities of language and discusses possible explanations for our speaking behaviours.