Humanities Knowledge

           It's often hard to discuss the topic on "bad people," because what really is bad? Is it their past that makes them bad? Is it their actions? Intentions? Thoughts? In any way, there seems to always be an exception for why people are bad or do bad things. Just as discussed in class in correlation to the video of Breaking Bad with Walter White, I see that he does certain things that I do consider as bad. For example, he produces and sells meth in a partnership with a businessman in drug dealing and he lies about what he does by keeping it away from his wife and family. However, if we try to see it from his perspective and see that he is doing it to provide wealth to support his family when he dies and he's doing it to benefit the family, then it's not entirely "bad." In any case, there are always exceptions.

            Another topic we focused on this week was linguistics. Here, we see another version of how humans can be bad besides from merely physical action. Language is a very powerful thing and as we watched in class, Pulp Fiction, for example, Jules Winnfield used a great deal of swearing to get his point across and to emphasize his emotions. This leads to the question, does swearing make a person bad? What if it's a better way to express yourself? According to Bowers and Pleydell-Pearce in "Swearing, Euphemisms, and Linguistic Relativity," there was a research where participants would read a curse word aloud and with electrodermal activity measuring their autonomic activity, they found that the swear words made their autonomic responses to those words were larger than to neutral stimuli. There was another study where eight words including euphemisms, were given to volunteers and their responses were recorded according to seconds of their reaction from seeing the actual curse word, than from "the-f word." It was noted that through those studies, the participants who saw the word "f-word" was less stressed than from seeing the actual curse word. Like discussed in class, the ones who saw the actual curse word felt angry and possessed negative emotions than from seeing "the f-word."
         

  Euphemisms, a similar and less harsh way of saying a word, has the affect on people where they can read it and be less angered by it. Some groups of people, however, prefer to use actual swearing words in their own group called, anti-society. Anti-societies are a group of people who emerged away from the original society to be different and have their own dominance and power-ground. This is the group that uses swearing as natural vocabulary and most of the time can be viewed as "bad." Those people who interact with one another in their anti-society can also be viewed as bad because they influence each other wit that negative language. The original society however isn't viewed as bad because they don't use that language and therefore have "good" people. As Montgomery mentioned in Chapter 5: "Anti-Language," "the anti-society has an antagonist relationship with society at large and their natural suspicion of outsiders make it difficult to study their language..."
         

"Introduction to Language and Society." Goodreads. Montgomery Martin, n.d. Web. 08 Dec. 2015.