Name: The ultimate swearword.
Age: Ber! Mind your own business.
Sorry, age is just the way we normally start things around here. “Ber”, though, what does that mean? It’s short for banger.
What, as in old car? Not as in old car. Or sausage. Or excellent tune. It’s a swearword.
Is it? Says who? Says Sophie Maclean, with a bit of help from Andrey Markov.
Who are they? He’s a Russian mathematician, who died in 1922. She’s an MSc mathematics student, very much alive and well and studying at King’s College London.
OK, I think now is the time for some sort of explanation. Maclean, whose next project is a PhD in analytic number theory, wrote a code that she says has created the world’s best swearword.
How does it work? She fed a list of swearwords into “the Markov chain”, a mathematical model that predicts the probability of a sequence based on previous input and figures out the chances of each letter following the one before …
A bit like predictive text? Exactly.
What the actual duck?! We know how rubbish predictive texting is at swearing. What did the code say? That the ultimate swearword was likely to begin with a “b” and end in “er”.
So it ended up spitting out banger? It was a tie between banger and ber, but Maclean noted that the first word already had lewd connotations.
Does it? Ask your dad. Anyway, ber presents a new opportunity.
Ber, though. It just sounds a bit … ber. I can’t see Malcolm Tucker using it. Maclean admits that neither banger nor ber “is as satisfying as ‘fuck’ when you’ve stubbed your toe”.
Not just satisfying, and inevitable, but helpful, no? True. While, of course, Pass notes doesn’t encourage cussing, Maclean says science has shown that shouting profanities can reduce pain.
It’s not the first makey-uppy bad language, is it? No, fiction has been doing it for ages. Think “karabast” in Star Wars Rebels.
“Karabast! I can’t find my blaster holster!” That. And “jagweed” in the US TV comedy 30 Rock.
“Listen up, jagweeds!” See also “mudblood” in Harry Potter, etc, etc.
None of which have really caught on, except among dedicated fan groups. Neither, clearly, will ber or banger.
Perhaps it’s reassuring that the best mathematics can come up with sounds so rubbish. When AI has taken all our jobs, at least we can sit around doing nothing except swearing – properly and excellently – at each other. To lessen the pain.
Do say: “Screw that, I’m sticking with wazzock.”
Don’t say: “Ber!”
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The ultimate swearword: an algorithm has come up with the 'best' expletive ever. It is certainly a surprise - The Guardian
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