If I told you to pretend “apricot” meant “asshole”, it might work a little
Maybe the first of those experiments could have persisted for a while with a plan like that, but otherwise it’s an untested hypothesis that I don’t have particular reason to believe. Part of the conditioning around swear words comes from how you’ve seen other people react to them. If you put the test subject in a big group that was prompted to respond to “apricot” as if the person had said “asshole” and conditioned the person like that for a long while, that might work better than the subject just pretending. But it might be hard to do for long enough.
No I still don’t believe that. It would work if you got everyone I met as a kid (such as teachers, schoolmates, and strangers) to also act as if the two words were switched, since then I’m basically growing up speaking a nonstandard English dialect with different swear words. It’s unclear that you could do it single handedly.
Maybe the first of those experiments could have persisted for a while with a plan like that, but otherwise it’s an untested hypothesis that I don’t have particular reason to believe. Part of the conditioning around swear words comes from how you’ve seen other people react to them. If you put the test subject in a big group that was prompted to respond to “apricot” as if the person had said “asshole” and conditioned the person like that for a long while, that might work better than the subject just pretending. But it might be hard to do for long enough.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minced_oath
Man, if you’d have read one more sent you wouldn’t have needed to type a paragraph…
No I still don’t believe that. It would work if you got everyone I met as a kid (such as teachers, schoolmates, and strangers) to also act as if the two words were switched, since then I’m basically growing up speaking a nonstandard English dialect with different swear words. It’s unclear that you could do it single handedly.