What to Make of Trump’s Uptick in Profanity (and the taboo words he still avoids), by @JohnHMcWhorter. John and I have both written about the linguistics (& in my case the psycholinguistics) of profanity, he in Nine Nasty Words, I in "The Seven Words You Can't Say on Television" in The Stuff of Thought. We'll present our analyses at the meeting of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression in Philadelphia next month. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/08/opinion/trump-profanity.html?smid=tw-share