The study of dirty-word descriptions extends our knowledge of semantic, comprehension, and contextual language processes. Two studies were conducted to examine how we interpret and react to dirty-word descriptions. Subjects were asked to judge how much they would like a fictitious person described with dirty and non-dirty adjective pairs. Liking was significantly influenced by (a) semantic interpretation (connotation v. denotation), (b) the intrinsicalness of the adjective to the person described (prenominal adjective order), and (c) the contextual relation between the speaker and the listener (friend v. enemy).
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Timothy Jay (1981) studied this question.
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