Swearing III

Soooo, I know it's been a long time since my last post, but I had quite a busy time (moving back to Germany and sulking about it). But now I'm back with the promised next part about swearing (here part one and two). Again, a lot of the 'expert's opinion' stuff is taken from Fry's Planet Word. This post will be a bit more about the psychology of swearing and less about the linguistic side. Still, I hope you enjoy it! (again warning: strong language used)

Well, swearwords are universally used. But the question is, what makes a word offensive? Apparently (well, quite obviously) those words are all taken from the semantic field of bodily fluids / disfunctions, intimate actions or body parts. Steven Pinker, the famous linguist and cognitive scientist states the rather obvious when he says that the areas we get our swearwords from are often connected with negative feelings such as jealousy, disgust, fear or repulsion. According to him, sexuality and sex give way to some especially strong and offensive swearwords, because we tend to connect them with derogation (e.g. rape. incest, exploitation) rather than pleasure. However, he also points out that our Western society is getting more relaxed about swearwords related to sex, while swearing connected with race is still a big taboo. But that would go more into abuse, and that's not what I want to write about. Swearing is something entirely different.

Swearwords get most of their power from reaction. We are taught from a very young age that certain words are offensive and not socially acceptable, even though we might not understand why exactly when we're young. But the first time we say a swearword in front of our parents for example, we get a very strong emotional response (and usually not a very nice one), so subconsciously we link the offensive word to strong emotions. Let me relate a little personal story here: When I was very young (around 8 I think), my cousin who is 3 years older than me taught me the phrase 'fuck you' (well, in German of course, which is fick dich). I had no idea what it meant - and to be honest, I think neither did my cousin - but we had great fun experimenting with that phrase, finding different things people could fuck, at one point shouting 'fuck your bike' after a girl. As I said, I had no idea. Later that day my cousin and I were in my room, still having fun with that versatile phrase, when my mum came in. I got up, ran over to her and gleefully told her to go fuck herself.
She reacted wonderfully, though. She took me aside and calmly explained to me what the phrase meant and why I must not say it to people. I felt very grown-up and serious about it. My cousin got a right shitstorm later.

Why do we swear, though? What was the motivation behind the first swearing? Well, one answer is that we use swearing to channel aggression. We swear at people instead of hitting or biting them like animals do. So swearing actually gives us an evolutionary advantage, if you want to look at it that way. If we would hit or bite someone every time we're angry with them, we probably wouldn't go very far. But there's another, very interesting point: Swearing also seems to be linked to feeling pain. In his documentary, Stephen Fry and Brian Blessed took part in an experiment to prove exactly this: Each of them had to put one hand into a tank of ice cold water. The first time round they weren't allowed to swear at all, but the second time they were allowed to use a swearword. Amazingly, the swearing helped against the pain and Fry managed to keep his hand in nearly twice as long as before. The professor conducting the experiment (I forgot his name) explained it thusly: When we swear aloud, we shock ourselves and the released adrenalin numbs the pain. As Brian Blessed is well-known for swearing a lot, the effect didn't set in with him, because he was so used to swearing it lost its shocking effect for him.

I think it is not just the shock effect that makes swearwords so strong, it's also their sound. They are mostly rather short, and sound very harsh. 'Fuck' has that great 'ffff' sound and the hard consonant ending after a short vowel. 'Cunt' is even harsher, with a hard consonant at the beginning and at the end. That would explain why we find 'shit' more effective than 'poo' - the latter just sounds too nice with its long open vowel ending, it doesn't sound as disgusting. Plus, those words - especially fuck - are extremely versatile.

And at the end a small link between swearing and comedy, again: Adding a swearword into a sentence - called jab-line - makes the line funnier, because it surprises the audience. And you can create such wonderful sentences with them.