The art and science of swearing

When you hear someone casually drop the word “fuck,” what’s your reaction? Offended? Surprised? Confused?

In any case, I’m fairly certain hearing someone curse out of nowhere provokes some kind of immediate reaction. We have a taboo in this culture against profanity and when someone breaks that taboo, it gets your attention.

But why is that, exactly? Swearing is everywhere. We all do it. So why does it still have such power? Whatever the explanation, it goes beyond taboos and social norms. There’s something unique to swear words in our language.

Rebecca Roache is a senior lecturer in philosophy at Royal Holloway, University of London, and the author of a new book called For F*ck’s Sake: Why Swearing is Shocking, Rude, and Fun. This book is as amusing as it sounds, but it’s also genuinely fascinating in the way that works that tackle seemingly trivial subjects in serious ways can be.

Roache explores the exceptional flexibility of swear words and tries to explain why they’re able to communicate so much more than other words. She also asks how the same words, depending on how they’re used, can either offend people or build trust between them. 

So I invited Roache on The Gray Area to talk about all these puzzles and several others. As always, there’s much more in the full podcast, so listen and follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you find podcasts. New episodes drop every Monday.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Sean Illing

I guess we should start with the basics: What makes a swear word a swear word?

Rebecca Roache

They tend to be words that focus on taboo topics — sex, defecation, religion, things like that. And that’s quite universal. They are words that we tend to use to express emotion, and the small amount of philosophy that’s been done on swearing has mentioned that swear words are linked to expressing emotions. You can use a swear word to vent without necessarily trying to convey information the way you normally would in a sentence. The linguist Geoffrey Nunberg has said something like swearing is more like a scream than an utterance.

Sean Illing

I do like this distinction you make in the book between swearing and using swear words. When you’re swearing, you’re not really using words to describe something in the world, you’re communicating emotions. So when you stub your toe and scream, “Fuck,” that’s not a description of the event, it’s an expression of pain. It’s not about something in the way the phrase “I have a black truck” is about the black truck in my driveway. But sometimes swear words are just like any other word, i.e., “There’s bird shit on my truck.”

Anyway, to your broader point, it seems like context is everything. If some words have more power than others, it’s not because of anything inherent to the words themselves, it’s because we’ve given them that power and we keep reinforcing it in our daily interactions with each other, which I guess is how culture in general works.

Rebecca Roache

Yeah, I think that’s exactly right. One thing that really brings this out, and this is the first puzzle that got me into this topic, is thinking about how asterisks work. You see this all the time in news stories, for instance, where some of the letters in a swear word are obscured by asterisks. So you get f**k instead of “fuck” and there’s this puzzle about how that works. If the offensiveness of swearing is the word itself, then that shouldn’t work because we all know what word is being censored; it doesn’t hide the word in any kind of meaningful way. But I think the reason it works to reduce offensiveness is pretty clear.

I mentioned that, when swearing offends, it’s because we are signaling disrespect and when we censor swear words with asterisks or with bleeps when it comes to spoken swear words, that message of disrespect gets replaced by a competing message, which is something like, “I really need to convey this word but I’m also worried about how you are going to feel about it, so I’m obscuring some of it because I care about your feelings.” So, you get this message of consideration when you censor swear words like that and I think that story wouldn’t make sense unless the offensiveness of swear words was about the attitudes that we convey when we use them rather than that particular arrangement of letters or sounds.

Sean Illing

Why are curse words so uniquely flexible? Why can you do so much more with a word like “Fuck” than you can almost any other word in the language?

Rebecca Roache

There is a great linguistics paper by the late linguist James McCawley where he’s comparing two senses of the word fuck, which he calls “fuck one” and “fuck two.” Fuck one behaves just like a normal verb or whatever that word is. It’s up for grabs, is it a verb or is it something else? You can talk about two people fucking, for example, and then it behaves in the same way as a normal verb. But you can also use it in this more unusual way, which is “fuck two.” This is when we say “fuck you,” or “fuck off,” or we just pepper our conversation with swear words. Anthony Burgess has a great example of this where he talks about an army mechanic trying to fix a truck [who] says, “Fuck it, the fucking fucker is fucking fucked,” which makes complete sense, right? It works because we understand that swearing is not just about conveying information, asserting truths and opinions, it’s also about expressing emotion.

Sean Illing

So when is it okay to swear and when it is not okay to swear?

Rebecca Roache

There are a few dimensions here. One is that just chucking in a swear word into your fucking sentences as a form of fucking punctuation like I’m just doing here is relatively benign compared to looking somebody in the eye and saying “fuck you” or “you fucking idiot,” something like that where it’s directed at somebody, you’re weaponizing the word, you’re using it to intensify your negative attitude towards another person. 

I think that that directedness plays a part in aggravating the shock value of swearing. A lot depends on who we’re with and who we’re swearing in front of. Even people who are very liberal about swearing tend to want to tread carefully around children, especially other people’s children. If you’re just letting off steam and somebody’s got their kid with them, then itÆs like, “Oh, God, sorry.”

I think we also get a little cagey around power imbalances. Swearing at a police officer, for instance, or a teacher, the sort of thing where there’s one person who is free to do what they like and the other person who has to obey the rules or they get into trouble. But more generally speaking, there are some contexts that are more informal than others, not just with regard to the language we use, but things like how we dress, how we have to address each other, whether you can call people by their first names, for example. And I think it is helpful to view swearing as just part of this quite rich and complex network of norms. The more formal a situation is, the more risky it’s going to be to swear in that situation.

Sean Illing

A lot of this boils down to a social or emotional intelligence, or a basic capacity to read the room and know where you are, who you are, who you’re with and judge appropriately. If you can’t do that, then you’re probably going to run into trouble. 

The point about parenting and kids is interesting. My wife has had to check me a lot at home because she doesn’t want our son, who’s now five, hearing a bunch of curse words. And on the one hand, I get it but, on the other hand, why do we care? They’re just words and a lot of them, as we’ve demonstrated, are objectively great and the only reason for not wanting him to hear them isn’t that they‘re inherently bad, it’s that we don’t want him to make an ass of himself in polite society. And if we‘re being honest, we probably also worry about being judged by other people who hear our kid. But is that a good enough reason, really?

Rebecca Roache

We want our children to grow up knowing how to navigate the norms of the culture they’re in, but we do seem to take an incredibly precautionary approach here. If we were to take this same attitude to other norms, then we’d have our kids not say “mama” or “dada” and instead say “mother” or “father,” or we’d make them address everybody super formally just to make sure they don’t slip up in some social situation. We don’t really do that, though. 

I think part of it is probably that people judge breaches of etiquette that have to do with swearing more harshly, and judge the parents more harshly, than other breaches of etiquette. But it’s also weird that we have this attitude that we need to protect our kids from swearing but, at the same time, if you are to meet somebody who took that to the extreme and said, “I’m taking steps to ensure that my kid never learns to swear, they’re going to have a chaperone with them at all times to make sure older kids don’t teach them rude words,” this sort of thing, that would be really sinister. Even those of us who are concerned with our kids being polite, it’s not that we never want our kids to learn these words, maybe it’s that we just never want them to learn them from us. 

I think this explains the squeamishness we have about swearing in front of other people’s children. There’s also the idea that it takes a village to raise a child and we think, “Well, the parents might be really working hard to bring their kids up to be polite and yet here I am dropping F-bombs left, right, and center ,undoing all their good work.” So we just want to be supportive of other people’s efforts to raise their children.

Sean Illing

How do you walk that line between avoiding swear words so as not to offend people on the one hand, and using the words you want to use and simply not caring about offending people who are offended by the wrong things?

Rebecca Roache

If I think people are going to be offended by swearing, I don’t swear. Generally, we should avoid causing people to feel offended if there’s no good reason to do otherwise, and I think sometimes there is a good reason to do otherwise. So, for example, if you have a relative who is offended by mixed-race relationships, in that circumstance, it’s the relative’s problem and you have a good reason to just ignore what they find offensive. But I think with swearing, usually there’s nothing to gain by swearing in the company of people who are upset by it, and my view is that I’d rather be nice and have everybody happy.

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