by Emma Byrne
The result also suggests a converse experiment to me: can we rate the severity of swear words by how much analgesic effect they have? Rather than asking people to say subjectively whether they think a swear word is mild, moderate, or severe, wire them up to heart rate monitors and have them stick their hands in ice water. Perhaps that’s something for the team at the Oxford English Dictionary to consider ahead of their next edition.
Social Pain Is Real Pain—and Swearing Helps There Too
The relationship between physical pain and emotional states is definitely a complicated one, made more so by the fact that we all experience something called social pain. Social pain, feelings of being rejected or excluded, is as real as physical pain. Experiments with acetaminophen10 and marijuana11 (not at the same time) show that identical analgesics can relieve both social and physical pain. It makes a lot of evolutionary sense. For most of human history, experiencing loss or rejection could have been as detrimental to your survival as appendicitis or a broken leg.
One of the most astounding experiments to demonstrate the equivalence between social and physical pain looks at the way two pains that are experienced in quick succession tend to interact. We know, from other studies, that two physical pains experienced in quick succession have an entirely unexpected effect on the way we perceive them. A mild pain makes us temporarily more sensitive to discomfort whereas severe pain numbs us and makes us more able to bear further trauma.12 There might be an excellent reason for this: if you’re bitten by a dog, the fight-or-flight instinct kicks in. We become highly vigilant to other pains either as extra motivation to get out or fight back, or as a way of avoiding further trauma in our fight or flight. In contrast, for the kind of pain where curling up in a defensive ball is the best course of action—a broken limb, for example—further pain tends to feel much less severe than it would otherwise. We can stand a further mauling, because fighting or fleeing are not an option.
If social pain is activating the same psychological or biological pathways as physical pain then moderate social pain should make further physical pain seem more intense whereas severe social pain should numb us to physical trauma. We now know that this is actually the case thanks to one of the most disturbing of all pain-tolerance studies.
Volunteers were randomized to one of two types of social pain.13 In the first group, people were asked to play an online game of throw and catch. They weren’t told that they were actually playing against computers, so when the ball was never thrown to them they felt left out and shunned. That was the mild version of social pain. Members of the other group were asked to fill in a questionnaire about their personality and preferences and were told that their answers would be assessed by a highly reliable software model that could predict the strength of their future relationships. However, the researchers completely ignored the answers and gave every volunteer in the “severe social pain” category the same profile:
You’re the type who will end up alone later in life. You may have friends and relationships now, but by your mid twenties most of these will have drifted away. You may even marry or have several marriages, but these are likely to be short-lived and not continue into your thirties . . . The odds are you’ll end up being alone more and more.
It’s not often that “and then we pinch them really hard” is the least upsetting part of one of these experiments. But when the volunteers were subjected to a number of carefully calibrated pinches afterward, those who missed out on the ball in the game of throw and catch found them much more painful than the people who were told that they were unappealing losers, destined for a life of loneliness and misery.
And, of course, if social pain is the same as physical pain we should find that swearing reduces its severity, too. And that’s exactly what Laura Lombardo and Dr. Michael Philipp of the University of Queensland, Australia, found. They asked volunteers to remember an experience of being excluded from a group or included in a group. They found that swearing after being made to recall an event where you felt hurt reduces the pain associated with the memory of that hurt.14 But swearing can also increase the likelihood of being excluded, especially if you’re a woman.
Swearing and Illness
Cancer is such a social taboo in some countries that the name itself is even a swear word.‡ It’s probably not surprising that people going through long-term illness have a tendency to swear. Pain, fear, and frustration are all good triggers for bad language and a little bit of swearing can help us bear up under the pressure.
Dr. Sarah Seymour-Smith at the University of Huddersfield studied the experiences of men who were suffering from testicular cancer. They found going to support groups to talk about feelings extremely difficult,15 but they did find swearing really cathartic. She includes a transcript from the video diary of “Cal,” who has just had an operation to have a testicle removed.16 He’s listening to “Always Look on the Bright Side” while he makes a video in private, which he says that he doesn’t intend to show anyone. He starts by talking about how “shit” the year has been, and says that it’s “really bollocks, er . . . bollock sorry!” Cal is definitely reluctant to go to a self-help group to talk about his feelings, anything where he might have to “stand up, you know, ‘my name’s Cal Jackson I’ve had testicular cancer’ and then burst into tears and all that sort of thing and blokes don’t like that sort of thing. I don’t want anybody to cry in front of me or anything like that.” But swearing on his video and, most likely, with his mates, is giving him an outlet to deal with his feelings.
“I think Cal is adopting a masculine image in his video diary as a way of making light of the issue,” says Dr. Seymour-Smith. “Humor is something that men do seem to do when they’re ill, probably as bravado. When I’ve studied testicular cancer support forums humor is evident there.” The men on these forums tend to use words like “womble” (which sounds like “one-ball”) or speak of being a member of the “flatbaggers club.” Dr. Seymour-Smith’s research suggests that talking in this taboo-breaking, jokey manner is “a way of reworking a positive identity from having both testicles removed.” A means of both dealing with the pain and reasserting his masculinity.
It’s far more socially acceptable for women to talk about their feelings, even to cry, but if they vent their emotions with swearing it doesn’t go well for them. In a lab, with a bucket of ice, swearing helps women as much as men, but in the real world, with long-term, life-changing pain, women lose out when they swear.
Professor Megan Robbins and her colleagues at the University of Arizona wanted to know whether women with breast cancer and other long-term conditions swore, and, if so, whether it did them any good. From everything that we know about pain and swearing you might expect that a good swear would help these women cope better with their illness but, in a finding that both surprises and depresses me, women who swore ended up more depressed and had less support from their friends than those who were less likely to let rip with the swear words.17
To carry out her study, Professor Robbins recruited a group of women volunteers who had recently been diagnosed with breast cancer. She gave them all voice-activated tape recorders that caught about 10 percent of their speech over a weekend. She analyzed that data and also followed up with these women to see how they were getting along sometime later. Sadly, she found that the women who swore more around their female friends tended to lose those friends over the course of their illness and to end up more depressed.
Comparing these women’s experience with the experiences of Cal and his friends reveals something quite depressing. Women, certainly women born before 1960, are still uncomfortable around swearing. “I think it’s a combination of age and gender,” says Dr. Robbins. “The women in my paper were in their late fifties. In that generation they weren’t socialized to swear quite like men do.” I ask her if she thinks this will change. As a frequent swearer herself, she hopes so: “I can certainly identify with the [people like Cal]—sometimes you swear with your in-group and it promotes bond
ing, but not so in my parents’ generation.”
It’s not that these women were being objectionable, swearing angrily at their friends and alienating them. “Because we saw this decrease in emotional support I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, they’re swearing at people.’ But we found that that almost never happened. It was also rare that they were swearing in the context of their illness.” Most of the swearing was “kind of casual. Like the patient who was working with her husband on a project and she said to him, ‘So how do we bust up that shit?’ It’s this harmless swearing that was happening but even still the women who swear the most tended to fare worst.” As we’ll see in chapter 6, some of society’s attitudes to women and swearing are still extremely reactionary. Big boys don’t cry and nice girls don’t swear, even in the twenty-first century.
As Dr. Robbins says:
If my generation were in this study down the line I hope it would be different. As somebody who swears—to be funny, or for bonding —I think it is unfortunate for these women who are in midlife and are, you know, women. It’s important that our friends know there are circumstances where swearing might help this person who’s coping with something really painful. If you hear swearing, don’t go away.
There’s no doubt that it can be hard to hear a torrent of swearing—after all, we’ve seen now how emotive swearing can be. But from what we know about swearing and pain, and from examples like Cal’s experience with losing a testicle to cancer, swearing is a really important part of dealing with the shitty consequences of pain and illness. If we drop out when our friends sound off, are we really being friendly at all?
_____________
* I managed twenty-two hours of labor with gas and air and no swearing. On this highly unscientific basis, I conclude that the secret to a manageable labor is a long, thin baby with a narrow head!
† I can only assume that Ms. Allsop was very popular among her classmates. Before the study, at least.
‡ “Kanker” in Dutch, for example.
* * 3 * * * *
Tourette’s Syndrome, or
Why This Chapter Shouldn’t Be in This Book
When I tell people that I’m writing a book about swearing, one of the first things they usually ask about is Tourette’s Syndrome (TS). My answer usually disappoints them: for all its colloquial associations with swearing, 75 percent of sufferers don’t experience compulsive bad language at all. The second part of my answer is usually even more unsatisfying: even in those patients who do swear, no one is entirely sure what causes TS. We can make certain inferences. For example, the fact that certain drugs alleviate tics suggests that the neurotransmitter dopamine is somehow involved, but we still aren’t entirely certain how. We also know, from family studies, that TS is a genetic condition, but we don’t yet know which genes are involved or why.
We also know that most TS sufferers are plagued with a host of other problems such as obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Not only does it make these people’s lives even more challenging, it also makes it hard to pin down the definition of where TS ends and some of these other illnesses begin.
For a start, while TS might be popularly associated with swearing, in reality it presents as a much more varied set of symptoms. According to Professor Timothy Jay, a psychologist at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts, fewer than a quarter of TS sufferers have problems with uncontrollable swearing.1 Even that rather imprecise number is up for debate. Depending on how you define coprolalia (copro, Greek for “shit” and lalia, Greek for “chatter”—talking shit has a medical name), then anywhere between 7 and 40 percent of TS patients suffer from the urge to use bad language.
One thing is clear, all TS sufferers are afflicted by “unvoluntary”* movements: it’s part of the definition of the illness. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, someone suffering from TS will:
•have two or more motor tics (for example, blinking or shrugging the shoulders) and at least one vocal tic (for example, humming, clearing the throat, or yelling out a word or phrase), although they might not always happen at the same time.
•have had tics for at least a year. The tics can occur many times a day (usually in bouts) nearly every day, or off and on.
•have tics that begin before he or she is eighteen years of age.
•have symptoms that are not due to taking medicine or other drugs or due to having another medical condition (for example, seizures, Huntington disease, or postviral encephalitis).2
These tics aren’t like the involuntary blinks or coughs that the rest of us experience. Instead they are movements that the person doesn’t want to make, and can even sometimes suppress, but that generally get harder to control when they are stressed or tired. Sufferers tend to experience bouts of urges, where a number of tics occur in clusters and the severity of these urges comes and goes. For most sufferers, the urges of TS tend to wear off, or at least diminish, sometime in late adolescence.3 While around six in every thousand school-age children suffer from TS, numbers drop to around one in two thousand for adults.4
For almost all patients, their tics tend to develop in a fairly stereotypical pattern. According to Dr. Christine Conelea, assistant professor of psychiatry and human behavior at Brown University, patients usually start to get the urge to make movements of the eyes, face, or head, beginning as blinks and sniffs. After a while, these motor tics start to spread down the body, becoming more complex as they go. For some children, what starts as a small shoulder spasm might develop into an elaborate arm movement over a period of months or years.
The same sort of thing happens with vocal tics, which tend to start as compulsive sniffs, throat-clearing, or simple noises but develop into whole words or phrases.5 But not all of these will result in swearing. In fact, while many people jokingly refer to any frequent swearing as “Tourette’s” there are other illnesses that are much more likely to result in bouts of bad language. We know that schizophrenia and some personality disorders are strongly linked with swearing, which is usually “propositional”—it’s planned to have a specific effect on the hearer—whereas TS sufferers have no such control over their vocal tics.
In the first chapter we also saw how some stroke patients with aphasia are able to swear, despite not being able to say much else. But there are some marked differences here, too. Stroke patients can learn to use swearing in a propositional way but their swearing vocabulary is limited to those few swear words that are committed to rote memory before the stroke. In contrast, TS sufferers can (and often do) learn new swear words or phrases that become part of their vocal tics over time.
The coprolalia in TS is different from these types of illness-related swearing, and can be described as “unpropositional.” The patient can’t control their outbursts—or at least not easily—but they aren’t provoked by pain or anger. In a distressing irony, for most TS patients, their swearing is provoked largely by how socially unacceptable it would be and, as with swearing for pain relief, the stronger the swear word, the greater the satisfaction. But the choice of “forbidden” words isn’t necessarily restricted to swearing. At least one patient suffered from the distressing urge to shout their ex-lover’s name in front of their current partner, causing extreme awkwardness all round.6
Coprolalia in TS seems almost to be designed to cause the sufferer maximum stress and embarrassment. The swear words and other inappropriate language that comes out during bouts of coprolalia tend to be louder and clearer than the rest of what that person is saying, which draws attention to the tic and increases their mortification. While some sufferers can suppress the impulse to use bad language, it tends to cause them a great deal of anxiety. Remember the immense irritation of trying not to sneeze or scratch an itch. Now imagine that giving in to the sneeze or the scratch could get you anything from a dirty look to being arrested. Some TS sufferers try using “minced oaths” like “sugar” for shit or “fudge” for fuck. But, as with pain relief, these disgu
ised forms of swearing give much less relief, like rubbing that itch instead of scratching it.
Frustratingly, it’s hard to study how coprolalia develops because we don’t know exactly which swear words or other inappropriate outbursts plague TS sufferers. Professor Jay has made an extensive survey of the research into TS and he laments that so many researchers in this field are exasperatingly coy about the exact language that TS patients use. “Many authors who study Tourette’s syndrome unaccountably don’t give the specific swear words that are used by the coprolaliac patients. Some refer only to ‘uncontrollable strings of obscenities,’ or ‘a number of four letter words.’” However, in the data that he has personally managed to collect, the top five swear words in coprolalia among TS sufferers who speak English are, in descending order: “fuck,” “shit,” “cunt,” “motherfucker,” and “prick.”
Like all swearing, the use of bad language in TS is extremely culturally specific. According to Professor Jay, in Japanese culture, rather than swearing, TS sufferers are more likely to feel compelled to hurl insults such as “lecherous,” “stupid,” or “ugly.” In other languages patients tend to use commands like “shut up” (kaeft) in Danish, or “shut up, stupid” (taci, cretinaccio) in Italian; while in German, TS patients tend to use vivid, non-swearing taboos like “rotten bones” (verfaulte Knopfen).
The embarrassing outbursts experienced by TS sufferers aren’t confined to swearing, insults, or ex-lovers’ names. Those urges also include coprographia (the urge to write swear words) and copropraxis, which usually consists of rubbing or touching your genitals in public. Copropraxis is that set of gestures that is rude but doesn’t actually mean anything (other than the risk of being punched or maced). In contrast, when sign language users get the urge to swear in sign language, that counts as coprolalia. For example, one twenty-three-year-old woman learned sign language at seventeen, around the same time that she developed verbal and motor tics. She would find herself signing “fuck” and “shit” while making high-pitched “fu” and “sh” sounds.7 But that kind of linguistic tic counts as an entirely different symptom from the desire to flip someone the bird or make the “wanker” gesture.
