Swearing Is Good for You

by Emma Byrne

  Dr. Susan Hughes’s study of lower-working-class women in the north of England from the mid-1990s found that women rated “slag” and “slut” as far worse insults than “bitch,” “cow” or even “cunt”—despite several decades of feminism, the surest way to insult a woman is still to imply that she is sleeping around.22

  Why do we give women a hard time for having too much sex, and castigate men for having too little—or too little with women, at least? Professor Berger suggests that these swear words are so effective because they question the “honor and reputation” of the person on the receiving end. The different terms used to insult men and women reflect the age-old double standard about sex: male reputations are built on sexual prowess and women are still meant to be “good girls.” It’s power and purity raising its head again.

  Swearing at women focuses on sexual behavior. The one exception—“bitch”—denigrates any woman who isn’t “nice” enough. Swearing at men is much more varied. It includes insults based on parentage (“bastard”), intelligence (“shithead”), and parts of the body (“asshole,” “cunt,” “twat”). We also know that men are actually on the receiving end of more swearing than women.

  Professor Tony McEnery has spent many years studying the use of swearing in various databases of spoken and written language. He discovered that people are, in general, more likely to be abusive about their own sex, but while women were only slightly more likely to swear about a woman than they were about a man, men were significantly more likely to use swear words about men than women.‡ So, although women are responsible for nearly half the recorded swearing, they are on the receiving end of only just over a third of it.

  My colleagues and I found a similar pattern, albeit about a different subject, when we studied swearing among soccer fans on Twitter. Fans are overwhelmingly more likely to swear about their own team and rarely slate the opposition.23 In fact, the only player to be sworn about by the opposing team’s fans was Kevin Nolan, then captain of West Ham, who was sent off and received a three-match ban after a particularly nasty foul on a Liverpool player. It’s worth noting that Nolan was so roundly disliked at this point that even the West Ham fans couldn’t conceal their delight, with tweets like “Nolan’s last game for us? Let’s fucking hope so! #WHUFC” and “FUCKING HAPPY DAYS KEVIN NOLAN IS GOING TO BE BANNED FOR 3 GAMES!!!!! GET IN THERE HAHAHA #thereisagod #whufc.”

  Women still tend to use the “weaker” swear words more often than men. As swear words lose power, we tend to see women using them more and men less. We don’t know if this is because swear words adopted by women are seen as less powerful by men, and so used less by them, or because women become more willing to use these swear words after men have discarded them as weak. Professors Bailey and Timm did, however, discover that women will use “men’s” swear words, but men rarely use “women’s” swear words, which tend to be softer and more euphemistic. They might have been considered foul-mouthed in previous generations but it seems that as soon as a swear word falls out of the “strong” category, men cease using it. Of the twenty-nine uses of “darn,” twenty-six were by women. Men didn’t admit to using “Jeez,” “shoot” or “crud” at all in the study. In their choice of swearing, as well as in the kind of swearing they attract, men’s masculinity is a very vulnerable thing, it seems.

  The idea that women are the purer sex when it comes to bad language seems to be a notion held by men about women, rather than a reflection of the truth. In reality, there is a lot of overlap between women’s and men’s speech depending on age, class, and context. As Susan Hughes points out, the (male) experts on the Antiques Roadshow tend to use a lot of “womanly” words like “pretty,” “charming” or “delightful,” while the women at Ordsall community center would be much more likely to use speech that might make a construction worker blush.

  And it was a woman, after all, who paved the way for me to write this book without using a galaxy of asterisks. Wuthering Heights contains twenty-seven instances of “damn,” “damned,” or “damnable,” twelve “God”s used as interjections, and insults like “slattenly witch” and “fahl, flaysom divil.” In her preface to the book, Charlotte Brontë (writing under the pseudonym Currer Bell) first challenged the use of “niceties” like “b——d” and “d—n” in novels. She explained that there would be no punches pulled in pursuit of realism:

  Wuthering Heights must appear a rude and strange production . . . A large class of readers . . . will suffer greatly from the introduction into the pages of this work of words printed with all their letters, which it has become the custom to represent by the initial and final letter only—a blank line filling the interval. I may as well say at once that, for this circumstance, it is out of my power to apologise; deeming it, myself, a rational plan to write words at full length. The practice of hinting by single letters those expletives with which profane and violent persons are wont to garnish their discourse, strikes me as a proceeding which, however well meant, is weak and futile. I cannot tell what good it does—what feeling it spares—what horror it conceals.

  The negative attitudes we hold about women swearing are irrational and outdated and are, perhaps, finally starting to change. We should keep challenging those assumptions that insist that men must always be powerful and women must always be pure, and the way we use language has a profound impact on the way the sexes see each other.

  Karyn Stapleton puts it most eloquently: “Swearing, for men and women, differs so much depending on the context. When women swear, they’re expressing trust in other people. When you’re able to relax with someone and swear with them, that means you trust them.” Men do this too, but for women the message is particularly strong. “Swearing is still more circumscribed for women, it is a higher risk. But that’s changing slowly. The gender distinction is closing a bit, but not entirely. Not yet.”

  We should keep at it. Swearing is a powerful instrument, socially and emotionally. If women and men want to communicate as equals, we need to be equals in the ways in which we are allowed to express ourselves. Sod social censure. Let us allow men to cry and women to swear: we need both means of expression. I like this observation from British-American anthropologist Ashley Montagu, writing in the 1960s: “If women wept less they would swear more . . . Today instead of swooning or breaking into tears, she will often swear and then do whatever is indicated. It is, in our view, a great advance upon the old style.”24

  Too fucking right.

  _____________

  * John Dryden, playwright and poet, August 9, 1631–May 1, 1700.

  † “The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is ‘What does a woman want?’” From Sigmund Freud: Life and Work by Ernest Jones (Basic Books, 1953).

  ‡ Of 799 recorded episodes of women swearing, 407 were leveled at other women and 392 were aimed at men, while for men the difference is much greater: of 858 episodes of swearing, 702 were at or about other men and 156 at or about women.

  * * * * * * 7

  Schieße, Merde, Cachau:

  Swearing in Other Languages

  We learn early on in life that swearing is somehow special. Whether we notice an adult acting embarrassed after using a new word, or we get into trouble for saying particular things, we tend to learn sooner rather than later that some language is different. As children, the moment when we discover that some words have so much power is extremely exciting. Depending on the reaction of those around us we either internalize the taboos and resolve not to swear or we relish that power and resolve to use swear words as much as possible.

  But in childhood we’re still learning the social rules of language as well as its syntax and semantics. We learn the rules of use at the same time as we pick up the rules of grammar, without any formal instruction. What happens when we come to learn a second language? If we learn the rules of impolite behavior as small children, but learn the language of impolite beha
vior as an adolescent or an adult, can we ever truly understand swearing in a second language?

  As anyone who has ever learned another language at secondary school will remember, the most well-thumbed pages of any bilingual dictionary are the ones with the dirty words. Many an unmotivated scholar, incapable of retaining the rudiments of the dative case, will commit to memory the German words “Scheiß” and “Arschloch” with ease. Adolescents are fascinated by taboos, and taboo words are no exception.

  Adults who learn a second language might not make a beeline for the filthy words but exposure to popular culture while living abroad means that they will pick up taboo phrases whether they intend to or not. Studies of second-language learners show that adolescents are keen to learn bad language, young adults are keen to use it, and older adults pick it up—intentionally or otherwise—and can, with care, learn to use it appropriately.

  But the languages we learn in infancy are the ones that will always have the greatest emotional resonance. New parents often find themselves reverting to the language of their own childhood when they bring home their firstborn; the tender endearments that they heard as infants sound more natural to use with their own babies than ones they learned later. We internalize the links between language and emotion most readily in childhood, which is why swearing in our first language tends to evoke stronger feelings than second-language swearing even for very fluent speakers.

  How late can someone learn a second language and still have it mean the same—emotionally as well as intellectually—as their mother tongue? We know that people describe films, for example, in far more detached, factual ways when using their second language than they do when using their first.1 Because of the emotional power of swearing, studying its effect on second-language speakers is a great way to understand how and when the links between language and emotion are formed. These studies show that our personalities continue to evolve until late in life; languages we learn as adults, particularly ones that are learned while living in another country, have their own emotional resonance and can even unlock an entirely different personality.

  Stepmother Tongues and the Strength of Language

  Professor Jean-Marc Dewaele of Birkbeck, University of London, has made extensive studies of bad language and its emotional effects on the polyglot. He himself is intimidatingly multilingual, and he tells a story about the time he used a newly acquired swear word in his fourth language, Spanish.

  “‘When in Rome, do as the Romans’ does not necessarily apply to swearing,” he said. “I personally learned this lesson when using a taboo word in Spanish . . . after consumption of many tapas and red wine in one of Salamanca’s bars. Although the exclamation ‘joder’ (‘fuck’) had been uttered several times during the evening, my use of it was greeted by a stunned silence.”2

  That moment prompted Professor Dewaele’s interest in swearing and emotion among people who speak multiple languages; a subject that he has spent over a decade researching. His findings show that how we learn a language, where we learn it, and even the way we were raised, can have profound effects on the way we swear. To try to get to the bottom of some of these effects, Dewaele asked over 1,000 multilinguals some questions about language and emotion. Using an online questionnaire he managed to find some remarkably gifted linguists: 144 bilinguals, 269 trilinguals, 289 quadrilinguals, and 337 pentalinguals—some of whom had been spoken to in two or three languages since birth.

  When asked what language they choose to swear in, the respondents chose their first language significantly more often than their second, and their second significantly more often than their third. The large majority who preferred to swear in their first language did so for various reasons. For some it was the fact that first-language swearing is just more automatic. “K,” a volunteer who speaks Finnish as a first language but also English, Swedish, and German, said, “If I would happen to hit myself with a hammer the words coming out of my mouth would definitely be in Finnish.” Force of habit makes Finnish K’s go-to language for spontaneous frustration swearing.

  But it’s not just habit that drives us to swear in our first language. Sometimes a little thought about the effect of our swearing can make us retreat to home turf. Many multilinguals say that they get a real feeling for the strength of their swearing only when using their native tongue. “Sandra”—who is a native German speaker but who has Italian as a second language—said, “If I am really angry only German words come into my mind; if I use Italian instead I may not use the right measure.” The concern over using a swear word that is too strong (or too weak) can be a powerful motivation to stick with a language whose cultural rules we have internalized through experience early on in life.

  As an adult, it’s harder to pick up the cultural and emotional resonance of swearing in a new language. That’s because we learn how to interpret tone, gaze, facial expressions, and other emotional cues early in childhood and after a while this repertoire of emotional tells becomes somewhat fixed. In the 1980s, psychologist Professor Ellen Rintell recorded native English speakers expressing pleasure, anger, depression, anxiety, guilt, or disgust. She then asked speakers for whom English is a second language to identify the emotion in the recording, and to rate it for intensity. She found that even the most fluent speakers struggled to do as well on the task as people for whom English was their first language. That’s not to say that we can’t learn a new set of emotional signals, even as adults, but all of that instinctive emotional processing doesn’t immediately translate to a second language.3

  Learning a second language during or after adolescence tends to change the way in which we process feelings in that language. The words we learn in childhood have a profound ability to provoke or express emotion, whereas words we learn later on have a tendency always to feel more distant, less intense. Anglo-Canadian author Nancy Huston moved to France when she was at university. In her biographical essay Nord perdu (Losing North) she writes (in French):

  In my case it is in French that I feel at ease in an intellectual conversation, in an interview, in a colloquium, in any linguistic situation that draws on concepts and categories learned in adulthood. On the other hand, if I want to be mad, let myself go, swear, sing, yell, be moved by the pure pleasure of speech, it is in English that I do it.

  For Ms. Houston, her first language is the language that is more free, spontaneous, and emotionally expressive. She says that it’s the language she chooses to swear in because the words come more readily to her. This is a common reaction, particularly when we let loose with interjection swearing: it’s not just our familiarity with words that makes swearing so powerful, it’s the fluency of our feelings.

  But it’s not just swearing that packs a greater emotional punch in your mother tongue. To test whether words learned in childhood set off stronger emotional reactions than words learned later in life, scientists at Boston and Istanbul Universities set out to measure the reactions of people who spoke both English and Turkish to the kind of telling-off they might have heard as children.4 While these reprimands weren’t in the form of swearing, they still have a lot in common with bad language: childhood reprimands tend to elicit shame and embarrassment on the part of the hearer; they are used to intensify an argument emotionally and, as we saw in chapter 1, childhood reprimands and swearing are the two categories of language that are most often retained, even after strokes that rob the sufferer of all other types of speech.

  In their study, Professors Catherine Harris, Ayşe Ayçiçeği, and Jean Berko Gleason wired thirty-two native Turkish speakers to galvanic skin-response monitors. Importantly, none of these volunteers had learned English before the age of twelve, so all their tellings-off in childhood had been heard in Turkish. The scientists had them hear or read words that were neutral (e.g., “door”), positive (e.g., “joy”), negative (e.g., “disease”), taboo (e.g., “asshole”), and childhood scolds (e.g., “Don’t do that!” and “Go to your room!”).

  The scientists found that the volunteers didn
’t react particularly strongly to the neutral, positive, or negative words, regardless of language. They reacted similarly strongly to the taboo words that they heard, regardless of whether they were in English or Turkish; their exposure to swearing in late adolescence had been enough to make English swearing an emotionally effective part of their language. However, the volunteers did respond very differently to the childhood reprimands depending on the language used. Even though the volunteers all understood the reprimands, their skin conductivity remained low—they showed no stress—when they heard the words in English. When they were exposed to the tellings-off in Turkish, and in particular when they heard rather than read them, their galvanic skin response went through the roof. Being told off in their native language was enough to make these volunteers (average age twenty-eight) break out in a cold sweat. This shows that understanding a word and feeling its emotional impact are two very different processes. We have to have experience of the emotional consequences of words if they are going to affect us.

  It might still be possible to acquire a language fluently after childhood, but there is evidence that languages acquired after puberty never reach the same level of emotional force as languages learned earlier. Linguist Steven Kellman coined the phrase “stepmother tongue” for a language that has been acquired fluently but after early childhood.5 What’s more, the developmental stage we are at when we learn a language, particularly if we learn it immersively, might determine exactly which emotions we can access in it.

  One of the first clues that emotions might be felt differently in a first and second language came from studies by the psychologist Dr. Susan Ervin-Tripp in the 1950s and 1960s. It’s a very human trait to tell ourselves stories, and part of what defines our personality are the types of stories we let ourselves believe. Dr. Ervin-Tripp wanted to see if people who spoke two languages fluently told different sorts of stories depending on the language they used, and the age at which they learned it. To do this she showed bilinguals various pictures and asked them to describe what was happening in them. The process was repeated six weeks apart, once in English and once in French.