We all swear, although some people swear they don’t. In one sense, swearing is benign, as in swearing on the Bible in court, or swearing by something you believe in, like a cure for warts. But we also swear in the more interesting and degenerate sense of using taboo words, of the sort we are urged not to utter in front of the kids.
And kids, too, are often reprimanded or punished for using taboo words. The wonder is how they learned them in the first place. Perhaps they are spread by older siblings or adult moles, or by parents who simply can’t refrain even when the kids are around. Children anyway seem to have an instinctive reaction to overly moralising parents or teachers, and irresistibly seize the opportunity to shock. Being told one must never say a particular word creates an irrepressible urge to say it, just as being told one must not think of a polkadotted elephant makes it very hard not to create precisely that image in the mind.
Surveys show that about two-thirds of swearing has to do with frustration, anger or surprise. As an aggressive weapon, swearing may serve as a substitute for physical assault. It is more common in those who rank low in social standing, in extroverts, in those with high levels of hostility, and less common in people who are agreeable, conscientious, religious or sexually anxious. Swearing can also be simply a kind of slang, often no more offensive than other cult words, such as ‘awesome’ or ‘cool’. It may also be a badge of allegiance, especially among groups of men.
Swearing in anger seems to depend on deep areas of the brain, including a structure known as the amygdala, which is involved in emotion. But it is perhaps also a question of whether higher-order structures, and especially the frontal lobes, can suppress the impulse to swear. People who have lost the normal use of speech due to cortical damage often retain the singular ability to utter profanities, and understandably may do so profusely. This suggests that swearing can be automatic and ungoverned. Another example comes from Tourette’s syndrome, an inherited neurological condition characterised by involuntary swearing and cursing (known as coprolalia), along with tics, head jerking, spitting and yelping. Victims of the disorder are embarrassed by their profanities, but have no control over them. Somehow, the balance between the well-mannered cortex and more primitive emotional centres in the brain has been disturbed.
In the recent movie The King’s Speech, George VI, a chronic stutterer, is depicted as frequently swearing. While this may have been simply a reaction to frustration, his swearing is relatively fluent, and the speech therapist is shown using swearing as a means of controlling the King’s stutter during his public speeches. I am told though that Peter Conradi, coauthor of the book on which the movie was based, swears this didn’t actually happen.
The earliest profanities are probably religious, prompted by strict teaching not to take the names of God or gods in vain. In an increasingly secular society, especially in the West, these taboos have largely lost their power to offend. Oaths like ‘Jesus’, ‘Christ’ or ‘God in heaven’ are now almost empty of shock value. In earlier times, religious profanities were often sanitised, as in ‘jeepers’, ‘cripes’ or ‘gosh’, but such terms have largely disappeared. In some cultures, though, religious terms have retained the power to shock. In French Quebec, the most effective profanities still relate to the Church and its liturgy, as in expletives such as ‘tabarnak’ (tabernacle) or ‘calice’ (chalice). ‘Merde’ is relatively mild.
Nevertheless, religious doctrine may also underlie the taboos against terms relating to defecation and sexual function, but these too have lost much of their impact, although British actor Stephen Fry, recently stuck in a lift, expressed his frustration by tweeting ‘Arse, poo and widdle’ to his many followers. Expressions like ‘bugger’, ‘shit’, ‘piss off’, ‘bollocks’ or ‘cock-up’ punctuate normal conversation without arousing much disapproval, except perhaps in some leafy avenues of genteel society. The F-word was once replaced by sanitised variants, such as ‘frigging’ or ‘fecking’, but is now part of regular discourse and is heard widely on television, often as a culinary accompaniment. There are wide cultural differences, of course, and even in the United States such profanities on public television are much less acceptable than in the United Kingdom or feckless Australasia. The C-word is still largely taboo, perhaps due to a persisting sexual taboo mixed with the residues of old-time chivalry—and maybe a pinch of feminism.
Change can be swift. In 1914 the phrase ‘Not bloody likely!’ caused an uproar when uttered on an English stage, in 1956 All Black Peter Jones shocked the nation by declaring himself ‘absolutely buggered’ on public radio, and in 1972 Germaine Greer was fined for saying ‘bullshit’ in a speech at the Auckland Town Hall. Domains of disapproval have now largely shifted from the religious and scatological to the political, probably because we are controlled by lawmakers rather than religious authorities. The strongest taboos are against racial terms. The N-word, for example, is rarely heard on television, but may surface in racist insults hurled by white supremacist skinheads. Other derogatory terms for cultural and indigenous minorities have largely disappeared from everyday discourse, and retain a genuine power to offend.
Taboo words will persist, if only because taboos themselves reflect necessary controls over human behaviour. Unchecked, we are an unruly species. But taboo words are also valuable in providing outlets for frustration that fall short of physical violence. A world without taboos, and taboo words, might be an altogether more dangerous place.