The situation when I swear, can be of joy, can be of utter surprise can be of deepest
regret, or pain or anger. It seems to be the most expressive means to show your emotion
This is CrowdScience from the BBC World Service. I’m Anand Jagatia, and this edition is all
about the stuff you can’t normally put on the radio: bad language..
It’ll come out automatically without me even thinking about it, and I’ll feel better
immediately.
I’m a nice person, I don’t curse a lot!
CrowdScience is the show that runs off your curiosity.
And it turns out that swearing is something that a lot of you are interested
in!
A few weeks back, we mentioned we were making a show all about swearing, and since then
our inbox has been flooded with your stories - and quite a bit of profanity.
I used to play sports. And definitely, I think a lot of swearing used to come out there.
And I wouldn't always swear as other players because you can, you know, get sent off for that
so…!
I don't swear a lot. I think if you use it a lot, it kind of loses strength. You want
to save it for when it's really useful.
Thanks to everyone who got in touch - we’ll be hearing more from you throughout the show.
But first, let’s hear from the listener who started this off with his question - Gadi
Shalom, from the UK.
I want to know why it feels so good to use bad language.
So Gadi your question, can you sort of put that feeling into words,
Yeah, so it is rare. But in a stressful situation, or when something happens, that is unexpected,
it seems to be like a reflex to swear. And it sort of feels good in a way! It's also
the feeling after, so after you've stubbed your toe, for example, and you've used some
bad language, it sort of diffuses the situation a little bit. But how and why? And that's
what got me thinking…
Gadi says he doesn’t swear much himself, and of course there are people - maybe you’re
one of them - who never swear - even if you’ve been cut up in traffic,
locked out of the house or shut your fingers in the door.
But many of us will relate to what Gadi’s talking about - that sudden sense of release
when uttering bad language, the feeling that certain words are charged with an extra layer
of energy...
So how and why do these words work? To help us figure it out, we turned to Dr. Emma Byrne,
an expert on expletives who’s written a whole book about them, [called Swearing Is
Good For You.]
First things first - what is swearing?
Swearing is very, very tricky to pin down. We decide what swearing is by consensus. And
a lot of that consensus is to do with what's taboo in that particular
culture. Some places are very offended by parts of the body, some by animal names, some
by illnesses, some by certain bodily functions and not others. So what I ended up landing
on was that swearing is something that is by its nature taboo, in order to have that
emotional impact, you've got to be playing with a taboo. And
it's the kind of language that you would consider not using in certain circumstances, for example,
in a job interview or meeting your partner's parents for the first time. And it is the
kind of language that we use either in shock, amazement, elation, to be funny, to be offensive,
but as it's a cultural phenomenon, it is very, very hard to pin down an exact definition
of what swearing might be.
Right, okay. So it's emotive, it's generally something taboo.
And something which we've immediately run into, obviously, in
this programme is that we it's quite tricky to talk about swearing, without actually swearing.
I mean, we can just bleep them. If I say ****, that's now been bleeped. No one knows what that word
was. Or maybe we can just say like the F word, which is an English word lots of people be
familiar with, or maybe we could agree on some substitutes, like flip and sugar...
Yeah, I mean, the problem with using completely arbitrary substitutes is that they don't have
the emotive impact of a real swear word. So they're okay is sort of code to let people
know what it is we're talking about, but it is very hard to know how to use swearing in
broadcast is because you know, it's going to have an emotional impact, you just not
entirely certain what that emotional impact will be, particularly on a service like the
World Service where you're speaking across so many cultures, that the the opportunity
to give inadvertent offence is so great.
And maybe somebody who can help us navigate these tricky boundaries is our producer,
Cathy, so you're on the call Cathy, what are we allowed to say what we're not allowed
to say?
Yeah, I have got the BBC guidelines in front of me. And they're very detailed.
But they start off by saying that different words cause different degrees of offence in
different communities, as well as in different parts of the world. So like Emma said, we've
got listeners in all parts of the world. So we don't want to alienate anyone. But saying
that, judging by our inbox, the CrowdScience inbox, it's something a lot of our listeners
want to know about and are very interested in. It is gonna depend on the
context each time, so just do your best to not offend anyone.
Okay, so we can use we can talk about bad language, but we can't take the **** basically.
Watch it. Anand you *******
STOP IT
Now we've got that out of our systems. And I mean, there are clearly special social rules
and BBC guidelines. But Emma, what happens in our own heads when we use them? I mean,
do we process them differently in the brain?
Yeah, I mean, this is one of the most interesting things that I came across,
particularly at people who’ve had something called a hemispherectomy
where you remove one hemisphere of the brain. If damage to a single hemisphere is so extensive
it’s sometimes easier to just remove that entire hemisphere and you can live with one a single hemisphere of the brain.
Speech tends to be very strongly lateralized to one side of the brain or the other.
However, when you take somebody's left hemisphere, or somebody's left hemisphere is very
badly damaged to stroke, and they lose the majority of their language, what you tend
to find is that they will still be able to swear. And it seems we lay down very strong
emotional connections to certain types of language and that that is stored separately
from the rest of our language, you can remove the entire of a left hemisphere, and completely
negate somebody's ability to use language in a way that is sort of deliberative and
planned like I'm doing now. But they can still spontaneously swear. Swearing is so profoundly
connected with emotions, that the muscular movements required to utter swear words are
stored in multiple places. So we have backups for when we need them.
Wow. Okay, so I guess that speaks to kind of how deeply embedded
swear words are in our in our brains. And what listener Gadi is really interested
in is specifically about how swearing provides this almost magical, physical effect
these words that can actually make you feel better when you're in pain where
if you stub your toe. And so to that end, I've got a bucket of ice here, which Cathy
asked me to procure, foolishly, I perhaps thought this would be for something fun, like
maybe, maybe champagne. But I think that was hopelessly optimistic. So I've got the ice
in front of me here, what what are we doing this Emma?
So this is a reproduction of one of my favourite experiments. In fact, the one that got me
into the whole subject of swearing.
So what we're going to do is see whether or not a swear word allows you to keep your hand in
that ice cold water for longer than a neutral word. So we’re going to contrast the word
soft and the world BLEEP. Sorry Cathy busy on the beep key.
So you're going to pop your hand in ice cold water and start the timer at same time. And
when you feel like you need a little help, you can use the word BLEEP.
Okay. 123 go. Hoo! Not warm.
No.
Yeah, I can it's actually quite painful..
There’s not much here that we’re allowed to broadcast, so while I’m freezing my hand in ice cold water
let’s go to the person who came up with this experiment.
Hi, I'm Dr. Richard Stephens, a senior lecturer in psychology at Keele University. And I run the Swear Lab at the University.
The Swear Lab that's quite cool. So I mean, you're the perfect person to talk to.
What made you interested in the impact of swearing?
This relates to just personal experience, doing DIY, having accidents, hitting myself
with a hammer, swearing, thinking, why would I do that. And then when my daughter was born,
there was a lot of swearing during the labour. And the medical staff said, this is a completely
normal part of giving birth. So that kind of brought the idea of swearing and pain together
in my mind, And I thought, I wonder if there's any point to swearing when you're in pain,
I wonder if it helps at all?
Before Richard carried out his studies, one theory doing the rounds was that swearing
made pain worse. Bad language, the thinking went, was a form of catastrophizing - it put
you in a frame of mind where you imagine the worst possible outcome. Like stubbing your
toe and thinking you’d have to get your whole leg amputated.
But catastrophizing would actually make things feel more painful, and that didn’t chime with
Richard’s gut feeling about things. So he decided to investigate with the ice water test I just
demonstrated with Emma, called the cold pressor test. Though - not initially on himself.
For the first few years, I'd never actually done the cold pressor
Classic experimental psychologist! Being mean to people not doing experiments on themselves
I sort of thought I'd be quite good at it, I was terrible at it, I felt the pain really
quickly! And what we found across all our studies, it's replicated really well,
it’s always worked. We always see an advantage - more time spent in the ice water for swearing
versus neutral word.
Now before Richard explains why swearing might help people cope with pain, I want to bring
in a couple of our listeners who’ve got some first hand experience in this area. First
up, Colin.
I don't usually swear. But a few years ago, I had to be rescued from a mountain after
an accident. I’d badly dislocated my shoulder. And I had to be put on a sled to come down
the mountain. Every single bump was agony. And all I could do was mouth expletives all
the way down the mountain. No other words seem to do.
Medics are probably used to their patients swearing at them - whether that’s up a mountain
or in a hospital, like listener Rebecca, a radiographer and swearing enthusiast.
If somebody comes into my X ray room, and they are in a lot of pain, a lot of people
will jump straight to swearing at me, which I encourage. Or if people seem to be feeling that it’s impolite I will say no, no, no, it's okay. You swear away
it helps with the pain. I read it in a magazine once. People seem to really go for it. And
it's a bit of relief. It gives them a bit of a chuckle as well.
The pain-relieving power of swearing in full force there - but why exactly might it help Colin
and his dislocated shoulder or Rebecca’s X-ray patients? Another finding from Richard
Stephens’ ice bucket test might give us a clue.
We usually see an increase in heart rate in the swearing condition as well compared with
the neutral word. And that seems to indicate some kind of emotional response to the swearing
and we know that swearing is kind of emotional language. So our kind of working hypothesis
has been that when people swear in pain, they're actually ramping up their stress levels, and
bringing into play a phenomenon called stress induced analgesia, which is part of the wider
fight or flight response.
It’s a bit like soldiers on the battlefield who don't notice their injuries because they’re
so flooded with adrenaline. Maybe the emotion of swearing helps you get into that pumped
up state, and that reduces the pain?
Well, further studies have suggested it’s more complicated than that.
We were interested, if swearing brings about fight or flight response, it should make you
stronger. So we ran a study, where we looked at swearing again, the same thing repeating
the swear word, compared with a neutral word. And we did show as we predicted that swearing
makes you stronger. However, there was no sign of the fight or flight response, so we
had the effects we predicted, but not by the mechanism we predicted. So that tells us there's
something else going on, and that's kind of where we are now, trying to pick up what that
mechanism might be.
And that means I get to swear for science again...
Put your hands underneath each thigh, right hand and your right thigh obviously left undone
to your left thigh. Yep. Push down, straighten up your arms
so that you're lifting your feet off the floor and you're behind off the seat.
Okay, so you're supporting all of your body weight on your hands on the chair.
okay.
So while you're doing this task, I would like you to repeat the word BEEP at normal speech
volume and same pace once every two seconds. So when you're ready, go.
OK. My arms are shaking quite a lot.
You’ll just have to imagine what popular English expletive I’m using,
it features high up on the BBC’s offensive
word list.
But it did seem to help - I could almost feel a little blip of release when I swore.
People in the next room are going to be wondering what kind of interview I'm doing.
This went on for quite a long time….
Do you work out Anand? As well as swearing while weightlifting, Richard
set me some other tasks, involving blowing up virtual balloons. Because, if it’s not
the fight or flight response that’s making people stronger, he wants to know what else
is at work.
I think it's entirely possible that there is more than one mechanism by which swearing
can lead to effects, what we're sort of thinking is that may be swearing
just makes you kind of go for it a little bit more and become a little bit less inhibited.
And there are some parallels with this. So for example, people doing karate, when they
kind of make a move, they make that sound the kayap, studies have compared the amount
of strength people can produce with and without the sound, and they can produce more strength
with the sound.
They were not able to say what the mechanism was but again, they they were talking about something
like disinhibition, going for it.
Thanks to Dr Richard Stephens - and if you want to help him and his team test this new hypothesis
then if English is your first language you
can get involved and help CrowdScience live up to its name - go to swearlab.co.uk for more information on how to take part.
So, if swearing has this physical power to relieve pain and even make us stronger - the next
question is: since they’re just words, where do they draw this power from? Back to our
trusted profanity pundit, Dr Emma Byrne.
Yes, there were two contending theories as to why swearing is so satisfying.
And there is the the sound based theory, which is that there's something about the particular
letters and sounds phonemes that we use in swearing that are very satisfying the ff and
the shhh and then there is the taboo theory. And so when you have a look at swear words
throughout history, throughout the world, it turns out that there isn't really any phonological,
any sound based pattern that we can discern. Certainly the two most commonly used swear
words in the UK do have a f and sh. But that hasn't always been the case.
But when you look at taboos, there's definitely much more of a link with a society's taboos,
and the language that is used as swearing. I find it really interesting, for example,
that in European French, a lot of the swear words are to do with bodily functions and
bodily parts, whereas in Canadian French, they're still a lot more religious. They talk
about tabernacle, and the host, the communion host. And it's not that the words sound any
different, or that they're produced differently, or they feel different in the mouth. It's
just they don't have that emotional resonance. It's the same language, the same words, but
they're swear words in one culture and not in another.
Ok so I guess we can look at society, but also we can try and work out experimentally what's going on
and try to pick apart what’s going on in the words, and I know that you were involved in an experiment
with Richard Stephens, who we just heard from, where you tried to basically create new swear
words from scratch and see if those words still had power. So can you tell us a bit
about that?
Yeah, that was enormously fun. So I was involved in shortlisting from a whole range, I think
we had hundreds of submissions from members of the public that we went through. And the
two words that we decided that we'd like Richard to take back to the lab were fouch and twizpipe,
we decided on two because we had two different essentially hypotheses we wanted to test.
One was the its words that are short, that start with a fricative. So that's a fff sound
that allow you to expel some sort of feelings. So we thought that fouch was a nice portmanteau
or something that sounds like a swear word. And it's also the ouch sound. There was also
the “is it that swearing kind of makes us laugh, and we want something that's a little
bit irreverent?”. And so we played with the word twizpipe quite a lot. You kicked
him right in the twizpipe? No, not the twizpipe!
It is a good word, I think it's interesting, because when you say those words, fouch does
sound like it could be a rude word. So what did he find in the experiment, did fouchery
or twizpipery actually have an effect on pain tolerance?
I'm afraid not, no, because we don't have these two booths that are linked with those
words, they just don't play that role. Um, yeah, I mean, if we, if we went round banning
our children from saying fouch or twizpipe, if we told an entire generation that these
were incredibly taboo words, there is a chance that they would grow up to be able to use
those to have that effect, but only by making those words be
taboo somehow.
You'd have to you'd have to go to really great lengths. I mean, if we pretended that we had
a culture in which ears were really taboo, then I could insult you. I could call you
a massive earlobe. Yeah. And that would be really offensive.
You aural canal, you. Yeah, don't be such a cochlea.
I wanted to delve a bit more into that idea of different taboos in different languages.
Does swearing feel the same around the world? And you, our wonderful foul-mouthed listeners
stepped in to help us out again ...
Spanish, is a very creative language to swear in. Because when you hear somebody that's
really extremely angry, you get full sentences, with a subject and a verb and an object, and
full stories with their own narrative.
So in Maltese, I'd say like the most insulting thing that you could probably say to a person
would translate in English to sperm. Which is kind of strange because in English
you would not call someone that without having strange looks.
Russian is the best language to swear in. They are the most offensive of everything
I know. And it's
it's virtually impossible to imagine a Russian person who doesn't swear so he or she must
be a saint I believe.
There's an interesting swear in Mandarin Chinese mainly, it means doing something bad to your ancestors for 18 generations.
That's quite a specific number. And a lot actually, yeah, 18 generations.
Like you say I am going to do this to
your mother. Or I'm going to do this to your grandmother. Or I'm going to do it it's to ancestors up
to 18 generations. I say that to my dad, like where do I stand?
So although the content of swearing can be quite different across the world, from insulting
18 generations of someone’s family to calling them a sperm, swearing does seem to be a universal
part of human culture. And there are even reports of something like swearing in our
primate cousins. Here’s Dr Emma Byrne again.
There are some amazing studies with chimpanzees that involve essentially fostering chimps
bringing them into an extended version of a family home. And the partners who did most
of this work, Deborah and Roger Fouts in the United States, they only spoke around these
chimpanzees using sign language. And they taught these chimpanzees signs for all sorts
of things.
But the other thing they did because chimpanzees tend to communicate in the wild by throwing
their faeces is they potty trained these chimpanzees, they instilled a very strong, fecal taboo.
But once they’d done this, the chimpanzees started using the sign that they learned for
everything that was to do with bowel movements, which is usually transliterated in the researchers
dirty, in the same way that we in British English use our own four letter word for everything
to do with bowel movements, they would use it to express their frustration, they would
use it to remonstrate, they would call other chimpanzees
dirty monkey.
And Roger and Deborah Fouts write of walking through a lab and hearing these chimpanzees
smacking the backs of their hands on the underside of their chins. This is the sign for dirty,
so hard that their teeth would be clacking together. And instead of flinging poop at
each other, they were flinging this idea of poop at each other. And that, to me was probably
one of the most arresting parts of the research in the book was that realisation that as soon
as you have a taboo and the means to express it, then something like swearing can emerge.
To the point where these chimpanzees would actually make poop jokes as well. The height
of their wit, which was about the level of you know, my three year old, which sits
at the table sort of singing bum or poo or wee...Yeah, they shared the almost exact same
sense of humour.
Okay, so potentially this goes back
really far in our evolutionary past which is
just fascinating. The other thing that we've heard from, you mentioned
poop jokes between the chimps. We've also heard from listeners that and swearing isn't
just insults or when you're in pain, it's often used humorously and it's kind of quite
bonding when you swear with somebody else. So if we're thinking about why swearing feels
good, that's that's also going to be part of the picture, right?
That's right. And there's some great research that looks at the way in which swearing helps
build teams and particularly how effective teams are when you have people who feel comfortable
enough to participate in something that's sometimes called jocular abuse. And some of
it seems to be to do with the fact that when you swear, you take a social risk, you're
essentially saying, I trust that you trust me enough to know that what I'm saying is
meant, in a jocular way, I am essentially taking a risk with our relationship, not because
I don't value it, but because I do, because I want to show you that I think we are this
close.
The other thing is that it can in those contexts, it can also be quite funny and playful. And
it's actually quite a rich part of language.
That's right. Yeah. I loved the comment from your Spanish listener who was talking
about the fact that a sentence can just grow and grow and grow with multiple parts of swearing.
That idea of inventively using swearing to express all kinds of different things. Even
elation, like football fans on Twitter saying that phenomenally excellent goal that was.
That is not the word they use. But yeah, we use swear words, to celebrate as well as to
denigrate.
The fact that swearing is such a nuanced part of language, which can be used in so many
contexts, means that learning to swear in a new language can actually be very difficult
to get right. This got
us thinking - what’s it like to swear in a second or third language? Does it still
feel as good as swearing in your native tongue? We wanted to hear more of your experiences…
My name is Lais, I am originally from Brazil. But I've been living in Germany for the last
10 years.
I've always been very careful with slang or with swear words, in German or in other languages,
because I always feel like it might sound very ridiculous if I use it somehow, it just
won't feel natural for the person who's hearing it.
I'm Jane. I'm originally from the UK, but I've also lived 20 years in Malta, and I'm currently in Berlin, Germany, and I've been here for nearly 10 years. If I swear especially
like if it's like a sort of a reaction, then that will definitely be in English. But sometimes,
like, it's fun to try out things in other languages as well just to explore
a bit the ranges of swearing that you can get away with in other languages
as well.
My name is Jessica Hirani. And I live in Conway in North Wales, I speak in Gujarati that's
my mother tongue. On a daily basis, I speak in English, I tend to swear in Gujarati. Because
I live in a predominantly non Asian area, I know that no one is going to understand
what I'm saying.
My name is Jacqueline, my native languages are Mandarin and Cantonese and I've been going to Australia since 2018.
When I was in Australia, I was working in a shearing shed, and they do
swear a lot. I asked them. I was like, Yeah, can you really say anything without swearing?
And they say that BLEEP no. So I feel more comfortable swearing then.
And then when I came out and met other people they were like, oh, Jackie,
that's really rude.
You can't say that. You're not shearing sheep anymore.
Yeah, exactly. That's what they say.
So there can be pitfalls to swearing in a non-native language, but it might also be
fun to play with. However, nothing quite compares to the giddy emotional power of swearing in
your native tongue.
If you're swearing your first language, or you hear swear words in your first language,
you react physiologically, you start sweating, your heart beats faster.
This is Jean Marc Dewaele, professor of Applied Linguistics and Multilingualism at Birkbeck
University of London. He’s Belgian, but has discovered a lot about English swearing
since moving in London over 20 years ago - and he researches the emotional impact of swearing
in different languages.
If you hear similar words, in a language you know, but not your first language. It doesn't
have the same effect. These words seem detached, disembodied That is a widely observed phenomenon
in multilingualism studies. I think in the first language, the emotional connotations
are richer, deeper, you remember a word and you remember
how your mum reacted when you used that word, Whereas, a foreign language swear
word that you acquired in a classroom will never stir you in the way that your first
language swear words, stir you.
And… as well as the fact these words feel different if they’re not in your native
language, there are also all sorts of unwritten social rules that go with swearing - so is it quite
difficult to get it right in another language?
Absolutely. When you grow up learning those rules, it's not too hard in the sense that
you simply imitate what people around you are doing. However, if you are a foreign language
learner, then your knowledge of these rules is incomplete.
So it means that like myself, it took me many years before I discovered what the C word
actually meant. And I remember my colleague in the department, I asked him, I said, Malcolm,
you know, what's the worst swear word in English? And he said, Oh, that would be the C word.
Yeah. And I said, I have no idea what that is. And so I couldn't possibly tell you because,
you know, this is not a word that we utter, but I can spell it out. And then I said the
word and he jumped up, astonished. And I thought, Wow, so that's a pretty powerful word that
and he said Oh, yes, I strongly recommend you avoid it!
Wise words!
And just thinking back about the interview with Jacqueline, on the Australians who were
swearing so much the sheep shearers. I mean, that is a typical example of specific norms
within a small community that might differ completely from the norms outside that little
community. So she quickly discovered that what was perfectly acceptable in one context
was absolutely unacceptable in another one, and that's why swearing is so difficult in fact.
Thanks, Jean Marc Dewaele, and Emma, the takeaway from that, which might sound facetious is
that some people say swearing isn't big or clever, but actually it does. It's quite sophisticated.
If you're learning a new language, especially.
it is, I mean, learning what kinds of swearing is socially appropriate. And being able to
navigate different registers of language, understanding how people
might feel, we devote so much brain space to it for a start. It's very, very important
for the functioning of society.
I suppose one thing we haven't talked about much as the dark side of this, which is that,
you know, obviously swearing can be incredibly inappropriate and vulgar and offensive, and
it can hurt people.
It can. And quite often, if someone is trying to be hurtful, they might reach for
swearing. But they're likely to go for things that are incredibly personal. it's not the
words themselves that are necessarily offensive. It's what you think they're going to do to
the person who hears them. And that idea of trying to limit people, negate them, something
called othering them saying, you know, you're not like us, or to put someone down to be
hurtful. We don't Need swear words to do that. And quite often we don't use swear words to
do that.
So with the caveat aside that, you know, words do have power, and they can offend, and they
can be used in in really horrible ways. I suppose, as long as you're not hurting somebody
else, what I would take away from this episode is that swearing does feel good. And that
it's something that we maybe should cherish
rather than writing it off, as we often do to children, perhaps mistakenly, as just these
are words that you should never say.
Absolutely. I'd rather teach my kids to swear in frustration, elation, sympathy, joy, but
not be mean, than the other way around. My daughter actually saying once get me out of
this high chair is fine. But if I heard her call one of her friends something that wasn't
a swear word, but was designed to really hurt them, then then we'd have words.
I think those would be good rules just for
society at large. You know, you can swear but don't be mean. Yeah. Well, I think
that's a really great note to end on. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Emma.
It's been flipping brilliant having you here.
Thank you. You're, you're an absolutely fundamentally amazing chap to talk to.
And just like all the listeners you heard on this show, you too can get in touch with us if you have a question. Here's our
very polite listener Gadi, with details of how to do that as he ends the show.
That's all for this episode of CrowdScience from the BBC World Service. Today's question
was from me, Gadi in the UK, I hope you weren't offended. If you have any science questions
for the team, please send an email to crowdscience@bbc.co.uk Thanks for listening. Bye