I swear, cursing isn’t cool for teens

Grade 9 students in the Collective Voice program at Aden Bowman Collegiate share their lives and opinions through columns. Selected columns run on Mondays in The Saskatoon Starphoenix.

Weeks ago, I was performing at my high school band concert. I was supposed to enjoy this opportunity to be in the spotlight and take in my surroundings. However, it was ruined by a guy sitting in front of me who kept turning back and glaring at me every time I made a mistake.

I didn’t know how to express my feelings, but my anger and aggression were growing stronger. Finally, I couldn’t stand this feeling any longer, so I told one of my groupmates what happened.

“F**k that b***h,” he exclaimed.

I instantly felt much better, even though I never swear myself. These curses immediately released my emotions. I appreciated my group mate and those words, but I would like to put “swearing” into a box on a shelf, carefully choosing the situation when I should use it.

This brought up a question in my mind: Do other teens share my attitude about swearing?

A study done a decade ago by Timothy B. Jay, a psychology professor at the Massachusetts College in Liberal Arts, found that the average adolescent uttered about 80-90 swear words a day. That’s equal to 0.5 to 0.7 per cent of all the words that person speaks.

It seems that swearing is still on the rise among teens, who must be using expletives less carefully than in the past. It’s time to clean their mouths.

For some teens, not swearing is a way to save face.

“Many young people resort to swearing as a means to try to demonstrate their level of maturity,” says Dr. Francis Compton, a retired New York psychology professor.

Did he just speak to your heart? In fact, instead of being a way to “demonstrate their levels of maturity,” it’s really a way to demonstrate their levels of rudeness.

I once sat on a bus with a boy in the back seat who was about my age. Although we were strangers, after experiencing just five minutes with him, I hoped I would never see him again. Listening to him laughing with curses bursting from his mouth, all I felt about him, Mr. I-canswear-10-words-in-fiveseconds, was, “What a rude kid.”

Are you that “rude kid” who’s trying to be cool? Think about it: you might be acting ugly in others’ eyes.

Academically, if you’re over-swearing, you most likely have vocabulary problems. As you randomly drop casual expletives into your sentences as fillers or substitutes for words you’re too lazy to think of, this probably indicates a sign of your limited vocabulary. The words you replace with curses can be erased by the “storage cleaner” inside your brain.

Are you willing to trade the chance to give a speech at your graduation ceremony for satisfying yourself by swearing at any time you want? It’s your choice. Swearing has risks.

You might say, “How can you say swearing is useless? It’s not bad all the time.”

I remember how swearing helped me at my school concert. According to an article in TIME magazine, “Swearing deadens our pains and enlivens our emotional discourse.”

I strongly agree with this, but please don’t use this as an excuse to swear unnecessarily. Let what you are saying have more values. Make the “density of your literacy” greater, or let your expletives be worth something, like taking away your sadness.

We don’t need Mr. I-canswear-10-words-in-five-seconds. He’s not cool at all.