WTF! Is swearing really good for you?

For F***’s Sake: Why Swearing Is Shocking, Rude And Fun

Rebecca Roache

OUP €24

In 1992 the late Queen Elizabeth II had a spectacularly bad year. Three of her children’s marriages imploded, and the ensuing scandals were played out over the media. A fire swept through Windsor Castle. She had to start paying income tax. This book begins by imagining what if, instead of using the phrase ‘annus horribilis’ to describe those 12 months, the queen had effed and blinded through her speech celebrating 40 years on the throne?

The author of For F***’s Sake, Rebecca Roache, points out such an event would have made headlines around the world. Yet, she asks, why should this be? If someone had used such words among friends down the pub, it wouldn’t have raised an eyebrow. As such, the book takes a philosophical approach to investigate what it is about swearing that leads us to react differently depending on who is using such words, and where and how they are doing so. The book aims to define what swearing is: a combination of offensiveness, expression of emotion and some linguistic anarchy (the f-word after all can be used as an imperative, adjective, noun, verb and adverb). Many people will be familiar with the idea that swearing tends to cluster around taboos – themes like religion, defecation, disease and sex – in other words, things that can harm us physically or spiritually.

Times do change over what we find the most offensive – hard to remember now what a stir Rhett Butler’s ‘Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn’ made decades ago. But what continues to make swearing really offensive is not what the words are, but the unspoken and usually unconscious inferences that speaker and listeners make about each other.

In one of the most fascinating chapters, Roache argues that the real offence now is caused by slurs rather than swears – for example, use of the n-word or other terms that target oppressed groups or minorities. Such slurs are not context-dependent like swearing is, although over time they can become inoffensive or can be successfully reappropriated as we’ve seen in the reclaiming of the word ‘queer’.

The book also examines the difficulties in deciding how offensive is offensive; why quoted swearing is less offensive than unquoted swearing, and the difference between asterisking out swear words and writing them out in full.

Roache, a senior lecturer in philosophy, certainly thinks the four-letter words can be positive. She highlights that swearing has been shown to foster social intimacy and according to psychology experiments, swearing can help withstand pain. When the researchers observed people submerge their hands in a bucket of very cold water for as long as they could bear it, those who swore were able to do so for longer.

For F***’s Sake is likely to be eagerly seized on by teenagers who want to challenge their parents (its pink and yellow cover is clearly aimed at them). A warning: the pages are stuffed full of the most offensive of swearwords… so not the best choice for your aged auntie.