Damn right, that cursing can work
BRITAIN: Not for General George S Patton the soaring rhetoric of a St Crispin’s Day speech. Addressing the troops before D-Day, he first promised to ‘‘shoot that paperhanging son-of-a-bitch Hitler’’, and then pledged: ‘‘We’re going to murder those lousy Hun cocksuckers by the bushel-f***ing-basket.’’
Patton had the right idea. Fine words might inspire but swear words, it turns out, literally give you strength.
Psychologists have measured people’s grip strength and exercise bike performance and found they did better if they were allowed to curse the researchers liberally while doing it. The study, presented at the annual conference of the British Psychological Society, follows on from another by the same scientists that established swearing can provide relief from pain.
Richard Stephens, from Keele University, began the research because he wanted to investigate the persistence and power of swearing in human language.
‘‘Swear words are powerful words,’’ he said. ‘‘There are strong links between swearing and emotional arousal.’’
He wanted to see how deep these links went, and whether they went beyond emotions. His research into pain involved people holding their hand in iced water until they could bear it no longer, while either repeating a swear word of their choice or repeating another neutral word. That experiment showed those who were swearing lasted longer, but also that their heart rate rose.
‘‘This suggested the mechanism might be to do with the fight or flight response,’’ said Stephens.
If that was the case then people might also be stronger when they swear – in response to all the extra hormones preparing them for conflict. So along with colleagues in the United States he investigated how fast people could cycle and how strongly they could grip. Despite both tasks testing very different forms of strength, in both cases those who swore did better.
Surprisingly though, this time there was no sign they were experiencing a fight or flight response after all. What was going on?
One explanation is that swearing
"Maybe by swearing we throw off our shackles and those everyday constraints and just go for it a bit more."
lessens pain through another mechanism entirely, and that the link between pain and strength is more direct: when people feel less pain they are able to grip harder and cycle faster. It is also possible that the word itself provides the power directly.
‘‘The interesting thing about swearing is it’s not the semantics of the word that matters. There are other ways to say the meanings that swear words convey. It’s the fact it’s taboo, we know it’s taboo, but we are saying it anyway,’’ Stephens said.
‘‘Maybe by swearing we throw off our shackles and those everyday constraints and just go for it a bit more.’’ – The Times