OMG! Is swearing still taboo?
If it were the 14th century, your name was Robert Clevecunt and you lived on Pissing Alley, you wouldn’t have hesitated to tell anyone your name or address. Such words were common enough to be unremarkable. It is easily offended 21st-century humans who would change our name by deed poll and lobby the council to change its road signs.
However, we may be becoming more relaxed about swearwords. It was reported last week that an employment judge, presiding over a case of unfair dismissal and discrimination, had decided that using the phrase “I don’t give a fuck” in a “tense” meeting was not necessarily significant. “The words allegedly used in our view are fairly commonplace and do not carry the shock value they might have done in another time,” said the judge.
Swearing is everywhere. It is on TV, on social media, in music. Young children use “WTF” and “OMG”. For many of us, workplace swearing seems so normal that it doesn’t even stand out any more (this was one theory, in that employment tribunal, as to why others in that meeting couldn’t remember if that particular swearword was used).
Parents report teenage children dropping the F- and C-words at home far more freely than they did at the same age. Dorothy, 65, whose daughter is 22, is shocked by the extent of her child’s swearing. “The F-word is quite common in her conversations. I was concerned she would use it in the wrong situation, but she moderates it around older people. With her friends, and with her brothers, it’s not a thing that bothers them – it’s acceptable.” She used to ask her to stop, but then gave up. Dorothy, who admits to using words such as “bloody”, never swore like that in front of her parents. “Good grief, no.”
A 2021 survey for the British Board of Film Classification found that threefifths of people said strong language was part of their daily lives, while onethird used such language more than they did five years ago. A 2020 report by Ofcom, the TV and radio regulator, found that swearing-related complaints had halved in five years; a year later, swearing accounted for only 1% of complaints, reflecting a “trend of increasingly relaxed attitudes about the use of swearwords” (this did not include slurs and discriminatory language).
This isn’t to say that anything goes – witness the broadcasters braced for impact whenever they need to mention the chancellor Jeremy Hunt, or Krishnan Guru-Murthy, who was taken off Channel 4 news for a week for being overheard, off-camera, using the C-word to describe Steve Baker, the Northern Ireland minister.
The shambolic few weeks of Liz Truss’s tenure as prime minister gave rise to some good swearing – not quite the magnificent creations from The Thick of It, but punchy nonetheless. “I am fucking furious and I don’t give a fuck any more,” the then deputy chief whip, Craig Whittaker, was reported to have said; a German news clip of apolitical correspondent recounting it verbatim went viral. During the economic turmoil that was unleashed, the Financial Times reported that allies of Truss described stories of tensions between her and the then chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, as “weapons-grade bollocks”.
Has swearing finally lost its power? Timothy Jay, a professor of psychology at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts and a swearing expert, sighs. “I’ve been answering that question for 50 years,” he says. “The offensiveness of any word is entirely dependent upon context. All of us carry the calculus for who, what, where and when. If I went in my dean’s office, I wouldn’t swear in there; a student wouldn’t swear in there, but they would swear in a dorm room or a bar.”
Richard Stephens, a senior lecturer in psychology at Keele University, agrees: “It is nuanced. I think what the judge was saying [in the tribunal ruling] was that, in the specific context of that conversation, the F-bomb wasn’t too offensive, but it’s all about context. Within that situation, it’s using swearing as a linguistic tool, as opposed to using it as an insult, or to offend or belittle people. We swear for many different reasons – to show emotion, to show we really mean it, sometimes for humour, to intensify what we’re saying. It is still very context-driven.” As Karyn Stapleton, a senior lecturer in communication at Ulster University, says, there have always been workplaces where swearing is acceptable and, in fact, “part of the culture”.
“We are exposed to more swearing than ever in history – all of the media that we consume,” says Jay. “However, that doesn’t mean that the average person swears more. Again, it depends on the context.” Language evolves and taboos weaken. Stephens found a copy of Vanity Fair from the early 20th century in which the word “damn” was disguised with dashes. “Then, that was an unprintable word, but now we’re comfortable with that. I think we are more comfortable with the four-letter words now than we have been.” What is driving that? “This is just my opinion, not a research-informed answer, but society is becoming more open and we’re freer with language like we’re freer with lots of other things.”
But it is not right to say swearing has entirely lost its power. “Even though we are in quite a comfortable place with swearing and four-letter words, you’re never quite sure how a swearword is going to land, so it’s still a risk to pop one into the conversation. It’s that unpredictability that helps to keep swearing current.”
In her book Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing, Melissa Mohr – she of Pissing Alley and many other brilliant examples – writes that, in the English middle ages, there was little taboo around bodily functions or sex, so some of the words we find most offensive now would not have been considered so. Things started to change in the 14th century. “Combined with the rise of Protestantism, and with it a strain of puritanism, this civilising process slowly transformed innocuous words into what modern observers would recognise as obscenities.”
Religious swearwords, or profanities, were considered most offensive. In the early 17th century, Mohr says, parliament passed an act making it illegal to use references to God mockingly, including shortened versions such as “zounds” (meaning God’s wounds). Then, over the next couple of centuries, there was a decline in the shock power of profanities, but a rise in obscenity – anything bodily – that the Victorians considered so horrific that the power in those words lives on today.
The big swearwords are relatively unchanged. “It’s all convention,” says Jay. “Institutions of power – school, church, your parents, the media, the sports team you’re on – set standards, then police these standards and punish people who break the rules. That’s why we’ve maintained all of these words over the years.” The church has lost its power, which is why most people consider it completely harmless to say or hear “oh my God”, whereas you would never have heard it, says Jay, in early radio broadcasts.
What worries Emma Byrne, the author of Swearing Is Good for You, is that as words such as “fuck” lose their impact, worse words might take their place. “Swearing tends to lose its power as it loses its taboo status,” she says. “The terms that remain taboo tend to be slurs, derogatory terms for other people, and I would much rather the bodily functions stayed as our outlet.”
A huge number of racist, homophobic, ableist and misogynistic terms are used regularly online – and the words change, says Byrne, to evade filters and hate speech laws. “The bodily functions unite us – there’s something about ‘fuck’ and ‘shit’ that we can relate to on one level or another. I’m very concerned as to what’s left if those words are no longer considered taboo. Slurs are used as weapons in a way that ‘fuck’ and ‘shit’ never were.”
More encouraging is the emergence of a nuanced approach in professional life, she says. “I think workplaces are becoming more aware of the distinction between swearing and abuse. You can be swearing with your colleagues about ‘how fucking stressful this quarter’s been’, or you can consistently undermine and belittle someone and never use a swearword at all. One of those I would say is OK and the other is not. Taking our focus off swearing and putting it more on bullying and abuse is something to be welcomed.”
Stephens’ research has shown that swearing has benefits – which in itself may make people more comfortable with it. In one study, he got participants to dip their hands into ice-cold water and repeat either a swearword or a neutral word, to see if swearing helped them cope with the pain. It did. “They’ll keep their hand in the water longer in the swearing condition,” he says.
The researchers also tested the effect of swearing on strength, testing the force people create using a handgripping device. “People will grip that with more force when they’re repeating a swearword over repeating a neutral word,” says Stephens. “We’re still not sure how it works, but it’s looking like it’s something to do with being disinhibited. People use swearwords to overthrow restraint, stop being so controlled, be a little bit freer, not overthink, that sort of thing. Swearing helps you just nudge over to a bit more of a don’t-hold-back mindset.”
Jay has shown that, contrary to widespread belief, swearing is not the refuge of those who are lacking in vocabulary. “Swearing is a wonderful evolutionary advantage – for humans to be able to express their emotions abstractly. It allows me to vent, it allows me to express frustration, anger, but also surprise, joy. It allows me to express that and communicate it to you very effectively. When you say ‘fuck you’ to someone, it’s almost like punching them, but it’s not punching them.”
Young children, he says, “progressively learn how to express their anger, which originally is very physical – tantrums, biting, scratching – and then it becomes much more abstract. I can yell ‘fuck you’ to someone across the street and I don’t have to hit or bite them.” As offensive or upsetting as it might be, he says, “it’s better than shooting someone. We have enough of that crap here [in the US].”
Swearing can produce responses such as increased sweating and raised heart rate and is thought to be processed differently from other forms of language. “Somebody swearing for humour, or to express frustration with some third party, is possibly processed differently from the automatic, emotional, maybe pain-driven, swearing,” says Stapleton. It may be associated with strong childhood and adolescent memories and the responses to those, he adds. This could include a parent telling you off for swearing, but it could also be positive – “maybe bonding with peers, or receiving acceptance or admiration”.
Children start using swearwords as soon as they start talking, says Jay, but he isn’t convinced this is new, more that now we have more ways of observing them. Different cultures have similar kinds of swearwords. “In places where you have a strong presence of the Catholic church, you have a lot of religious profanities,” says Jay. “But everybody has sexual terms, scatological terms, ancestral allusions – bastard, motherfucker, son of a bitch – and animal names.”
Even chimps might swear. “The two things that are sufficient for swearing to emerge are a taboo and the means to express it,” says Byrne. For the chimps that were studied, that was bowel movements and learning a sign for “dirty”. “They used that sign as a way of expressing frustration, of telling someone they’re not happy with them, and also joking. They have a really scatological sense of humour and would wind up the humans by basically doing what my six-year-old does, which is say ‘poo’ all the time at the table.
“I loved that, as soon as you have a taboo and the means to express it, at least in one other species, we’ve seen that used in the same way as we use it.”
Her favourite example of swearing, though, she says with a laugh, tells us much about how swearwords deliver far more than the sum of their parts – how they can convey frustration, intensity, shock and humour, but also sufficient emotion regulation and language skills, where once there would have been an angry physical reaction. It was when her toddler turned to her, looked her dead in the eye, and said: “Mummy, get me out of this fucking highchair.”
• This article was amended on 9 February 2023. An earlier version said that a viral German news clip featured a newsreader. This should have said political correspondent.
In a copy of Vanity Fair from the early 20th century, the word ‘damn’ was disguised with dashes