Emma Byrne, a science writer and artificial intelligence researcher, has just published a new book called Swearing is Good for You: The Amazing Science of Bad Language and it sounds fucking great. "If you ask people what they think about swearing, they tend to insist that it diminishes the speaker’s credibility and persuasiveness—-especially if the speaker is a woman," Byrne writes. But actually, a presenter's swears can sometimes make them damn more convincing. From Smithsonian:
In the book, Byrne cites one study that examined the rhetorical effects of swearing on an audience that was already sympathetic to the speaker’s message. For the study, psychologists Cory Scherer of Penn State University and Brad Sagarin from Northern Illinois University showed videotaped speeches to 88 undergraduate students. Participants listened to one of three different versions of a speech about lowering tuition rates at a university—one with no swearing, one that had a “damn” thrown in the middle, and one that opened with a “damn.” The rest of the speech was unchanged.
“The students who saw the video with the swearing at the beginning or in the middle rated the speaker as more intense, but no less credible, than the ones who saw the speech with no swearing,” Byrne summarizes in her book. “What’s more, the students who saw the videos with the swearing were significantly more in favor of lowering tuition fees after seeing the video than the students who didn’t hear the swear word.”
Byrne delineates between what she calls propositional swearing, which is deliberate and planned, and non-propositional swearing, which can happen when we’re surprised, or among friends or confidants. Trump’s most recent swear, she suspects, is of the latter category. Among his supporters,President Trump’s profanity is often considered a sign of honesty – e.g. “he tells it like it is.” A leader’s coarse choice of words can be an instance of deliberate use of profanity as a rhetorical device, says Byrne. “As with rehearsed gestures and well-orchestrated photo opportunities, swearing can be used instrumentally to give an impression of passion or authenticity,” she says.
You know when you stub your toe and involuntarily utter an expletive? You probably didn’t give it much thought, but you might have been on to something.
As children we’re taught that cursing, even when we’re in pain, is inappropriate, betrays a limited vocabulary or is somehow low class in that ambiguous way many cultural lessons suggest. But profanity serves a physiological, emotional and social purpose — and it’s effective only because it’s inappropriate.
“The paradox is that it’s that very act of suppression of the language that creates those same taboos for the next generation,” said Benjamin K. Bergen, author of “What the F: What Swearing Reveals About Our Language, Our Brains and Ourselves.” He calls this the “profanity paradox.”
“The reason that a child thinks the F-word is a bad word is that, growing up, he or she was told that it was a bad word, so profanity is a cultural construct that perpetuates itself through time,” said Dr. Bergen, a professor of cognitive science at the University of California, San Diego. “It’s an affliction of its own creation.”
Swearing and cursing are often used interchangeably, but there’s a subtle difference in their origins. A curse implies damning or punishing someone, while a swear word suggests blasphemy — invoking a deity to empower your words. For the sake of modern discussion, both words are defined as profanity: vulgar, socially unacceptable language you don’t use in polite conversation.
The paradox is that profane words are powerful only because we make them powerful. Without their being censored, all of the words we designate by a first letter and “-word” would just be average terms.
In “The Stuff of Thought,” Steven Pinker, a cognitive scientist and a professor at Harvard, listed a few functions of swearing. There’s emphatic swearing, for instance, which is meant to highlight a point, and dysphemistic swearing, which is meant to make a point provocatively.
But swearing is beneficial beyond making your language more colorful. It can also offer catharsis. A study co-authored by Richard Stephens, a senior lecturer in psychology at Keele University, found that swearing can increase your ability to withstand pain. So when you stub your toe and howl an expletive, it might help you tolerate the pain better.
In his experiment, Dr. Stephens asked subjects to come up with a list of words, including swear words, that they might use if they hit their thumb with a hammer. Then they were asked to come up with a list of neutral words to describe a chair (like wooden, for example). He then asked them to submerge a hand in ice water for as long as they could, while repeating a word from either list: a swear word or a neutral one.
Participants who repeated a swear were able to keep their hand submerged in the ice water for almost 50 percent longer than those who repeated a neutral word. Not only that, swearing also made participants feel like the pain wasn’t as intense. Researchers concluded that swearing had the effect of reducing sensitivity to pain. Who knew four letters could be so soothing?
“For pain relief, swearing seems to trigger the natural ‘fight or flight’ stress response, as well as increased adrenaline and heart pumping,” Dr. Stephens said in an email. “This leads to stress-induced analgesia — being more tolerant of pain.”
In his experiment, Dr. Stephens asked subjects to come up with a list of words, including swear words, that they might use if they hit their thumb with a hammer. Then they were asked to come up with a list of neutral words to describe a chair (like wooden, for example). He then asked them to submerge a hand in ice water for as long as they could, while repeating a word from either list: a swear word or a neutral one.
Participants who repeated a swear were able to keep their hand submerged in the ice water for almost 50 percent longer than those who repeated a neutral word. Not only that, swearing also made participants feel like the pain wasn’t as intense. Researchers concluded that swearing had the effect of reducing sensitivity to pain. Who knew four letters could be so soothing?
“For pain relief, swearing seems to trigger the natural ‘fight or flight’ stress response, as well as increased adrenaline and heart pumping,” Dr. Stephens said in an email. “This leads to stress-induced analgesia — being more tolerant of pain.”
Now, to clarify: These words, of course, don’t have any intrinsic, mystical power that confers superhuman strength and endurance. It is simply the act of speaking a taboo word that makes it cathartic, according to researchers, and that applies to emotional catharsis, too.
“There must be evolutionary advantages to cursing, or we would not have evolved to do it,” said Timothy Jay, an emeritus professor at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts who has written extensively about profanity. “We can express our emotions, especially anger and frustration, towards others symbolically not through tooth and nail. Cursing is coping, or venting, and it helps us deal with stress.”
Curse words can help you more accurately communicate your emotions, which contradicts the folk belief that people use profanity because they lack vocabulary skills.
“This is the ‘poverty of vocabulary’ myth, that people swear because they lack the right words due to impoverished vocabulary,’’ Dr. Jay said. “Any language scholar knows otherwise.”
Dr. Jay was the co-author of a 2015 study, published in Language Sciences, that tested the ability of people to generate words beginning with a given letter. It ended up debunking the poverty-of-vocabulary myth.
“We found that people who could generate a lot of letter words and animal names could also generate the most swear words,” Dr. Jay said. “So as fluency goes up, so does the ability to say swear words, not the other way around.’’ He added, “Fluency is fluency.”
Some research also finds a link between swearing and honesty. For example, a study published in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science concluded “profanity was associated with less lying and deception at the individual level.”
Dr. Jay said other research showed that people perceived those who use profanity as more honest, too. The idea is that liars have to use more brain power and require more thinking time to make up lies, remember lies or to just avoid telling the truth. Truth tellers, on the other hand, get to the point faster, which might mean speaking impulsively and without a filter.
“We believe that when people use profanity they are indicating their emotional state to us, and it’s not something that people always do,” Dr. Bergen said. “Lots of people hide their emotions for lots of reasons, and I think that we infer from someone swearing that they must not be doing that. They must be truthfully conveying their emotional stance. If you want people to think that you’re telling the truth, then swearing might help with that.”
If you enjoy a strongly uttered four-letter word every now and again, you've definitely heard it. It probably came from someone at least 20 years your senior and was accompanied by a furrowed brow and/or wagging finger:
"Swearing is the sign of a weak mind."
"Cussing is the sign of a poor vocabulary."
"Profanity is a sign of limited intelligence."
Maybe you felt guilty and agreed with them, or maybe you gave them a silent middle-finger with your mind. Regardless of how you reacted, science is here to tell us (again) that they were wrong.
Exciting new research recently published in the journal Language Sciences confirms what f-bomb droppers have always known in their hearts: Swearing isn't a mental crutch--it's a sign of verbal intelligence.
The study, a joint effort of psychologists at Marist College and the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts, found that people who swear more may actually have stronger language skills overall than those who don't.
They reached this conclusion by pitting two popular theories against each other:
A folk assumption about colloquial speech is that taboo words are used because speakers cannot find better words with which to express themselves: because speakers lack vocabulary. A competing possibility is that fluency is fluency regardless of subject matter—that there is no reason to propose a difference in lexicon size and ease of access for taboo as opposed to emotionally neutral words.
To test which theory was correct, researchers gave study participants 60 seconds to rattle off as many swear words as they could. Then, they asked them to do the same with a more benign subject, such as animal names. (In social science this is known as the Controlled Oral Word Association Test.)
If old-fashioned swear haters are right, participants fluent in swearing should have had trouble coming up with the neutral words but that's exactly the opposite of what happened.
Instead, those who listed the most curse words were consistently able to list the most words in other associative trials—showing an undeniable connection between swearing skills and a larger overall vocabulary.
Fucking awesome, right? It gets better.
Because the researchers separated the types of swear words listed into distinct categories (like slurs, general pejoratives, sexual terms, etc) they could also determine that "speakers who use taboo words understand their general expressive content as well as nuanced distinctions that must be drawn to use slurs appropriately."
In normal words, this means that swearing is actually a sign of verbal intelligence, rather than linguistic deficiency. Which is a huge professional advantage, not to mention a life skill that many people lack.
So if you want to hurl a few swears at the sky every now and then, go ahead. It just means you're better than everyone else.
