On being foul-mouthed

Marina Salandy-Brown

Saying the unsayable is not merely about being disruptive, as we have been taught to believe. It turns out that it really helps in dealing with our emotions. Bad language is as important to us as speaking itself. That is not special pleading on my part, as I am known when surprised to utter “bloody hell” [I wonder if my editor will delete those words!], learned in Britain from my super polite and very proper great uncle who had English ancestral roots and felt more English than the English. Swearing Is Good For You is the title of a wonderful new book by research scientist Dr Emma Byrne who provokes us to get our behaviour and beliefs into perspective.

The usage of words of which society disapproves still rankles with many of us. We all still notice when we hear a taboo word or expression, even a mildly profane word, such as “damn” or “s--t.” We do not even know why. Research on a stream of individuals reveals we actually have a physical revulsion to expletives and the stronger the swear word, the bigger the physical reaction and we learn that early in life. But swearing is often a sign that a person is distressed. Expletives reduce physical pain, lower anxiety, help us avoid physical violence and trauma victims to recover language. Judicious swearing in a situation of trust also promotes human co-operation.

I was brought up, as most people, to believe that “nice” people avoided using “dirty” words. That was challenged when I went to live in the UK where the better educated people were the more they seemed to swear. I once heard my aristocratic boss on the phone asking for a message to be taken to Lord Tennyson advising him that he would be late in arriving at the exclusive London club where they were members. [I thought Lord Tennyson was merely a long dead poet]. I only mention that to underscore that my boss was the first “decent” person I heard use the word “f--k and other profanities in ordinary speech without censure. His family did too. Avoiding certain words, I was told, is a petit-bourgeois, hangover-Victorian preoccupation and shows a lack of interest in language itself.

Some of that is born out by Dr Byrne’s book, which interestingly also shows how our notion of what is profane changes all the time. For a long time, dictionaries excluded “improper” words, including the Oxford English Dictionary which once preferred to use the word “ineffables” for “trousers” and did not include the four-letter words, which it now does. As Dr Byrne points out, this is not because we are now more liberal but rather that values and language change generationally. As words cease to have impact we use new ones that pack the emotional punch we desire. Yet, the constant is that foul language is generally not socially accepted in any culture, which is hypocritical at best.

What is curious is how human beings have managed to create such impenetrable fortresses around areas of human emotion and behaviour that are perfectly natural and perpetual, such as drug taking – humans have always resorted to mind altering substances – and swearing. You might argue that human beings are not wild animals and socialisation is what allows us to live all together in harmony, more or less, and that society only works if we have rules and all agree to work within those parameters. And that is quite right but still the very act of successfully constructing such thorough bodies of belief that persist, even when values change, is worth considering.

The Atlantic Slave trade and the enslavement of a certain group of people for centuries as an economic system is one such remarkable event in history. It would appear that human beings have always enslaved one another, capturing them in war or times of deprivation and bending them to their will, and it continues now, ceaselessly. Human slavery has hardly abated in the 21st century, in fact, it may have increased as the millions of people flee terror and famine in their native lands and become hostages to fortune. But, the terrible triumph of the European-African slave trade was the novel religious, economic, linguistic, scientific, academic, societal structures erected to support the trade. Few people seemed to know, consciously, that it was wrong. Most came to believe profoundly that black people were not human, otherwise it is impossible to understand the cruelty suffered by slaves. The Atlantic slave trade ended approaching 200 years ago yet that belief system has only partly been eradicated, notwithstanding universal legislation that outlaws racism and protects all people’s human rights.