F*** it! Why I love swearing

I can also remember the first time I said “c***”. During my first week at secondary school I overheard the bigger boys using it with alacrity. I’d no idea what it meant but it was clearly the property of the cool kids, so I went home and I tried it out on my younger sister, who promptly told our mother, who went ballistic.

“I don’t even know what it means!” I protested.

“It’s a horrible word for vagina!” my mother said.

“Sorry,” I said, but “Ooooh! Isn’t that interesting?” was what I thought.

“Oh, how I adore it when other women swear!”

DAN KENNEDY FOR THE TIMES

Swearing is how I met my best friend. In our first weeks at university I encountered Jules in the campus launderette. On attempting to open a tumble dryer a touch early and having it project her still-damp pants out into the room, she screamed “F***ing arsehole!” at the inanimate machine. I knew in that instant that we would be mates.

In my first journalism job on a women’s magazine I accidentally said “c***” in front of (not actually at) my features editor, then saw his expression change into one of absolute rapture. “You say ‘c***’?” he asked softly. I nodded. He clasped his hands to his heart and beamed. He was gay, but it was a bit like he fell in love with me in that moment. Four years later, in my first staff job on a newspaper, I’d sit next to the poshest, sweariest, dearest individual, who’d say, every time her desk phone rang: “F*** a skunk! What fresh hell?”

I’ve had people tell me off for swearing, strangers “tsk” me, less-sweary colleagues ask what’s wrong with me and grow genuinely huffy. I’ve had to apologise to friends’ children for swearing in front of their vulnerable little ears (all the while aware that they gazed at me, their eyes bright and round with newly earned respect). All of which only makes me do it more.

I have sweary merch. A signet ring that says “shit”, a necklace that reads “f*** it” in gold-plated cursive. A friend (I am not lying here) once came back from a speaking engagement at the UN in New York, having found time to swing by a boutique in the East Village and pick me up a pair of vast gold chandelier earrings consisting of the word “c***”, each letter dangling from the last. I immediately popped them into my lobes, took a selfie and posted it to a hilarious/furious reception. “Oh, grow up!” one person said before unfollowing me (it should also be noted that one of the very first to “like” my post was Samantha Cameron). I got the wonderful Cressida Jamieson to embroider “f***” in her charming signature needlepoint onto the front of a T-shirt. If I do not yet have a sweary tattoo, it’s surely just a matter of time.

And, oh, how I adore it when other women swear! I am a bigger fan of Adele for her swearing than her singing. When Mary Earps saved a World Cup penalty against Spain, then screamed “F*** off!” in celebration, my heart leapt. I have two friends, both of whose husbands swear (pun intended) that they proposed to them because of their terrible language (“I was telling the bouncer to shove his no re-entry policy right up his arse — he told me he loved me, asked if he could buy me a drink, in that order”), and generally I am of the opinion that swearing makes the world better. It’s like a glorious everyday bit of rebellion, accessible to all, although not everyone takes advantage of it because not everyone likes it and, as I’ve already said, thank f*** for that! What would swearing be if some people weren’t offended by it?

Curious, then, that I hadn’t stopped to think more about swearing from a historical, political or sociological perspective, but fortunately Roache, author of For F*ck’s Sake!, has done precisely that. I zoom her and ask why she wrote it. “There was an article published a few years ago in some bogus academic journal — there are lots of them, by the way — a paper called Get Me Off Your F***ing Mailing List. The whole paper was just that one sentence, repeated,” she says. “But when this was reported in a news story, it had a screen shot of the front page of this article — you could see what it said. But in the news story itself the swearword had asterisks instead of letters. I remember thinking, how does that work?”

When we all know they mean the same thing?

“Yes. But it does seem to be different.”

Roache — herself not a big swearer (“It feels like work”) — noticed through her research that “there is a cluster of taboo topics around the world: religion, sex, toilet stuff”. Same everywhere, pretty much? “Yes. Though you do get a bit of variation. We don’t have that much religious swearing in the UK, for example, and what we do have is quite weak.”

Is that because the UK is quite secular? “Yeah. I think our most offensive words track the values in society. So as the influence of religion waned [in Britain], sexual swearwords took their place. ‘Damn it’ became ‘f*** it’. And then, over the past two decades, you see slur terms — racist, homophobic — that become a lot more offensive than … ”

F***?

“Exactly.”

“I must be in it for the shock value, not to offend. I seek to spice things up, not to hurt”

DAN KENNEDY FOR THE TIMES

This makes me realise that, as much as I swear, I’d never use slur terms, which means I must be in it for the shock value, not to offend. I seek to spice things up, not to hurt. Having said that, Roache thinks my favourite swearword “has an element of misogyny about it, particularly in the US, when it’s used against women”. She thinks men’s genitals are less offensive as swearwords, dick, cock, nob, etc, “because women’s bodies are viewed with genuine distaste”. But I deploy “c***” with affection, I protest. I use it as an expression of intimacy and trust — ie, I know you well enough to think you’ll be flattered by me transgressing verbally to this extent. Also, if I really did consider you to be awful, I’d call you a “c***” behind your back, not to your face. And anyway, isn’t there an argument for the word’s feminist reclamation? “It’s a dilemma for feminists,” Roache says. “There are some who think it’s so misogynistic we should never use it, and then there’s the opposite — we need to reclaim it, use it more, break down the taboo, break down people’s dislike of women’s bodies.” This makes me feel uneasy because I don’t want “c***” to be less shocking than it is. How much it unsettles some people is why I love it above all other words.

Roache says there’s evidence that swearing produces a physiological response in us that helps us withstand pain, which might explain why, when we bash our funny bone, we scream “F***!” rather than “Elbow pain!” “Although that painkiller effect has only been found in people who don’t swear that much,” she says. “In people who swear all the time in their daily lives it didn’t make much difference. Perhaps because it’s to do with adrenaline, with breaking a taboo, which is exciting. But if you do it all the time anyway … ” No adrenaline? “Yup.”

That’s me f***ed.

I ask Roache if she thinks a propensity to swear is a personality-type issue. I am, if not an out-and-out attention seeker, certainly one who doesn’t mind the limelight. It also occurs to me that, as a middle-class white woman who works in the creative industries, swearing is something I can be confident of getting away with. When I do it, it’s considered, at worst, shocking and inappropriate, at best, daring and outrageous, but certainly never aggressive or threatening. I may have sweary woman’s privilege.

“Hmm. That’s a good question,” she says. “I’m not sure. I think it’s interesting that a lot of studies start with something like, ‘We all swear sometimes … ’ But actually that’s not true. Some people never do. Or claim that they don’t. I suppose swearing is subject to the same kinds of rules as norms and etiquette, and depending on your background, you might care more about etiquette?”

We end our Zoom. I won’t lie, Roache and her book do make me question my love of the foulest language, and on several grounds: political, ideological, and whether or not I’m just unacceptably f***ing rude. But I also do still think there’s a smidge of righteous feminist rebellion in it. It’s a recurring expression of my refusal, as a woman, to be nice, good, predictable, reliable, well behaved, appropriate, mild-mannered, sweet. Although it does also just feel really good on the tongue.

Is there anything wrong with swearing, and if so, what? We don’t necessarily do anything wrong when we swear, even when we swear inappropriately.

Swearing, in its own modest way, is a superpower. Understanding it is a rewarding process that reveals to us some of the vast complexity and richness in the way we use language to relate to each other. When we hear somebody exclaim “F*** you!”, we do not understand them via a literal interpretation of what they have said. Instead, we take them to be using the expression to communicate their anger, hurt or annoyance.

Swearing is particularly good at enabling us to communicate certain emotions. The way we swear reveals that language also enables us (among other things) to express and communicate how we feel, to fast-track trust and intimacy with others, to cause shock and upset, to create and reinforce shared values, and to defuse or escalate tension and conflict.

And, incredibly, most of this stuff is going on between and behind the words that we actually utter: it happens through the inferences that we make about each other when we interact — inferences that we generally don’t even realise we’re making. There’s some comfort to that, especially in a world that has social conservatives shaking their heads and moaning about how society is falling apart because young people today are more connected to their smartphones than they are to each other. It turns out that even while we’re screaming sweary abuse at each other, we understand each other more than we think. Even a snarled “F*** you!” is a rich and complex form of connection. (It is, of course, a form of connection that most of us would rather pass on, so, keep that in mind before you say it to your boss or your prospective in-laws.)

It’s precisely because swearing is so powerful that our kneejerk response to it can be so dramatic that we take leave of our senses and unreflectively judge those who swear inappropriately to have done a Bad Thing. These automatic responses can conceal bias and prejudice. If we can slow down and reflect on the way we respond to swearing, then we can use its power to reflect and reinforce social values in order to create a more just society. Of course, sensible decisions about swearing alone aren’t going to lead us to utopia, but they can be one tool in the armoury we use to fight injustice. Embrace your superpower, friends. Use it wisely.

Extracted from For F*ck’s Sake: Why Swearing Is Shocking, Rude, & Fun by Rebecca Roache (Oxford University Press £16.99), which is published on Wednesday. To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members.