AI transcript
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0:01:05 Let me try that again.
0:01:07 Fuck.
0:01:09 Did you feel a difference?
0:01:20 You knew what I was saying the first time, but I’ll bet it felt different the second time.
0:01:22 Why is that?
0:01:25 Swearing is everywhere, and it always has been.
0:01:28 So why does it still have so much power?
0:01:31 And how does that power change over time?
0:01:38 What makes it funny is AG double hockey sticks in one context and horribly fucking offensive in another.
0:01:46 I’m Sean Elling, and this is The Group Barrier.
0:01:57 [music]
0:01:59 Today’s guest is Rebecca Roche.
0:02:04 She’s a senior lecturer in philosophy at Royal Holloway, University of London,
0:02:12 and the author of a new book called “For Fuck’s Sake, Why Swearing is Shocking, Rude, and Fun.”
0:02:15 Roche explores something I’ve always wondered.
0:02:17 What makes swear words different?
0:02:24 How can the same words, depending on how they’re used, either offend people or build trust between them?
0:02:29 And why do they seem to communicate so much more than other words?
0:02:34 I find this shit fascinating, so I invited Rebecca on the show.
0:02:38 Rebecca Roche, welcome to the show.
0:02:40 Thanks for having me.
0:02:44 So I guess we should start with the basics. What makes a swear word a swear word?
0:02:49 Apart from the social consensus we have about which words go in the swear bucket?
0:03:00 They tend to be words that focus on taboo topics, so typically sex, defecation, religion, things like that.
0:03:05 But as far as I can tell, that’s quite universal.
0:03:10 They are words that we tend to use to express emotion,
0:03:17 and the small amount of philosophy that’s been done on swearing in the past has mentioned this,
0:03:21 that swear words are linked to expressing emotions.
0:03:28 You can just sort of give vent using a swear word without necessarily using it as a word in a sentence.
0:03:32 You’re not necessarily trying to convey information.
0:03:38 The linguist Geoffrey Nunberg has said something like swearing is more like a scream than an utterance.
0:03:40 So there’s that aspect of it as well.
0:03:45 And then there is the particular way in which swear words offend.
0:03:50 Swear words don’t offend in the way that other taboo language does.
0:03:57 So slurs, for example, which are words that denigrate entire groups of people.
0:04:01 So homophobic language, racist language, sexist language, and so on.
0:04:07 Those words offend in a particular way by conveying contempt about a group of people.
0:04:09 Swearing doesn’t do that.
0:04:10 Swearing is different.
0:04:18 We’re swearing it’s more that we’re saying something that we know the people around us are going to dislike,
0:04:26 and in doing so we signal our disrespect to them, or we’re taken to do that.
0:04:30 And I think also there’s the moral dimension is different.
0:04:35 I think that most of the time we’re not doing anything morally wrong when we swear,
0:04:38 but I think with slurs it’s different.
0:04:39 I agree with that.
0:04:46 And I’m going to, as a habitual swearer myself, I’m going to end up mounting a bit of a defense of swearing.
0:04:49 I’m sure as we move through this, but I’ll get there.
0:05:01 Just to give a specific example, and I can’t believe I’m about to ask you to draw a philosophical distinction between the words poop and shit.
0:05:05 But I got to do it because shit is a swear word.
0:05:09 Poop is not, but they both refer to the same thing.
0:05:15 So what makes one of them profane and the other just silly?
0:05:20 Yeah, I think the short answer is that there’s no good reason.
0:05:23 One is just ruder than the other.
0:05:31 And I think that’s the case with all of our conventions, that there’s often an air of randomness about that.
0:05:39 So if you use a knife and fork to eat, you hold your knife in your right hand on your fork in your left hand.
0:05:44 And if you did otherwise in a really formal dinner, you would be breaching etiquette.
0:05:50 But there’s no kind of deep reason why holding your fork in your left hand is somehow more right.
0:05:52 It’s just what we’ve all agreed.
0:05:57 And I think the same is true when you contrast the words shit and poop.
0:06:02 One is ruder than the other because we’ve all decided that it’s ruder.
0:06:10 And I think what that comes down to is one word is more strongly disliked than the other.
0:06:20 Are there interesting examples, at least in our language, of words that used to be swear words but are no longer swear words?
0:06:24 And if that’s the case, how did that transition happen?
0:06:31 Yeah, I think the capacity of swear words to shock tends to track the values of a culture.
0:06:37 So in countries like the US and the UK, and obviously this does vary from culture to culture,
0:06:41 religious swearing is milder than it used to be.
0:06:49 So if you think back to the 1930s, the film Gone With The Wind,
0:06:52 where there’s that famous line by the character Rhett Butler.
0:06:57 Rhett, you go. Where shall I go? What shall I do?
0:07:01 Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.
0:07:09 And at the time, that was shocking language. There was discussions about whether it was too rude to include in the film.
0:07:13 You know, there were sort of people saying, well, maybe he should say, I don’t give a hoot.
0:07:18 But, you know, watching that now, that is much, you know, that’s quite measured, right?
0:07:21 You would have him say something else if you were going to remake the movie now.
0:07:26 So that is something that was once really shocking and is no longer shocking.
0:07:37 But by contrast, if you watch that film today, you know, the portrayal of the plight of people of colour in that culture at that time is really shocking, right?
0:07:42 That’s what stands out to modern audiences as a really shocking part of the film.
0:07:48 But at the time when the film was made, that was, you know, that was much less shocking.
0:07:54 And I think that’s a really nice example of how changing cultural values affect our patterns of offensiveness.
0:08:04 You know, which words we view as shocking and which, you know, not just words, but portrayals, behaviours, all sorts of things, what we find offensive in general.
0:08:14 Is it fair to say that the offensiveness of swear words really doesn’t have anything to do with the words themselves?
0:08:17 Yeah, yeah, I think so.
0:08:20 This is one of my deeply held beliefs about swear words.
0:08:35 There are plenty of swear words that if you say them, the sound you make when you say them is the same as the sound you would make in all sorts of benign circumstances where you wouldn’t offend anybody at all.
0:08:43 So the word country, for example, which my kids went through a phase of sort of saying in particular provocative ways.
0:08:54 But, you know, you said that the word country, completely benign, polite, neutral word, but contains the sound of probably our most powerful swear word in English.
0:08:59 So, you know, occasionally you’ll get people saying, oh, well, you know, it’s the sound of swear words.
0:09:01 Stephen Pinker takes this attitude.
0:09:05 He talks about swear words being quick and harsh.
0:09:07 And I think that’s definitely part of it.
0:09:12 Swear words need to be satisfying to utter in the sorts of circumstances where you want to use them.
0:09:18 Like if you have just trapped your thumb in a door or something like that, we want to say, like, fuck.
0:09:20 Well, that’s a really important point.
0:09:26 And I think this is a distinction you make in the book between swearing and using swear words.
0:09:30 When you’re swearing, you’re not really using words to describe something in the world.
0:09:32 You’re communicating emotions.
0:09:38 And this is the point that the linguist you mentioned earlier, Jeffrey Nunberg makes, right, that swear words don’t describe your feelings.
0:09:40 They manifest them.
0:09:45 So when you stub your toe and scream, fuck, that’s not a description of the event.
0:09:47 It’s an expression of pain.
0:09:54 It’s not about something in the way the phrase, I have a black truck is about the black truck in my driveway.
0:09:59 But sometimes swear words are just like any other word, you know, there’s bird shit on my truck.
0:10:01 That’s using a swear word.
0:10:03 Anyway, I just love that distinction.
0:10:04 Yeah.
0:10:05 Thank you.
0:10:06 Yes, that’s right.
0:10:13 I’m just going to say, I mean, not to be too nerdy about this, but context is everything, right?
0:10:24 I mean, this was Victor Stein’s whole point that the meaning of a word lies in how it’s used in the language games we all play with each other.
0:10:31 And if some words have more power than others, it’s not because of anything inherent to the words themselves.
0:10:43 It’s because we’ve given them that power and we keep reinforcing it in our daily interactions with each other, which I guess is kind of how culture in general works.
0:10:45 Yeah, I think that’s exactly right.
0:10:51 I mean, one thing that really brings this out, and this is this is the first puzzle that got me into this topic.
0:10:54 It’s thinking about how asterisks work.
0:11:01 When you see in a news story, a swear word, which has some of its letters obscured by asterisks.
0:11:05 So you get F, star, star, star, instead of F, U, C, K.
0:11:08 And there’s this puzzle about how that works.
0:11:19 And if the offensiveness of swearing is the word itself, then that shouldn’t work because we all know what word is being censored, right?
0:11:23 It doesn’t hide the word in any kind of meaningful way.
0:11:36 But I think the reason it works to reduce offensiveness and it does work to reduce offensiveness, that seems pretty clear, is, you know, I mentioned that when swearing offends it’s because we are signalling disrespect.
0:11:48 And I think when we censor swear words with asterisks or with bleeps when it comes to spoken swear words, that message of disrespect gets replaced by a competing message, which is something like, you know,
0:11:55 I kind of really need to convey this word, but I’m also worried about how you are going to feel about it.
0:11:59 So I’m obscuring some of it, you know, because I care about your feelings.
0:12:05 So you get this kind of message of consideration when you censor swear words like that.
0:12:13 And I think that story wouldn’t make sense unless the offensiveness of swear words was about the attitudes that we convey when we use them.
0:12:17 That particular arrangement of letters or sounds.
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0:14:38 I would say that a big part of my personal interest in swear words and frankly, my own use of them has to do with how incredibly flexible
0:14:43 they are as just pure rhetorical tools.
0:14:50 Why is that? Why are curse words so malleable in that way?
0:15:05 Yeah, yeah. There is a great linguistics paper by the late linguist James McCawley where he’s comparing two senses of the word “fuck,” which he calls “fuck one” and “fuck two.”
0:15:15 “Fuck one” behaves just like a normal verb or whatever that word is. It’s a verb or is it something else?
0:15:24 You can talk about two people fucking, for example, and then it behaves in the same way as a normal verb.
0:15:38 But you can also use it in this more unusual way, which is his “fuck two” when we say “fuck you” or “fuck off” or we just pepper our conversation with swear words.
0:15:50 Anthony Burgess has a great example of this where he talks about an army mechanic trying to fix a truck and saying “fuck it, the fucking fuck is fucking fucked,” which makes complete sense.
0:16:00 That is Mozart. That is music. That is pure art. “Fuck it, the fucking fucker’s fucking fucked.”
0:16:07 I mean, with that kind of flexibility, I don’t know how you cannot use these words. I’m sorry.
0:16:19 Right. Yeah, I mean, it works because we understand that swearing is not just about conveying information, you know, asserting truths and opinions.
0:16:21 It’s also about expressing emotion.
0:16:36 Well, I mean, I just want to point out that in that sentence, “fuck it, the fucking fucker’s fucking fucked,” you have a single swear word, which is being deployed as an imperative, an adjective, a noun, and a verb in one sentence.
0:16:53 I mean, I think we sent this to you. My favorite scene in the history of television is this famous scene in the HBO show “The Wire,” where you have these two detectives who walk into a crime scene.
0:17:03 And for about three minutes or so, they basically break down and deconstruct what happened, and they only use the word “fuck.”
0:17:16 Oh, fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck. Motherfucker. Fuckin’ A.
0:17:20 Is there any other word like that in the language that you can think of?
0:17:24 No, no. I mean, not even any other swear word, really, is there?
0:17:25 I don’t think so.
0:17:35 No, and what’s been communicated there is not really like, you know, the meaning of the word “fuck,” or the meaning of the utterances, right, in any straightforward sense.
0:17:50 It’s an expression of sort of attitudes. I mean, I guess the closest you could get to it without using the word “fuck” is using sort of gestures or just noises, right, rather than actual words.
0:17:58 Yeah, yeah. It’s just, that’s probably the word I use the most, I have to say, not that this thing is being officially tracked.
0:18:12 But, you know, people often like to say that cursing a lot is a sign of unintelligence, or at least it’s a sign of a narrow vocabulary.
0:18:18 Now, I strenuously disagree with that, but I’m curious what you think.
0:18:35 Yeah, yeah. Yeah, this is sort of hotly debated, and it doesn’t obviously indicate a lack of intelligence, although people have tried to demonstrate that it actually, you know, how many swear words you know indicate more intelligence.
0:18:38 You know, there’s nothing sort of really conclusive on either side.
0:18:46 I mean, I think what’s interesting here is to think about what’s going on. Where did this idea come from that people who swear are less intelligent?
0:19:01 And it’s kind of multidimensional. I think there is a lot of classism here, you know, people who are privileged, upper class, and so on, can get away with swearing in a way that poorer people can’t, right.
0:19:11 When you hear Stephen Fry swearing, people are like, oh, he’s so smart, you know, which he is, but he’s also sort of Cambridge educated and very articulate.
0:19:17 And so people think, well, when he’s swearing, he’s doing it in a sort of intelligent way. And he usually is, right?
0:19:32 But when they hear, I don’t know, you know, just sort of someone, an unemployed person at a sports match, say, swearing, then just the perception of that being a particular type of person.
0:19:39 There will just be this sort of knee-jerk response that, well, they’re obviously swearing because they don’t know any other words.
0:19:43 So I think it’s probably based in prejudice, ultimately.
0:19:47 Well, there’s also a gender dimension here too, I’d argue.
0:19:54 Yes, I think, you know, gender and swearing is a fascinating area. But yes, I think you have that.
0:20:03 There is this association with this sort of language and, you know, kind of locker room talk. We’ve heard this before, haven’t we?
0:20:14 It’s how people talk when they are unguarded and there’s an honesty there. And also, you know, what is unspoken there is just the only people there are men, right?
0:20:19 There’s, you know, there’s no, what would be the equivalent of sort of locker room talk for women?
0:20:26 I think there certainly are equivalents, but I don’t think it’s a sort of cultural trope the way that the locker room trope is.
0:20:30 It’s not just that women are judged more harshly for swearing, although I think they are.
0:20:37 But also, you know, there’s this sort of thought that you shouldn’t men shouldn’t swear in front of women, that it’s corrupting.
0:20:44 It reminds me a little bit of, you know, sort of women who swear sort of similar category of women who are sexually promiscuous.
0:20:54 You know, it’s a reason for judging, judging them harshly, even though it would be, you know, neither of those things are typically reasons that men get judged negatively.
0:21:05 Is it just the case in every culture that you know of that certain kinds of people seem to be able to get away with swearing and certain kinds of people don’t?
0:21:07 Is that universal?
0:21:09 So I don’t know.
0:21:21 But if we take a step back and think about taboo in general, so swearing is a taboo behavior and a taboo is just something that’s something that you’re not supposed to do.
0:21:23 It’s usually sort of informal.
0:21:31 So, you know, we’re not talking about stuff that’s actually illegal, but, you know, stuff that is informally disapproved of.
0:21:37 There’s a book on taboo by Keith Allen and Kate Burridge called Forbidden Words.
0:21:49 And they talk about this thing that they call the middle class politeness criterion, which is the idea that if you’re middle class, you are held to higher standards of behavior than everybody else.
0:21:53 So the middle classes get judged harshly for swearing.
0:21:57 The lower classes don’t because, you know, they don’t know any better.
0:22:03 It’s what we expect of such poorly bred people or, you know, whatever the prejudices are.
0:22:11 And people who are upper class can get away with it because they are in this position of privilege.
0:22:33 I used to teach university students and I developed a habit of occasionally, you might even say frequently, cursing in my lectures, not in an offensive way, but more as a way to signal emphasis and emotion.
0:22:39 And it was very useful because when students would hear it, it would jolt them to attention.
0:22:41 Right. I was thinking that. Wake them up, right?
0:22:45 In a constructive way. I mean, is that something you do a lot when you’re teaching?
0:22:52 I don’t actually. I think I occasionally swear when I’m teaching and I do teach this topic.
0:22:55 I have a philosophy of language course when we have a week when we teach swearing.
0:23:05 I mean, maybe I should. I’m not sure whether I would fall victim to the sort of attitudes we’ve been talking about, you know, sort of about men swearing versus women swearing.
0:23:23 Yeah. I mean, I think also part of what I was doing in that context as a teacher and I suppose even as a podcast host, swearing has a way of signaling a lack of pretentiousness, you know what I mean?
0:23:29 It startles and puts people at ease at the same time. And I like that.
0:23:41 And again, swearing seems uniquely useful in this way, or maybe it’s not as unique as I think, but it’s definitely the easiest and most reliable way to do this, which is why I do it.
0:23:50 Yeah. Yeah. I agree. I talk about this a little bit in the book, you know, that experience of making a new friend.
0:24:05 So maybe sort of a new colleague arrives at work and you’re getting to know them and you, you know, you go for a drink with them and you’re chatting and there might be that moment when somebody first takes the risk and uses a swear word, which is risky, right?
0:24:16 Because you might offend them. But if all goes well, there’s this sort of, you know, relaxing sort of exhalation of, OK, we can all relax and it can work really well to increase intimacy.
0:24:25 And I think it’s about trust, swearing with somebody new who, you know, you don’t know what they’re going to make of it. But your, you know, your intentions are good.
0:24:36 You like them and you want to continue to get to know them. And if they respond positively, then that’s, you know, they’ve kind of rewarded your trust, right?
0:24:42 I think that’s how it works. You know, we sort of trust each other to let our guard down a little bit.
0:24:52 Yeah, just a direct note to my audience here. When you hear me swear on the show and you do quite often, it’s not me being unprofessional.
0:25:11 I’m just reinforcing our bond and trust. And I hope that’s how it lands. I think I’ve got, I’ve got a few of these over the years from really thoughtful, I think well-intentioned listeners who didn’t like that I curse sometimes on the show.
0:25:22 And I took it seriously. And I did actually try to ask myself, am I doing this lazily? Am I doing this gratuitously? Or am I doing it because it feels organic and right?
0:25:30 And I hope it’s the latter, but I didn’t just dismiss it out of hand, but I also didn’t stop swearing. So there’s that.
0:25:43 Yeah, that’s it. And I like that response because I think there is a delicate line to tread, isn’t there? So one response could be, like, my house, my rules, if you don’t like it, don’t listen, right?
0:25:53 You don’t, nobody, nobody’s making you stay here. So it’s possible to take that attitude. And then it’s possible to just sort of bend over backwards to avoid offending people.
0:26:04 And kind of, I think sometimes that is appropriate, but there can be times when it comes at the expense of expressing things that are important to express.
0:26:12 Yeah, look, I don’t want to be, I don’t want to be an asshole, but I also don’t want to be who I’m not or I don’t want to pretend to be something.
0:26:13 Yeah, yeah.
0:26:18 And I don’t know where that sweet spot is, but hopefully I’m living somewhere in it.
0:26:26 Right. And I think that’s that sweet spot is something we struggle, we all struggle with a lot and not not just with swearing, I think.
0:26:37 I think another place it might come up is if you have that sort of awkward experience of you have two groups of friends or two groups of people that you hang out with.
0:26:47 And the way you behave is, is different with each, you know, as is inevitable, right? We sort of behave with our parents, friends, differently to how we behave with other groups of people.
0:26:55 And then you might have a situation where everybody’s thrown together and you’re trying to, you know, you’re sort of like, oh, who am I?
0:27:05 How do I behave in a way that kind of doesn’t seem inauthentic, but then also doesn’t make these people wonder who the hell they’re dealing with?
0:27:20 On the flip side of this, the bond reinforcing and the trust signaling is something you call offensive escalation, right? Swearing can also be used to very rapidly dial up the
0:27:21 Yeah.
0:27:26 Offensiveness. Do you have a good example of this in action because I do like this concept.
0:27:35 Yeah. So this is my explanation of how swear words get their offensiveness and explanation doesn’t rely on sort of any magical properties of the word themselves.
0:27:40 So I think the way it happens is we start out with a word that’s disliked.
0:27:54 So you’re speaking to somebody who you know dislikes a particular word or a particular topic and you start using that word or talking about that topic, regardless of your knowledge that about how they feel about it.
0:27:59 And they will ultimately come to see that as a signal of disrespect if you’re doing it.
0:28:05 But an example I talk about in my book arises from the fact that lots of people get my name wrong.
0:28:15 So my name is Rebecca. In case you were wondering, I get called Rachel quite a lot, including in the past by members of my family.
0:28:19 But you know, it’s okay. Occasionally even on.
0:28:23 That’s bullshit, Rebecca. Absolutely bullshit.
0:28:39 That’s what I mean. I’m not talking about like my close family. So yeah, so I draw this out in the book to a length that it has never actually gone in real life where I’m imagining meeting a new person and they start addressing me as Rachel.
0:28:46 And I gently correct them to actually as Rebecca, which I’m not sure I would do in reality.
0:29:04 I just think, okay, that’s I just answered a Rachel now around this person. But yeah, so if I if I were to correct them politely, and they continue to call me Rachel, and I correct them again, and again, and again, you know, maybe with kind of decreasing patients.
0:29:21 And if this goes on, and they continue to call me by the wrong name, then I’m going to struggle to view their behavior as benign, right? If they do it once or twice, then it’s kind of like, okay, lots of people do this.
0:29:28 It’s an innocent mistake. It’s completely forgivable. I’ll just let them know what my name actually is and we can all move on.
0:29:38 But if it goes on, then it’s it’s more difficult to view it in that way. It becomes implausible that they just made this sort of understandable mistake.
0:29:50 And I’m going to start to wonder things like, are they doing this on purpose? Are they trying to upset me? Are they in some subtle way trying to signal their disrespect of me?
0:30:01 So what we have there is this completely inoffensive words, right? The word Rachel is not offensive. And they’re not changing the language they use.
0:30:13 But just through what they signal to me by their use of this same word, my attitude towards them changes, right? I start to become offended.
0:30:24 Now, I use this as an analogy to explain how swear words get to be offensive. But I think it’s not a perfect analogy, right? The word Rachel is not universally disliked.
0:30:36 I think with swear words, we start out with words that are universally disliked. So people across a culture don’t like to hear them used, which I think is why swear words tend to focus on taboo topics.
0:30:42 You know, these are already topics that people don’t want to be discussed in polite contexts.
0:30:53 But I think you get the same offence escalation process where you get people thinking, “Hang on, this person knows that the people around them don’t enjoy hearing this word.”
0:31:03 And yet they’re still going ahead in using it. So it becomes difficult for some people to view the use of that prohibited word as benign.
0:31:06 They then interpret it as a sign of disrespect.
0:31:14 Yeah, I think that’s textbook assholery right there. I don’t think there’s much of a case in any other direction.
0:31:21 Right, doing stuff that, you know, people don’t want you to do without good reason for it. Yes, that’s assholery, isn’t it?
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0:32:13 This has been a fun journey through all the intricacies of cursing. Now, can you tell me when it’s okay to swear and when it’s not okay to swear?
0:32:17 Yeah, I need to solve.
0:32:33 There’s a few dimensions here. One is that just chucking in a swear word into your fucking sentences as a form of fucking punctuation, like I’m just doing here, is relatively benign compared to looking somebody in the eye and saying, “Fuck you.”
0:32:40 Yeah, or you fucking idiot, something like that, where it’s sort of directed at somebody, you’re kind of weaponizing the word.
0:32:45 You’re using it to intensify your negative attitude towards another person.
0:32:52 So I think that that directedness plays a part in aggravating the shock value of swearing.
0:32:58 I think a lot depends on who we’re with, who we’re swearing in front of.
0:33:08 Even people who are very liberal about swearing tend to want to tread carefully around children, especially other people’s children.
0:33:19 If you’re kind of just letting off steam and somebody’s got their kid with them and it’s like, “Oh God, sorry, I’ve had this, but my kids come to events with me and sit in the audience and organize.”
0:33:21 “Oh my God, this kid’s here.”
0:33:26 And I think any sort of power imbalance, we tend to be a bit cagey around that.
0:33:37 So swearing at a police officer, swearing at a teacher, swearing at one of their pupils, this sort of thing where there’s one person who is free to kind of do what they like
0:33:43 and the other person who kind of has to obey the rules or they get into trouble, that sort of imbalance.
0:33:48 But more generally speaking, there are some contexts that are more informal than others.
0:33:58 Not just with regard to the language we use, but things like how we dress, how we have to address each other, you know, whether you can call people by their first names, for example.
0:34:07 And I think it’s helpful to view swearing as just part of this quite rich and complex network of norms.
0:34:14 Just the more formal a situation is, the more risky it’s going to be to swear in this situation.
0:34:27 That’s right. I mean, so much of this really just boils down to a kind of social or emotional intelligence, just simply the capacity to read the room and know where you are, who you are, who you’re with.
0:34:36 And judge appropriately. If you can’t do that, then you’re probably going to run into trouble, not just here, but in lots of other ways.
0:34:50 The point about parenting and kids is interesting. You know, my wife has had to check me a lot at home because she doesn’t want our son, who’s now five, hearing a bunch of curse words.
0:35:02 And on the one hand, I get it. But on the other hand, why do we care? I mean, they’re just words and a lot of them, as we’ve demonstrated, are objectively great.
0:35:13 And the only reason for not wanting him to hear them isn’t that they’re inherently bad. They’re not. It’s that we don’t want him to make an ass of himself in polite society.
0:35:22 And if we’re being honest, we probably also worry about being judged by other people who hear our kid. But is that a good enough reason really?
0:35:30 I guess it is because I do check myself. But I don’t know, Rebecca, is that… I don’t know. What are your thoughts on that?
0:35:32 I mean, I think it is a reason to be careful.
0:35:34 It’s a reason. Is it a good one, though?
0:35:45 We kind of want our children to grow up knowing how to navigate the norms of the culture they’re in. But we do seem to take an incredibly precautionary approach, or lots of people.
0:35:54 The approach you’ve just described, you know, let’s not have our kid know unused swear words just so he doesn’t slip up in situations where it would be really rude to use them.
0:36:05 I mean, if you were to take that attitude to other aspects, you know, other norms, then you would have, well, let’s, you know, let’s have our kid address us in a really formal way.
0:36:17 You know, there’s no sort of mum and dad. There’s, you know, sort of mister and missus or whatever it is. Address everybody super formally just to make sure that when they’re in a situation where it matters, they’re not going to slip up.
0:36:28 I mean, we don’t do things like that, you know, having wear a tux for dinner every night, right? Just do them out, you know, be on the absolute best behaviour possible.
0:36:41 I think part of it is probably that people do judge breaches of etiquette they have to do with swearing more harshly and judge the parents more harshly than other breaches of etiquette.
0:36:49 But I think also it’s weird that we have this attitude that we kind of need to protect our kids from swearing.
0:37:03 But at the same time, you know, if you were to meet somebody who took that to the extreme and said, you know, I’m taking steps to ensure that my kid never learns to swear, they’re going to have a chaperone with them at all times to make sure older kids don’t teach them rude words.
0:37:14 I mean, that would be really sinister. Even those of us who are concerned with our kids being able to be polite, it’s not that we never want our kids to learn these words.
0:37:25 I mean, maybe it’s that we just never want them to learn them from us, right? Because if they learn them from somewhere else, then they kind of understand it’s, you know, it’s a sort of, I’ve called this before like the linguistic black market.
0:37:30 The linguistic black market. That’s good. That’s pretty good.
0:37:35 And I think, you know, this explains the squeamishness we have about swearing in front of other people’s children.
0:37:40 I think a lot of this is the idea that it takes a village to raise a child.
0:37:45 And we think, well, you know, the parents might be kind of really working hard to bring their kids up to be polite.
0:37:50 And yet here I am dropping F bombs left, right and center, undoing all their good work.
0:37:59 So we just kind of want to be supportive to other people’s efforts to raise their children to be good people because that I guess benefits all of us, right?
0:38:12 So let’s imagine someone who likes to swear and does it often and let’s call this hypothetical person me.
0:38:28 If I’m around someone who’s uncomfortable with swearing and gets mildly offended by it, does it make me an asshole if I still do it in a benign way since I can make a strong philosophical case that they shouldn’t be?
0:38:34 offended by that? You can tell me the truth here.
0:38:42 Yeah, I think you so you might be straying into what you’ve previously called assholery here, I think.
0:38:52 Yeah, I mean, so it’s often the case that we can we can make a strong a compelling argument for why people shouldn’t have the preferences they do have.
0:39:02 But, you know, sort of being a tolerant person often requires just accepting people’s preferences at face value.
0:39:13 It’s a bit like people who say you shouldn’t be afraid of spiders or these particular spiders because, you know, although they’re the size of the dinner plate, they’re not going to kill you and then just chucking a massive spider in their lap.
0:39:30 I mean, nobody would do that. You would sort of take the attitude of, well, you know, I know this person’s fear is it doesn’t it doesn’t track what’s actually sensible to fear, but at the same time, a considerate person would just accept it.
0:39:48 Well, you’re the resident expert. How do you walk that line between avoiding swear words so as not to offend people on the one hand and using the words you want to use and simply not caring about offending people who are offended by the wrong things?
0:40:01 If I think people are going to be offended by swearing, I don’t swear. Generally, we should avoid causing people to feel offended if there’s no good reason to do otherwise.
0:40:24 And I think sometimes there is a good reason to do otherwise. So I think, for example, if you have a relative who is offended by mixed race relationships, for example, and you have a spouse who is a different race to you, then if what you care most about is not causing this relative to feel
0:40:37 offends, then maybe you would say to your spouse, okay, do you mind not coming to this family gathering we’ve been invited to because I don’t want to accept my racist uncle, right? In that sort of circumstance, I think, well, it’s the uncle’s problem, right?
0:41:01 You do then have a good reason to just ignore what he finds offensive. But I think with swearing, it’s usually, there’s nothing to gain by swearing in the company of people who are upset by it, except making a point, which my view is that I’d rather be nice and have everybody happy.
0:41:07 Do you swear more or less after writing a book like this?
0:41:27 I think, at least for a time, I became quite conscious of my own swearing, which inhibited it a bit. It sort of felt a bit like work, or I felt like every time I was moved to swear, I would need to sort of analyse what I was doing, which really took the sheen off it.
0:41:49 I don’t think it’s made me swear more, except in the sense that if I’m around people who expect me to swear in a way that is aligned with my arguments on swearing, I will maybe not censor myself in the way that I might otherwise do, because I just don’t want to seem weird about it.
0:42:08 It’s really awkward. You described this as a sweet spot before, trying to balance all these considerations about do I swear, do I not swear. It’s become a lot more complicated area for me after writing this book.
0:42:23 Once again, the book is called For Fuck’s Sake, Why Swearing is Shocking, Rude and Fun. Rachel Roach. I’m kidding, I’m kidding. I’m totally kidding. Rebecca Roach, this was a fucking pleasure. Thanks so much for doing it.
0:42:30 Thank you for having me. It’s been really fucking enjoyable.
0:42:43 Alright, that was a lot of fun. As always, tell me what you think of the episode. You can drop us a line at TheGrayArea@Vox.com. I read all those emails, so keep them coming. I will respond in due time. Just be patient.
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0:01:05 Let me try that again.
0:01:07 Fuck.
0:01:09 Did you feel a difference?
0:01:20 You knew what I was saying the first time, but I’ll bet it felt different the second time.
0:01:22 Why is that?
0:01:25 Swearing is everywhere, and it always has been.
0:01:28 So why does it still have so much power?
0:01:31 And how does that power change over time?
0:01:38 What makes it funny is AG double hockey sticks in one context and horribly fucking offensive in another.
0:01:46 I’m Sean Elling, and this is The Group Barrier.
0:01:57 [music]
0:01:59 Today’s guest is Rebecca Roche.
0:02:04 She’s a senior lecturer in philosophy at Royal Holloway, University of London,
0:02:12 and the author of a new book called “For Fuck’s Sake, Why Swearing is Shocking, Rude, and Fun.”
0:02:15 Roche explores something I’ve always wondered.
0:02:17 What makes swear words different?
0:02:24 How can the same words, depending on how they’re used, either offend people or build trust between them?
0:02:29 And why do they seem to communicate so much more than other words?
0:02:34 I find this shit fascinating, so I invited Rebecca on the show.
0:02:38 Rebecca Roche, welcome to the show.
0:02:40 Thanks for having me.
0:02:44 So I guess we should start with the basics. What makes a swear word a swear word?
0:02:49 Apart from the social consensus we have about which words go in the swear bucket?
0:03:00 They tend to be words that focus on taboo topics, so typically sex, defecation, religion, things like that.
0:03:05 But as far as I can tell, that’s quite universal.
0:03:10 They are words that we tend to use to express emotion,
0:03:17 and the small amount of philosophy that’s been done on swearing in the past has mentioned this,
0:03:21 that swear words are linked to expressing emotions.
0:03:28 You can just sort of give vent using a swear word without necessarily using it as a word in a sentence.
0:03:32 You’re not necessarily trying to convey information.
0:03:38 The linguist Geoffrey Nunberg has said something like swearing is more like a scream than an utterance.
0:03:40 So there’s that aspect of it as well.
0:03:45 And then there is the particular way in which swear words offend.
0:03:50 Swear words don’t offend in the way that other taboo language does.
0:03:57 So slurs, for example, which are words that denigrate entire groups of people.
0:04:01 So homophobic language, racist language, sexist language, and so on.
0:04:07 Those words offend in a particular way by conveying contempt about a group of people.
0:04:09 Swearing doesn’t do that.
0:04:10 Swearing is different.
0:04:18 We’re swearing it’s more that we’re saying something that we know the people around us are going to dislike,
0:04:26 and in doing so we signal our disrespect to them, or we’re taken to do that.
0:04:30 And I think also there’s the moral dimension is different.
0:04:35 I think that most of the time we’re not doing anything morally wrong when we swear,
0:04:38 but I think with slurs it’s different.
0:04:39 I agree with that.
0:04:46 And I’m going to, as a habitual swearer myself, I’m going to end up mounting a bit of a defense of swearing.
0:04:49 I’m sure as we move through this, but I’ll get there.
0:05:01 Just to give a specific example, and I can’t believe I’m about to ask you to draw a philosophical distinction between the words poop and shit.
0:05:05 But I got to do it because shit is a swear word.
0:05:09 Poop is not, but they both refer to the same thing.
0:05:15 So what makes one of them profane and the other just silly?
0:05:20 Yeah, I think the short answer is that there’s no good reason.
0:05:23 One is just ruder than the other.
0:05:31 And I think that’s the case with all of our conventions, that there’s often an air of randomness about that.
0:05:39 So if you use a knife and fork to eat, you hold your knife in your right hand on your fork in your left hand.
0:05:44 And if you did otherwise in a really formal dinner, you would be breaching etiquette.
0:05:50 But there’s no kind of deep reason why holding your fork in your left hand is somehow more right.
0:05:52 It’s just what we’ve all agreed.
0:05:57 And I think the same is true when you contrast the words shit and poop.
0:06:02 One is ruder than the other because we’ve all decided that it’s ruder.
0:06:10 And I think what that comes down to is one word is more strongly disliked than the other.
0:06:20 Are there interesting examples, at least in our language, of words that used to be swear words but are no longer swear words?
0:06:24 And if that’s the case, how did that transition happen?
0:06:31 Yeah, I think the capacity of swear words to shock tends to track the values of a culture.
0:06:37 So in countries like the US and the UK, and obviously this does vary from culture to culture,
0:06:41 religious swearing is milder than it used to be.
0:06:49 So if you think back to the 1930s, the film Gone With The Wind,
0:06:52 where there’s that famous line by the character Rhett Butler.
0:06:57 Rhett, you go. Where shall I go? What shall I do?
0:07:01 Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.
0:07:09 And at the time, that was shocking language. There was discussions about whether it was too rude to include in the film.
0:07:13 You know, there were sort of people saying, well, maybe he should say, I don’t give a hoot.
0:07:18 But, you know, watching that now, that is much, you know, that’s quite measured, right?
0:07:21 You would have him say something else if you were going to remake the movie now.
0:07:26 So that is something that was once really shocking and is no longer shocking.
0:07:37 But by contrast, if you watch that film today, you know, the portrayal of the plight of people of colour in that culture at that time is really shocking, right?
0:07:42 That’s what stands out to modern audiences as a really shocking part of the film.
0:07:48 But at the time when the film was made, that was, you know, that was much less shocking.
0:07:54 And I think that’s a really nice example of how changing cultural values affect our patterns of offensiveness.
0:08:04 You know, which words we view as shocking and which, you know, not just words, but portrayals, behaviours, all sorts of things, what we find offensive in general.
0:08:14 Is it fair to say that the offensiveness of swear words really doesn’t have anything to do with the words themselves?
0:08:17 Yeah, yeah, I think so.
0:08:20 This is one of my deeply held beliefs about swear words.
0:08:35 There are plenty of swear words that if you say them, the sound you make when you say them is the same as the sound you would make in all sorts of benign circumstances where you wouldn’t offend anybody at all.
0:08:43 So the word country, for example, which my kids went through a phase of sort of saying in particular provocative ways.
0:08:54 But, you know, you said that the word country, completely benign, polite, neutral word, but contains the sound of probably our most powerful swear word in English.
0:08:59 So, you know, occasionally you’ll get people saying, oh, well, you know, it’s the sound of swear words.
0:09:01 Stephen Pinker takes this attitude.
0:09:05 He talks about swear words being quick and harsh.
0:09:07 And I think that’s definitely part of it.
0:09:12 Swear words need to be satisfying to utter in the sorts of circumstances where you want to use them.
0:09:18 Like if you have just trapped your thumb in a door or something like that, we want to say, like, fuck.
0:09:20 Well, that’s a really important point.
0:09:26 And I think this is a distinction you make in the book between swearing and using swear words.
0:09:30 When you’re swearing, you’re not really using words to describe something in the world.
0:09:32 You’re communicating emotions.
0:09:38 And this is the point that the linguist you mentioned earlier, Jeffrey Nunberg makes, right, that swear words don’t describe your feelings.
0:09:40 They manifest them.
0:09:45 So when you stub your toe and scream, fuck, that’s not a description of the event.
0:09:47 It’s an expression of pain.
0:09:54 It’s not about something in the way the phrase, I have a black truck is about the black truck in my driveway.
0:09:59 But sometimes swear words are just like any other word, you know, there’s bird shit on my truck.
0:10:01 That’s using a swear word.
0:10:03 Anyway, I just love that distinction.
0:10:04 Yeah.
0:10:05 Thank you.
0:10:06 Yes, that’s right.
0:10:13 I’m just going to say, I mean, not to be too nerdy about this, but context is everything, right?
0:10:24 I mean, this was Victor Stein’s whole point that the meaning of a word lies in how it’s used in the language games we all play with each other.
0:10:31 And if some words have more power than others, it’s not because of anything inherent to the words themselves.
0:10:43 It’s because we’ve given them that power and we keep reinforcing it in our daily interactions with each other, which I guess is kind of how culture in general works.
0:10:45 Yeah, I think that’s exactly right.
0:10:51 I mean, one thing that really brings this out, and this is this is the first puzzle that got me into this topic.
0:10:54 It’s thinking about how asterisks work.
0:11:01 When you see in a news story, a swear word, which has some of its letters obscured by asterisks.
0:11:05 So you get F, star, star, star, instead of F, U, C, K.
0:11:08 And there’s this puzzle about how that works.
0:11:19 And if the offensiveness of swearing is the word itself, then that shouldn’t work because we all know what word is being censored, right?
0:11:23 It doesn’t hide the word in any kind of meaningful way.
0:11:36 But I think the reason it works to reduce offensiveness and it does work to reduce offensiveness, that seems pretty clear, is, you know, I mentioned that when swearing offends it’s because we are signalling disrespect.
0:11:48 And I think when we censor swear words with asterisks or with bleeps when it comes to spoken swear words, that message of disrespect gets replaced by a competing message, which is something like, you know,
0:11:55 I kind of really need to convey this word, but I’m also worried about how you are going to feel about it.
0:11:59 So I’m obscuring some of it, you know, because I care about your feelings.
0:12:05 So you get this kind of message of consideration when you censor swear words like that.
0:12:13 And I think that story wouldn’t make sense unless the offensiveness of swear words was about the attitudes that we convey when we use them.
0:12:17 That particular arrangement of letters or sounds.
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0:14:38 I would say that a big part of my personal interest in swear words and frankly, my own use of them has to do with how incredibly flexible
0:14:43 they are as just pure rhetorical tools.
0:14:50 Why is that? Why are curse words so malleable in that way?
0:15:05 Yeah, yeah. There is a great linguistics paper by the late linguist James McCawley where he’s comparing two senses of the word “fuck,” which he calls “fuck one” and “fuck two.”
0:15:15 “Fuck one” behaves just like a normal verb or whatever that word is. It’s a verb or is it something else?
0:15:24 You can talk about two people fucking, for example, and then it behaves in the same way as a normal verb.
0:15:38 But you can also use it in this more unusual way, which is his “fuck two” when we say “fuck you” or “fuck off” or we just pepper our conversation with swear words.
0:15:50 Anthony Burgess has a great example of this where he talks about an army mechanic trying to fix a truck and saying “fuck it, the fucking fuck is fucking fucked,” which makes complete sense.
0:16:00 That is Mozart. That is music. That is pure art. “Fuck it, the fucking fucker’s fucking fucked.”
0:16:07 I mean, with that kind of flexibility, I don’t know how you cannot use these words. I’m sorry.
0:16:19 Right. Yeah, I mean, it works because we understand that swearing is not just about conveying information, you know, asserting truths and opinions.
0:16:21 It’s also about expressing emotion.
0:16:36 Well, I mean, I just want to point out that in that sentence, “fuck it, the fucking fucker’s fucking fucked,” you have a single swear word, which is being deployed as an imperative, an adjective, a noun, and a verb in one sentence.
0:16:53 I mean, I think we sent this to you. My favorite scene in the history of television is this famous scene in the HBO show “The Wire,” where you have these two detectives who walk into a crime scene.
0:17:03 And for about three minutes or so, they basically break down and deconstruct what happened, and they only use the word “fuck.”
0:17:16 Oh, fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck. Motherfucker. Fuckin’ A.
0:17:20 Is there any other word like that in the language that you can think of?
0:17:24 No, no. I mean, not even any other swear word, really, is there?
0:17:25 I don’t think so.
0:17:35 No, and what’s been communicated there is not really like, you know, the meaning of the word “fuck,” or the meaning of the utterances, right, in any straightforward sense.
0:17:50 It’s an expression of sort of attitudes. I mean, I guess the closest you could get to it without using the word “fuck” is using sort of gestures or just noises, right, rather than actual words.
0:17:58 Yeah, yeah. It’s just, that’s probably the word I use the most, I have to say, not that this thing is being officially tracked.
0:18:12 But, you know, people often like to say that cursing a lot is a sign of unintelligence, or at least it’s a sign of a narrow vocabulary.
0:18:18 Now, I strenuously disagree with that, but I’m curious what you think.
0:18:35 Yeah, yeah. Yeah, this is sort of hotly debated, and it doesn’t obviously indicate a lack of intelligence, although people have tried to demonstrate that it actually, you know, how many swear words you know indicate more intelligence.
0:18:38 You know, there’s nothing sort of really conclusive on either side.
0:18:46 I mean, I think what’s interesting here is to think about what’s going on. Where did this idea come from that people who swear are less intelligent?
0:19:01 And it’s kind of multidimensional. I think there is a lot of classism here, you know, people who are privileged, upper class, and so on, can get away with swearing in a way that poorer people can’t, right.
0:19:11 When you hear Stephen Fry swearing, people are like, oh, he’s so smart, you know, which he is, but he’s also sort of Cambridge educated and very articulate.
0:19:17 And so people think, well, when he’s swearing, he’s doing it in a sort of intelligent way. And he usually is, right?
0:19:32 But when they hear, I don’t know, you know, just sort of someone, an unemployed person at a sports match, say, swearing, then just the perception of that being a particular type of person.
0:19:39 There will just be this sort of knee-jerk response that, well, they’re obviously swearing because they don’t know any other words.
0:19:43 So I think it’s probably based in prejudice, ultimately.
0:19:47 Well, there’s also a gender dimension here too, I’d argue.
0:19:54 Yes, I think, you know, gender and swearing is a fascinating area. But yes, I think you have that.
0:20:03 There is this association with this sort of language and, you know, kind of locker room talk. We’ve heard this before, haven’t we?
0:20:14 It’s how people talk when they are unguarded and there’s an honesty there. And also, you know, what is unspoken there is just the only people there are men, right?
0:20:19 There’s, you know, there’s no, what would be the equivalent of sort of locker room talk for women?
0:20:26 I think there certainly are equivalents, but I don’t think it’s a sort of cultural trope the way that the locker room trope is.
0:20:30 It’s not just that women are judged more harshly for swearing, although I think they are.
0:20:37 But also, you know, there’s this sort of thought that you shouldn’t men shouldn’t swear in front of women, that it’s corrupting.
0:20:44 It reminds me a little bit of, you know, sort of women who swear sort of similar category of women who are sexually promiscuous.
0:20:54 You know, it’s a reason for judging, judging them harshly, even though it would be, you know, neither of those things are typically reasons that men get judged negatively.
0:21:05 Is it just the case in every culture that you know of that certain kinds of people seem to be able to get away with swearing and certain kinds of people don’t?
0:21:07 Is that universal?
0:21:09 So I don’t know.
0:21:21 But if we take a step back and think about taboo in general, so swearing is a taboo behavior and a taboo is just something that’s something that you’re not supposed to do.
0:21:23 It’s usually sort of informal.
0:21:31 So, you know, we’re not talking about stuff that’s actually illegal, but, you know, stuff that is informally disapproved of.
0:21:37 There’s a book on taboo by Keith Allen and Kate Burridge called Forbidden Words.
0:21:49 And they talk about this thing that they call the middle class politeness criterion, which is the idea that if you’re middle class, you are held to higher standards of behavior than everybody else.
0:21:53 So the middle classes get judged harshly for swearing.
0:21:57 The lower classes don’t because, you know, they don’t know any better.
0:22:03 It’s what we expect of such poorly bred people or, you know, whatever the prejudices are.
0:22:11 And people who are upper class can get away with it because they are in this position of privilege.
0:22:33 I used to teach university students and I developed a habit of occasionally, you might even say frequently, cursing in my lectures, not in an offensive way, but more as a way to signal emphasis and emotion.
0:22:39 And it was very useful because when students would hear it, it would jolt them to attention.
0:22:41 Right. I was thinking that. Wake them up, right?
0:22:45 In a constructive way. I mean, is that something you do a lot when you’re teaching?
0:22:52 I don’t actually. I think I occasionally swear when I’m teaching and I do teach this topic.
0:22:55 I have a philosophy of language course when we have a week when we teach swearing.
0:23:05 I mean, maybe I should. I’m not sure whether I would fall victim to the sort of attitudes we’ve been talking about, you know, sort of about men swearing versus women swearing.
0:23:23 Yeah. I mean, I think also part of what I was doing in that context as a teacher and I suppose even as a podcast host, swearing has a way of signaling a lack of pretentiousness, you know what I mean?
0:23:29 It startles and puts people at ease at the same time. And I like that.
0:23:41 And again, swearing seems uniquely useful in this way, or maybe it’s not as unique as I think, but it’s definitely the easiest and most reliable way to do this, which is why I do it.
0:23:50 Yeah. Yeah. I agree. I talk about this a little bit in the book, you know, that experience of making a new friend.
0:24:05 So maybe sort of a new colleague arrives at work and you’re getting to know them and you, you know, you go for a drink with them and you’re chatting and there might be that moment when somebody first takes the risk and uses a swear word, which is risky, right?
0:24:16 Because you might offend them. But if all goes well, there’s this sort of, you know, relaxing sort of exhalation of, OK, we can all relax and it can work really well to increase intimacy.
0:24:25 And I think it’s about trust, swearing with somebody new who, you know, you don’t know what they’re going to make of it. But your, you know, your intentions are good.
0:24:36 You like them and you want to continue to get to know them. And if they respond positively, then that’s, you know, they’ve kind of rewarded your trust, right?
0:24:42 I think that’s how it works. You know, we sort of trust each other to let our guard down a little bit.
0:24:52 Yeah, just a direct note to my audience here. When you hear me swear on the show and you do quite often, it’s not me being unprofessional.
0:25:11 I’m just reinforcing our bond and trust. And I hope that’s how it lands. I think I’ve got, I’ve got a few of these over the years from really thoughtful, I think well-intentioned listeners who didn’t like that I curse sometimes on the show.
0:25:22 And I took it seriously. And I did actually try to ask myself, am I doing this lazily? Am I doing this gratuitously? Or am I doing it because it feels organic and right?
0:25:30 And I hope it’s the latter, but I didn’t just dismiss it out of hand, but I also didn’t stop swearing. So there’s that.
0:25:43 Yeah, that’s it. And I like that response because I think there is a delicate line to tread, isn’t there? So one response could be, like, my house, my rules, if you don’t like it, don’t listen, right?
0:25:53 You don’t, nobody, nobody’s making you stay here. So it’s possible to take that attitude. And then it’s possible to just sort of bend over backwards to avoid offending people.
0:26:04 And kind of, I think sometimes that is appropriate, but there can be times when it comes at the expense of expressing things that are important to express.
0:26:12 Yeah, look, I don’t want to be, I don’t want to be an asshole, but I also don’t want to be who I’m not or I don’t want to pretend to be something.
0:26:13 Yeah, yeah.
0:26:18 And I don’t know where that sweet spot is, but hopefully I’m living somewhere in it.
0:26:26 Right. And I think that’s that sweet spot is something we struggle, we all struggle with a lot and not not just with swearing, I think.
0:26:37 I think another place it might come up is if you have that sort of awkward experience of you have two groups of friends or two groups of people that you hang out with.
0:26:47 And the way you behave is, is different with each, you know, as is inevitable, right? We sort of behave with our parents, friends, differently to how we behave with other groups of people.
0:26:55 And then you might have a situation where everybody’s thrown together and you’re trying to, you know, you’re sort of like, oh, who am I?
0:27:05 How do I behave in a way that kind of doesn’t seem inauthentic, but then also doesn’t make these people wonder who the hell they’re dealing with?
0:27:20 On the flip side of this, the bond reinforcing and the trust signaling is something you call offensive escalation, right? Swearing can also be used to very rapidly dial up the
0:27:21 Yeah.
0:27:26 Offensiveness. Do you have a good example of this in action because I do like this concept.
0:27:35 Yeah. So this is my explanation of how swear words get their offensiveness and explanation doesn’t rely on sort of any magical properties of the word themselves.
0:27:40 So I think the way it happens is we start out with a word that’s disliked.
0:27:54 So you’re speaking to somebody who you know dislikes a particular word or a particular topic and you start using that word or talking about that topic, regardless of your knowledge that about how they feel about it.
0:27:59 And they will ultimately come to see that as a signal of disrespect if you’re doing it.
0:28:05 But an example I talk about in my book arises from the fact that lots of people get my name wrong.
0:28:15 So my name is Rebecca. In case you were wondering, I get called Rachel quite a lot, including in the past by members of my family.
0:28:19 But you know, it’s okay. Occasionally even on.
0:28:23 That’s bullshit, Rebecca. Absolutely bullshit.
0:28:39 That’s what I mean. I’m not talking about like my close family. So yeah, so I draw this out in the book to a length that it has never actually gone in real life where I’m imagining meeting a new person and they start addressing me as Rachel.
0:28:46 And I gently correct them to actually as Rebecca, which I’m not sure I would do in reality.
0:29:04 I just think, okay, that’s I just answered a Rachel now around this person. But yeah, so if I if I were to correct them politely, and they continue to call me Rachel, and I correct them again, and again, and again, you know, maybe with kind of decreasing patients.
0:29:21 And if this goes on, and they continue to call me by the wrong name, then I’m going to struggle to view their behavior as benign, right? If they do it once or twice, then it’s kind of like, okay, lots of people do this.
0:29:28 It’s an innocent mistake. It’s completely forgivable. I’ll just let them know what my name actually is and we can all move on.
0:29:38 But if it goes on, then it’s it’s more difficult to view it in that way. It becomes implausible that they just made this sort of understandable mistake.
0:29:50 And I’m going to start to wonder things like, are they doing this on purpose? Are they trying to upset me? Are they in some subtle way trying to signal their disrespect of me?
0:30:01 So what we have there is this completely inoffensive words, right? The word Rachel is not offensive. And they’re not changing the language they use.
0:30:13 But just through what they signal to me by their use of this same word, my attitude towards them changes, right? I start to become offended.
0:30:24 Now, I use this as an analogy to explain how swear words get to be offensive. But I think it’s not a perfect analogy, right? The word Rachel is not universally disliked.
0:30:36 I think with swear words, we start out with words that are universally disliked. So people across a culture don’t like to hear them used, which I think is why swear words tend to focus on taboo topics.
0:30:42 You know, these are already topics that people don’t want to be discussed in polite contexts.
0:30:53 But I think you get the same offence escalation process where you get people thinking, “Hang on, this person knows that the people around them don’t enjoy hearing this word.”
0:31:03 And yet they’re still going ahead in using it. So it becomes difficult for some people to view the use of that prohibited word as benign.
0:31:06 They then interpret it as a sign of disrespect.
0:31:14 Yeah, I think that’s textbook assholery right there. I don’t think there’s much of a case in any other direction.
0:31:21 Right, doing stuff that, you know, people don’t want you to do without good reason for it. Yes, that’s assholery, isn’t it?
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0:32:13 This has been a fun journey through all the intricacies of cursing. Now, can you tell me when it’s okay to swear and when it’s not okay to swear?
0:32:17 Yeah, I need to solve.
0:32:33 There’s a few dimensions here. One is that just chucking in a swear word into your fucking sentences as a form of fucking punctuation, like I’m just doing here, is relatively benign compared to looking somebody in the eye and saying, “Fuck you.”
0:32:40 Yeah, or you fucking idiot, something like that, where it’s sort of directed at somebody, you’re kind of weaponizing the word.
0:32:45 You’re using it to intensify your negative attitude towards another person.
0:32:52 So I think that that directedness plays a part in aggravating the shock value of swearing.
0:32:58 I think a lot depends on who we’re with, who we’re swearing in front of.
0:33:08 Even people who are very liberal about swearing tend to want to tread carefully around children, especially other people’s children.
0:33:19 If you’re kind of just letting off steam and somebody’s got their kid with them and it’s like, “Oh God, sorry, I’ve had this, but my kids come to events with me and sit in the audience and organize.”
0:33:21 “Oh my God, this kid’s here.”
0:33:26 And I think any sort of power imbalance, we tend to be a bit cagey around that.
0:33:37 So swearing at a police officer, swearing at a teacher, swearing at one of their pupils, this sort of thing where there’s one person who is free to kind of do what they like
0:33:43 and the other person who kind of has to obey the rules or they get into trouble, that sort of imbalance.
0:33:48 But more generally speaking, there are some contexts that are more informal than others.
0:33:58 Not just with regard to the language we use, but things like how we dress, how we have to address each other, you know, whether you can call people by their first names, for example.
0:34:07 And I think it’s helpful to view swearing as just part of this quite rich and complex network of norms.
0:34:14 Just the more formal a situation is, the more risky it’s going to be to swear in this situation.
0:34:27 That’s right. I mean, so much of this really just boils down to a kind of social or emotional intelligence, just simply the capacity to read the room and know where you are, who you are, who you’re with.
0:34:36 And judge appropriately. If you can’t do that, then you’re probably going to run into trouble, not just here, but in lots of other ways.
0:34:50 The point about parenting and kids is interesting. You know, my wife has had to check me a lot at home because she doesn’t want our son, who’s now five, hearing a bunch of curse words.
0:35:02 And on the one hand, I get it. But on the other hand, why do we care? I mean, they’re just words and a lot of them, as we’ve demonstrated, are objectively great.
0:35:13 And the only reason for not wanting him to hear them isn’t that they’re inherently bad. They’re not. It’s that we don’t want him to make an ass of himself in polite society.
0:35:22 And if we’re being honest, we probably also worry about being judged by other people who hear our kid. But is that a good enough reason really?
0:35:30 I guess it is because I do check myself. But I don’t know, Rebecca, is that… I don’t know. What are your thoughts on that?
0:35:32 I mean, I think it is a reason to be careful.
0:35:34 It’s a reason. Is it a good one, though?
0:35:45 We kind of want our children to grow up knowing how to navigate the norms of the culture they’re in. But we do seem to take an incredibly precautionary approach, or lots of people.
0:35:54 The approach you’ve just described, you know, let’s not have our kid know unused swear words just so he doesn’t slip up in situations where it would be really rude to use them.
0:36:05 I mean, if you were to take that attitude to other aspects, you know, other norms, then you would have, well, let’s, you know, let’s have our kid address us in a really formal way.
0:36:17 You know, there’s no sort of mum and dad. There’s, you know, sort of mister and missus or whatever it is. Address everybody super formally just to make sure that when they’re in a situation where it matters, they’re not going to slip up.
0:36:28 I mean, we don’t do things like that, you know, having wear a tux for dinner every night, right? Just do them out, you know, be on the absolute best behaviour possible.
0:36:41 I think part of it is probably that people do judge breaches of etiquette they have to do with swearing more harshly and judge the parents more harshly than other breaches of etiquette.
0:36:49 But I think also it’s weird that we have this attitude that we kind of need to protect our kids from swearing.
0:37:03 But at the same time, you know, if you were to meet somebody who took that to the extreme and said, you know, I’m taking steps to ensure that my kid never learns to swear, they’re going to have a chaperone with them at all times to make sure older kids don’t teach them rude words.
0:37:14 I mean, that would be really sinister. Even those of us who are concerned with our kids being able to be polite, it’s not that we never want our kids to learn these words.
0:37:25 I mean, maybe it’s that we just never want them to learn them from us, right? Because if they learn them from somewhere else, then they kind of understand it’s, you know, it’s a sort of, I’ve called this before like the linguistic black market.
0:37:30 The linguistic black market. That’s good. That’s pretty good.
0:37:35 And I think, you know, this explains the squeamishness we have about swearing in front of other people’s children.
0:37:40 I think a lot of this is the idea that it takes a village to raise a child.
0:37:45 And we think, well, you know, the parents might be kind of really working hard to bring their kids up to be polite.
0:37:50 And yet here I am dropping F bombs left, right and center, undoing all their good work.
0:37:59 So we just kind of want to be supportive to other people’s efforts to raise their children to be good people because that I guess benefits all of us, right?
0:38:12 So let’s imagine someone who likes to swear and does it often and let’s call this hypothetical person me.
0:38:28 If I’m around someone who’s uncomfortable with swearing and gets mildly offended by it, does it make me an asshole if I still do it in a benign way since I can make a strong philosophical case that they shouldn’t be?
0:38:34 offended by that? You can tell me the truth here.
0:38:42 Yeah, I think you so you might be straying into what you’ve previously called assholery here, I think.
0:38:52 Yeah, I mean, so it’s often the case that we can we can make a strong a compelling argument for why people shouldn’t have the preferences they do have.
0:39:02 But, you know, sort of being a tolerant person often requires just accepting people’s preferences at face value.
0:39:13 It’s a bit like people who say you shouldn’t be afraid of spiders or these particular spiders because, you know, although they’re the size of the dinner plate, they’re not going to kill you and then just chucking a massive spider in their lap.
0:39:30 I mean, nobody would do that. You would sort of take the attitude of, well, you know, I know this person’s fear is it doesn’t it doesn’t track what’s actually sensible to fear, but at the same time, a considerate person would just accept it.
0:39:48 Well, you’re the resident expert. How do you walk that line between avoiding swear words so as not to offend people on the one hand and using the words you want to use and simply not caring about offending people who are offended by the wrong things?
0:40:01 If I think people are going to be offended by swearing, I don’t swear. Generally, we should avoid causing people to feel offended if there’s no good reason to do otherwise.
0:40:24 And I think sometimes there is a good reason to do otherwise. So I think, for example, if you have a relative who is offended by mixed race relationships, for example, and you have a spouse who is a different race to you, then if what you care most about is not causing this relative to feel
0:40:37 offends, then maybe you would say to your spouse, okay, do you mind not coming to this family gathering we’ve been invited to because I don’t want to accept my racist uncle, right? In that sort of circumstance, I think, well, it’s the uncle’s problem, right?
0:41:01 You do then have a good reason to just ignore what he finds offensive. But I think with swearing, it’s usually, there’s nothing to gain by swearing in the company of people who are upset by it, except making a point, which my view is that I’d rather be nice and have everybody happy.
0:41:07 Do you swear more or less after writing a book like this?
0:41:27 I think, at least for a time, I became quite conscious of my own swearing, which inhibited it a bit. It sort of felt a bit like work, or I felt like every time I was moved to swear, I would need to sort of analyse what I was doing, which really took the sheen off it.
0:41:49 I don’t think it’s made me swear more, except in the sense that if I’m around people who expect me to swear in a way that is aligned with my arguments on swearing, I will maybe not censor myself in the way that I might otherwise do, because I just don’t want to seem weird about it.
0:42:08 It’s really awkward. You described this as a sweet spot before, trying to balance all these considerations about do I swear, do I not swear. It’s become a lot more complicated area for me after writing this book.
0:42:23 Once again, the book is called For Fuck’s Sake, Why Swearing is Shocking, Rude and Fun. Rachel Roach. I’m kidding, I’m kidding. I’m totally kidding. Rebecca Roach, this was a fucking pleasure. Thanks so much for doing it.
0:42:30 Thank you for having me. It’s been really fucking enjoyable.
0:42:43 Alright, that was a lot of fun. As always, tell me what you think of the episode. You can drop us a line at TheGrayArea@Vox.com. I read all those emails, so keep them coming. I will respond in due time. Just be patient.
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You can’t drop an f-bomb on the radio, but fortunately for our guest, you can say anything you want in a podcast. This week, host Sean Illing talks to philosopher Rebecca Roache, author of For F*ck’s Sake: Why Swearing Is Shocking, Rude, and Fun about the philosophy and linguistics of swearing, and why certain four-letter words hold the magical power to both offend and delight.
Warning: In case it’s not obvious, this episode contains swearing.
Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling), host, The Gray Area
Guest: Rebecca Roache (@rebecca_roache)
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