Small Talk 11 - Profanity

This week I learned that in medieval English, the word for kestrel was windfucker. Well. There are many entertaining names for birds, but this was a new benchmark. I wanted to share the gem with my bird-loving friends. But I paused, because the name is, after all, kind of a swear. And there aren’t good rules for how much we should swear in casual conversation. So let’s explore that now—the question of profanity in small talk.

Profanity

I admit that I love swearing. I was raised among a family of prodigious swearers. My grandfather was the most profane, or at least the most creative. He regularly complimented us with such epithets as… ‘You’re so full of shit your eyes are brown!’ and ‘Your mouth goes like a duck’s ass under water!’ and ‘You talk like a shit salesman with a sample in his mouth!’

I found this very inspiring, of course. I’ve wondered if it held him back in life some, because he swore with generosity and equality—everybody got some. But there’s a park named after him in our home town, and he was elected to the Lake County Board. So maybe his language helped him, or maybe he could have been governor, if not for the salty language. Meanwhile, in this very environment, my mother tried to prevent her children from swearing at all, in even the lightest manner. She maintained a jar where we had to pay 25 cents for each time we swore. And she extended the definition of a curse to expressions such as ‘shut up’ and ‘stupid.’

So who had it right? Gramps or Mom?

There is a surprisingly large amount of scholarly literature about swearing. Books and websites dive into linguistics and etymologies and philosophies that aren’t nearly as funny as you’d hope they’d be. However, one useful observation emerges: over the course of human history, swearing falls into two categories—religion and bodily functions. The balance between the two has swung back and forth over time, revealing something about ourselves.

The ancient Romans left a rich record of profanity. Presumably because they had no paper, they wrote extensively on walls. Ordinary things like advertisements and prices of goods, but also, in abundance, profane graffiti. You can see this today in the ruins of Pompeii. Here’s an example of one, written outside the entrance of a Pompeiian house, which is the least offensive example I could find: “Fortunatus, you sweet soul, you total fucker. Written by one who knows.”

The Romans stand tall among cultures for profanity, in that they combined religion and sex equally. Their god of fertility, Priapus, was represented with an enormous erection. Epigrams honoring Priapus are filled with aggressive, sexual language that almost everyone would describe as obscene. The Romans had a lot of naughty words to draw from. Linguists have identified about six very offensive words in English; In ancient Latin, there were at least ten. But here’s an important point: not everything that we consider profanity today was objectionable in ancient Rome. It all depends on context. That is, we make words profane based on how we consider them.

If we look at Judeo-Christian traditions, we find that the biggest swears are those involving religion. The third commandment says, “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain.” According to theologians, here’s why breaking that commandment is so bad: When you make a false oath, invoking God, you assume his honor to support your falsehood and in effect make him out to be a liar. So when Jimmy says “I swear to God, I didn’t steal the pie from your window, Mrs. Wainwright!” he’s suggesting that God can attest to the truth of his alibi. So if Jimmy did steal the pie (which he probably did, let’s face it), he’s committing a pretty bad sin. In this way, according to the Judeo-Christian tradition, religious oaths are the worst kind. It would be better if Jimmy said, “Yeah I ate your fucking pie, Mrs. Wainwright.” Because religion.

In the Middle Ages, it was much worse to swear religiously than to use words we consider obscene today. In fact, some of our most taboo words were part of everyday, acceptable speech. The c-word, now widely considered the most objectionable swear, was used commonly in medieval England. The same was true of bollocks and sard (a synonym for fuck that might be fun to bring back). In addition to the windfucker, medieval words for nature included the shiterow (a heron), cuntehoare (a kind of poppy), and pissabed (dandelion). Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales is full of sexual and scatological references that make any schoolboy giggle. Clergymen from that time did caution against using these kinds of ‘foule wordes,’ but it was indisputably worse to say a religious oath. And yet, the record shows, people did—because it was a way to emphasize a point, to call attention to what you were saying, to shock people into taking you seriously. Swearing in the Middle Ages often involved God’s physical anatomy—a popular oath was “By God’s bones!” and there are also many references to God’s arms, nails, sides, arms, and of course, arse.

There is an interesting theory that suggests a correlation between personal privacy and the taboo nature of bodily functions. In the Middle Ages, towns and homes didn’t allow for much privacy. You had to poop and pee in public, people typically slept in groups around a shared fire, and even reading was a communal activity, due to the rarity of books. But starting in the Renaissance, homes began to include many more rooms, with individual fireplaces, and early forms of privies. Once people could do their personal business in private, these acts inspired more curiosity, mystery, and titillation. That is, the body inspired profanity.

I’m not sure about this theory, but it’s clear that the Victorians took privacy—and prudishness toward their bodies—to a hilarious level. The literature shows that by this time, expressing a religious oath just wasn’t a big deal. For example, the word zounds (which I thought was from Scooby Doo?) appears in dictionaries without rebuke as ‘an abbreviation of God’s wounds.’ On the other hand, in polite Victorian society, you should never even think of referring to sex or excrement. Or, for that matter, trousers! Or the word ‘leg!’ There are accounts of Victorian ladies dressing the legs of their pianos because the naked instruments were considered too suggestive. So if you really wanted someone’s attention at this time, you’d exclaim Shit! or Cock! or any of the words people consider offensive today. And Victorian people definitely exclaimed them. It’s not that the taboo words vanished from ‘polite society’ but that they now had more impact. The Victorians, by the way, had some swearwords no longer in use today. Kind of a shame, given the poetry of these words—they include: huffle, gamahuche, larking, and godemiche. Look em up.

Today, in English-speaking countries, we have even less concern for religious swearing. Surveys in this century cite the most common swearwords as hell, damn, goddamn, Jesus Christ, and—the most common of all—oh my God. (Tip o the hat to Skrillix.) It’s also much more common to use one of the six or seven obscene words, especially in popular entertainment. However, if someone’s giving a speech in a professional setting and they use profanity, it is certain to cause a kerfuffle. This brings us back to our original question—is it good to swear in small talk? My casual research on this subject yielded the following conclusions.

People swear about what they care about. The impact and usefulness of a swear comes from its taboo nature, the importance society places on it. If you’re in awe of a god, you’ll swear by that god for emphasis. If you’re obsessed with people’s bottoms, you’ll swear about that. Etcetera.

Profanity can be defined by how it makes us feel. Wait! I mean this more literally than you might think. Studies show that speaking or hearing swearwords increases skin conductance, the degree to which our skin conducts electricity. Higher emotional arousal creates higher skin conductance. Swearing electrifies us! On a related note, there is strong evidence that swearing is processed differently than regular speech in our brains. MRIs show that when we process profanity, our limbic system lights up—specifically the amygdala, which records the emotional content of words (rather than their basic meaning). This may help explain coprolalia, the compulsive swearing associated with Tourette’s syndrome.

Swearing is therapeutic. There’s pretty good support for this, it seems. For example, studies led by the psychologist Richard Stevens showed that swearing can help us endure pain. Participants sunk their hands into a bucket of painfully cold water—some of them got to swear and some didn’t. You guessed it—the ones who swore were able to endure the pain longer. But here’s an important side note: among the swearers, those who swore less in regular life, had more pain relief during the experiment. And that’s just physical pain—other studies demonstrate the cathartic effect of swearing for emotional distress. So in theory, if someone rear-ends you in traffic and you swear profusely, it will help with both your sore neck and your worry about missing your appointment.

Swearing is correlated to honesty. Throughout history, literature has connected ‘plain speech,’ which typically contains swears, with honesty. More recently, research suggests that including swearwords increases the believability of statements. All of this is perception of course—I found no studies that prove people who swear aren’t lying. But it’s an important theme to consider. Maybe Jimmy didn’t steal the pie. I think there’s also a converse to this theory—that people who fake-swear aren’t trustworthy. I’m not talking about quaint swearing (while our kids were young, my wife only used expressions like ‘rats!’ and ‘jeepers!’ which to this day is charming but absolutely did not prevent them from swearing like sailors, especially the youngest two). I’m talking about precious, euphemistic words, like ‘frick.’ It seems particularly disingenuous to use these terms because everybody knows to what they refer, eliciting the same taboo response, so you might as well just say the words, right? A former colleague comes to mind—some of you will know.

So swearing is good, right? Well not exactly. Because if we make swearing good, it will no longer be taboo, and will therefore cease to be a swear. That’s the paradox of profanity—we react to it, are drawn to it, because we are not supposed to. Swearing has to be shocking, and if it becomes too commonplace, it will no longer be shocking. Also, by God’s bones, we’ll no longer laugh when we hear windfucker.

So use swearing in your small talk, but judiciously so. This also applies to all the other words.

Have a good one,

Kipling Knox

If you like Small Talk, please consider subscribing.