You may remember George Carlin’s seven words from his 1972 riff on swearing. These words—shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, and tits—formed the baseline for most censorship standards. There are scads more obscenities or taboo words that cultures have used throughout history. They usually fall into one of three categories: forbidden, sacred, and filth. Depending on the culture, these categories can include:

• names of dead relatives—motherfucker is derived from this notion
• rulers or famous people 
• symbols of power 
• natural forces 
• body parts 
• animals 
• sex acts 
• bodily functions  
• death
• gender
• religion (gods, devils, sacred places, the future of life)

Since Carlin’s 1972 listing, English has ballooned to 17 naughty words (estimates vary), more if you count the “iffy” ones, which you’d never find in a PG Disney movie (or on my mother’s lips). We American English speakers look positively prudish in contrast to Latin dictionaries that identify 50-100 profanities. How frequently Romans actually used them remains unknown.

Reasons we swear

• Anger/annoyance. Swearing is an outburst, which gives us relief when we have a surge of emotion or pain. Swearing is a substitute for a physical response aimed at people or the toe you stubbed.
• Showing disdain. Swearing also has an important social component: to show one’s contempt for social conventions via vile language in public or on paper. 
• In-group swearing. If you belong to a social group that casually drops the f-bomb, it can become contagious to everyone. But when there is someone in the group who does not swear (like my mother who even had to spell out c-r-a-p), people usually adjust their swear-rate down. In this case, members might resort to using euphemisms, or so-called deputy words, such as gosh darn it, friggin,’ heck, shoot, shucks, phooey, MOFO, BS, SNAFU, FAFO, and so on. 

I’ve always found it curious that these sanitized deputy words are more widely accepted. Even altered written words like f**k, f—, f-word, f***, and eff you are okay. Who are they fooling? We all know what the euphemism stands for. That said, even those weasel words are not used in polite company or formal writing, showing there are gradations of vulgar language.

Why swear words exist

Many swear words are formed from the desire to challenge taboos. Take, for example, the Egyptians who gave everyone two names—a public name and a secret one. As Joseph Williams pointed out, “They believed if someone knew a person’s real name he would have power over that person. In other cultures, word-magic takes the form of taboos against uttering the name of a god or the name of certain relatives or even words that sound like those words.” In some cultures, violating taboos can result in expulsion from the village or being put into the stockades. 

Swearing abroad

Any word we utter is just a set of sounds. It gains its ‘value’ (good or bad) because we collectively agree on that ranking. In my lifetime, hell and damn have become more acceptable. But we don’t really know the value of swear words in other languages unless we understand the culture very well. 

Let’s take, as an example, the British swear word bloody. Unless we live in England, Americans have no feel for its place in British society. Is it on the order of the ‘f’ word, or as anodyne as ‘darn it’? The only measure I have of its offensiveness is my feeling that the Queen Elizabeth would never have said, “I can’t keep this bloody crown on straight.” 

Can/should we eliminate swear words?

We can’t really get rid of curse words altogether because it is not really the word itself that should be eradicated but the situation that calls for the need to express strong emotions. If we were forbidden to say these particular words, there would immediately be another stock of words to fill that vacuum. As Allen Walker Read said, if dirty words did not exist, we would invent them because they “perform a function for speakers of Standard English by serving as scapegoats ministering to the deep-rooted need for symbols of the forbidden.”   

Sounds of swearing

To make up your own swear words, choose sounds that are short and sharp. The “best” sounds are the short vowels and sounds like t, d, p, b, k, g, sh, and f. Long vowels (ā ē ī ō ū), nasals (n m), and sonorants (l r w j) do not “feel” rough enough. For instance, see what kind of reaction you get when you say to someone, “You’re really a jarro!” Or “He’s such a leel.” Curiously, leave it to the French to class up their obscenity word stock: Their polite-sounding word for s**t is merde, which violates all the rules above. 

The story of swearing is complicated and nuanced. The practice won’t go away anytime soon, if ever. As sociologist Ashley Montague explained, they are a more civilized response than the physical violence less civilized people resort to. Like money and perfume, we should just remember to use them wisely.

References for “Swearing”

Algeo, J., & Acevedo Butcher, C. (2014). The origins and development of the English language. (7th ed.). Cengage Learning.

Crystal, D. (2019). The Cambridge encyclopedia of the English language (3rd ed.). Cambridge University Press.

Montagu, A. (1967). The anatomy of swearing. Macmillan.

Read, A. W. (1934). An obscenity symbol. American Speech, 9(4), 264–268. https://doi.org/10.2307/452191

Williams, J. M. (1975). Origins of the English language: A social and linguistic history. Free Press.

Like this post? Read more like this one about Dictionaries!