Science Topic 3: Why do we Swear?

Matthew R. Bennett

According to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the rudest word in the universe is
“Belgium”.

Key points to take home having read this concept are:

1) Understand that swearing is an important human emotion and worthy of
study in psychology
2) Explore some of the ideas around self-definition and why swearing might be
important and how this importance develops.
3) Demonstrate how data sets for science can come from some unusual
places.

Swearing has a bad reputation as a research topic because it was assumed to be

simply a sign of aggression, weak language proficiency or even low intelligence 1. The
idea that swearing comes from a lack of language proficiency or low intelligence was
challenged by Jay and Jay (2015). They measured verbal fluency by asking volunteers
to think of as many words beginning with a certain letter of alphabet as they can in a
minute. More words in the minute the greater the verbal fluency. They compared this
with a swearing task in which the volunteers were asked to think of as many swear
words they could in a minute. Those that scored highly in the verbal fluency test also
scored highly in the swearing fluency test.

Researchers are beginning to challenge the view that swearing is negative in other
ways. For example, Stapleton et al. (2022) explored the power of swearing in a recent
paper. They conducted a meta-analysis of a hundred papers on the subject of
swearing from a range of different academic disciplines. Dewaele (2004) found that
for speakers of more than one language the catharsis of swearing is greater in one’s
first language. People feel better through swearing and it assists in releasing emotion
such that it can have a physical response such as causing one to sweat (Harris et al.,
2003). It is possible that swearing may be linked to the automatic responses of flight
or fight and as such be linked to the most primitive parts of our brain which are
removed from the speech regions. Swearing may therefore be a hard-wired part of
our human response to danger and difficult to inhibit. It is also clear that swearing
command more attention (Jay et al. 2008) which also makes sense if you are trying to
warn your group to run or fight. Stephens and Robertson (2020) found that swearing
raised a person pain threshold. This was based on asking participants to put their
hands in buckets of icy water while swearing or not. In another study Stephens et al.
(2022) found that swearing had an impact on a person’s physical strength. There are
other reasons for swearing to such as expressing aggression, humour or as part of
storytelling. Fagersten (2017) looked at the use of swearing by the YouTuber
PewDiePie and showed how it was being used to build intimacy and stimulate
conversations between friends. Stapleton (2010) explored the use of swearing as part

1 https://theconversation.com/the-power-of-swearing-how-obscene-words-influence-your-mind-body-

and-relationships-192104
of the process of storytelling.

Swearing has a range of potential physical and social purposes but according to
Stapleton et al. (2022) we know little about it. Most people when they hear a swear
word in a foreign language are unaware of it which implies that the power of the word
does not come from itself or the way it is said otherwise we would be able to spot
unfamiliar swear words. One explanation is to blame your parents! We are conditioned
by punishment and reprimand that certain words are bad and linked to certain
emotions. However, the research does not seem to bear this out (Stapleton et al.,
2022). Swearing is perhaps linked to memory and may share something in common
with music. There is a lovely piece of research done by Loveday et al. (2020) that used
archive files of Desert Island Discs that shows that a self-defining period for personally
relevant music emerges spontaneously in adolescence and ones early adult years.
For those that don’t know what Desert Island Discs is, it is a long running radio
programme on Radio 4 that started in 1942 and is still going today in which celebrities
are asked to select eight records to be cast away with. Basically, it is a talk show based
around eight favourite songs. Loveday et al. (2020) found that “half of all choices were
shown to have been most important between the ages of 10 and 30 years, and the
most popular reason for their relevance was the song’s link to memories of a person,
period, or place.” Stapleton et al. (2022) suggests that swearing may show a similar
origin that starts in a self-defining period and is linked to specific memories, fears, and
actions.

Figure 1: Difference in number of approximants in control word samples versus

swear words, by language. Positive values indicate more approximants in control
words than in swear words. Diamonds depict per-language averages. Source: Levi-
Ari and McKay (2022).
There is another study which is worth discussing and that was conducted by Levi-Ari
and McKay (2022) 2. They set out to see if there were common principles to the sound
of swear words, to address the question “why do swear words sound the way they
do?” The idea that sounds in swear words in any language (their phonemes) contribute
to their offensiveness transgresses a fundamental linguistic principle: that the
connection between the sound and meaning of a word is arbitrary. Take the word
“milk” nothing in this word is linked to its meaning and it is essentially luck that milk is
the word that described the output of a cow. One idea is that plosives allow an
expression of anger or frustration. A plosive is a consonant sound made by blocking
the flow of air as it leaves the body such as p, t and k. And we all know what English
word ends with “k”! Swear words tend not to have many sonorant sounds which are
softer such as l and w. The first study by Levi-Ari and McKay (2022) used volunteers
fluent in a range of languages that are not closely related – Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian,
Korean and Russian. Each volunteer was asked to create a list of swear words in their
language and to voice them. The sounds were compared to those spoken using a set
of control words. They did not find evidence for any abundance of plosives but did find
a lack of sounds called approximants (Fig. 1), which are created with a slight
obstruction of the airflow, such as l, r, w, and y. They explored this further by creating
a test in which they created pairs of “foreign” pseudo-words that differed by just one
sound. One of the words contained an approximant and the other a control sound an
affricate; so yemik and chemik is the example they give. People consistently judged
the word without the approximant to be the swear word (Fig. 2). This might help explain
why frigging is considered more acceptable than the fu***ng for example.

2 A popular account can be found at: https://theconversation.com/swear-words-we-studied-speakers-

of-languages-from-hindi-to-hungarian-to-find-out-why-obscenities-sound-the-way-they-do-192473
 Figure 2: Proportion of trials in which participants (grouped by native language)
identified the word with the affricate rather than the approximant as the swear word.
Diamonds depict group averages, and the dashed line denotes chance. Source:
Levi-Ari and McKay (2022).

Further Reading
Dewaele, J.M., 2004. The emotional force of swearwords and taboo words in the
speech of multilinguals. Journal of multilingual and multicultural development, 25(2-
3), pp.204-222.
Fägersten, K.B., 2017. The role of swearing in creating an online persona: The case
of YouTuber PewDiePie. Discourse, context & media, 18, pp.1-10.
Harris, C.L., Ayçíçeğí, A. and Gleason, J.B., 2003. Taboo words and reprimands elicit
greater autonomic reactivity in a first language than in a second language. Applied
Psycholinguistics, 24(4), pp.561-579.
Jay, K.L. and Jay, T.B., 2015. Taboo word fluency and knowledge of slurs and general
pejoratives: Deconstructing the poverty-of-vocabulary myth. Language Sciences,
52, pp.251-259.
Jay, T., Caldwell-Harris, C. and King, K., 2008. Recalling taboo and nontaboo words.
The American journal of psychology, 121(1), pp.83-103.
Lev-Ari, S. and McKay, R., 2022. The sound of swearing: Are there universal patterns
in profanity? Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, pp.1-12.
Loveday, C., Woy, A. and Conway, M.A., 2020. The self-defining period in
autobiographical memory: Evidence from a long-running radio show. Quarterly
Journal of Experimental Psychology, 73(11), pp.1969-1976.
Stapleton, K., 2010. 12. Swearing. Interpersonal pragmatics, 6, p.289.
Stapleton, K., Fägersten, K.B., Stephens, R. and Loveday, C., 2022. The power of
swearing: What we know and what we don’t. Lingua, 277, p.103406.
Stephens, R. and Robertson, O., 2020. Swearing as a response to pain: Assessing
hypoalgesic effects of novel “swear” words. Frontiers in psychology, p.723.
Stephens, R., Dowber, H., Barrie, A., Almeida, S. and Atkins, K., 2021. Effect of
swearing on strength: Disinhibition as a potential mediator. Quarterly Journal of
Experimental Psychology, p.17470218221082657.