Why dirty words can cast magic spells.
Swearing, even without censorship or euphemism, can also be affectionately benign. To be understood this way, a listener needs to trust that the speaker is not verbally attacking but letting his or her guard down and signaling that the setting is informal and the relationship is friendly. |
 | | Photo illustration by The New York Times; photograph via Getty Images |
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When my sister and I were little, there was a word we wouldn't utter, even to each other. We referred to it reverentially as the Very Rude Word. Eventually, we worked up the courage to use it — not with grown-ups, of course, just with other children — but even then, we didn't use it in sentences. It was enough to utter it alone, in hushed tones, gleefully savoring the naughtiness of it. |
You might have a similar story about your own initiation into swearing. Parents don't teach their children how to swear, only not to swear — and so we acquire our sweary vocabulary on the linguistic black market from older children, music we're not supposed to be listening to and other bad influences. Swearing's aura of naughtiness remains even as we reach adulthood and allow ourselves to indulge in it. "The words acquire their strong expressive power in virtue of an almost paradoxical tension between powerful taboo and universal readiness to disobey," the philosopher Joel Feinberg remarked of swearing. |
Why, though, is it these words in particular that we're not allowed to say that can produce a powerful reaction in us when we hear them in polite contexts — a job interview, a funeral, a meeting with one's future in-laws? And what sort of "ought" is involved in the widely held belief that we ought not to swear? |
When I started thinking about these questions in 2014, I looked for philosophers' answers and was surprised to find none. So I began to write the book, from which my recent guest essay for Times Opinion is adapted. Swearing can be offensive, of course, but it can also help us withstand pain, foster intimacy and raise a laugh. In my essay, I lift the lid on how it manages to do all this. |
| READ REBECCA'S FULL ESSAY HERE | | |
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