Back on June 11, I posted a blog affirming that swearing is good for you, information that was drawn from Emma Byrne's book ("Swearing Is Good For You")--and personal experience. In that post I narrated my occasional strategic swearing and commented on its extreme usefulness. Part of the reason I'm so fascinated by the subject is that my rare experience of swearing around Pietists drove them nuts and they just didn't know how to deal with me as a result. So I suspect there are a lot more than religious pietists who also misunderstand swearing--even though it's a regular occurrence in many forms throughout the American culture and workplace.
To gain a better understanding of swearing, here's a bit more information. The beginning place is to understand that scientists and linguists make a distinction between propositional and non-propositional swearing. The distinction is useful.
In business, nearly all my swearing was strategic. It's weird, but my business was so much fun that non-propositional swearing rarely surfaced. My strategic swearing is correctly labelled "propositional swearing" because it is deliberately chosen for effect. Furthermore, strategic or propositional swearing is processed mainly in the left hemisphere of the brain--the reasoning hemisphere. It's processed for structure, sound, tone, strategy and meaning. For me, propositional swearing may require preparation of 5 seconds to an hour or more before it comes out of my mouth. For example, when I was going to interview a potentially new client and had some concerns that he might question the business sophistication of my background as a former clergy, I thought about the best possible context, and the best possible words to use. So it was definitely audience focused communication. Inevitably, it surfaced in a narrative which I related to build my case for service to a client. If there were suggestions that the client did not use overt swearing, I took that into consideration. The opposite was also true. Propositional swearing was inevitably related to context, serving to enhance my business options.
In contrast, non-propositional swearing is almost immediate. It's an unplanned outburst, typically when you're surprised by a frustrating experience. I use only one expletive automatically. In a sense, it's my favorite and usually no one else is around, and it leans more heavily on the right hemisphere, the emotional side of the brain. I suspect it's the same word at least 95% of the time: "shit." I've noticed that lots of people prefer "fuck." I think fuck is for a much narrower use--and because of movies and web streaming it's way overused. Don't laugh, but I think shit is more upper class--and fuck is more lower class. And since I like to refer to myself as upper-class, that may be the reason I automatically prefer "shit." I recently learned from a brief article that Mark Edmundson, the distinguished UVA English professor, also prefers "shit." I don't have enough data, but shit may be preferred by the educational class. Like me, he rarely uses expletives.
Of course, shit also has a much broader locus of control than fuck. It can be used positively--for emotional relief, like fuck. My grandmother used "shit" very positively. She grew up definitely upper-middle-class, Methodist, and had two years of college, an experience something true of less than 1% of the population born in the same decade (1880s.) If as a little kid, I did something that was really smart--and perhaps unexpected--she would comment with a smile "you little shit." It was a definitional statement and obviously more propositional.
What's also important to understand is that originally swearing--cursing--was thought to have built-in magic. Swearing and cursing, they believed, can alter reality. Word took on human reality. That's very obvious in the Biblical texts. A close reading of the first verse in St. John's Gospel makes the case: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."
People in those worlds thought that swearing could alter reality. If you cursed someone, they really became cursed. It affected their lives, Swearing could "call down calamities or literally change the world." I doubt that most citizens of the USA believe that today, but there are plenty of places in our culture that if you curse someone, you may have to pay for it with a fight. The Southern Honor Code still sometimes suggests a physical duel (fists, not swords). Cursing someone is slandering to the Southerner. It was viewed worse than murder, because it spoiled a man's reputation. You'll still find young men at schools like Vanderbilt, UVA or Duke who are quite willing to hit the guilty or get in a fight when they are cursed. That suggests that the implications of cursing are cultural, not class oriented. It doesn't happen at Midwestern schools.
In studies also reported in the Byrne book, research reveals that swearing can occur with any emotion, yielding both positive or negative outcomes. Furthermore, these studies suggest that most uses of swear word don't create problems.Timothy Jay and Kristin Janschewitz have recorded over 10,000 episodes of public swearing by children and adults. They found that swearing rarely produced negative consequences. They have never seen public swearing lead to physical violence. Indeed, they found that most "public uses of taboo words are not in anger; they are innocuous or produce positive consequences (e.g., humor elicitation)." Since they both reside in Massachusetts, I suspect they are unfamiliar with the Southern Honor Code
Jay and Janschewitz believe that a key issue is to focus on the communication goals that are achieved by swearing, swear words can achieve a number of outcomes, as when used positively for joking or storytelling, stress management, fitting in with the crowd, or as a substitute for physical aggression. These authors, like Byrne, are intrigued by Stephens work that shows that swearing is associated with enhanced pain tolerance. This finding suggests swearing has a cathartic effect, which many of us may have personally experienced in frustration or in response to pain.
So swearing feels good--and it's also liberating. And people from all generations and cultures swear. Both propositionally and non-propositionally.