The benefits of a well-timed curse: What science says about swearing

Few things are more paradoxical than the way American television deals with the possible utterance of a swear word on air: with a beep. Watching the speech of a public personality punctuated by beeps ultimately underlines those swear words and, in addition, the beep itself becomes a comic resource. In a 2012 episode of Modern Family, Mitchell Pritchett and Cameron Tucker’s two-year-old daughter Lily blurts out “fuck” in church, causing those present to fall silent in stupefaction for a few seconds, before bursting into laughter. “I have two weaknesses: kids swearing and old people rapping,” Cameron says, looking into the camera.

The little girl didn’t know why the word had such an impact (the organization No Cursing Club asked ABC to remove the episode, considering it a bad example for a two-year-old to swear on TV). But it is a good example of how swear words always generate a reaction by acting as emotional switches in the brain. In Spain — more liberated in this practice — we had Guille in Farmacía de Guardia, a kid who kept saying “joder (fuck)” and, every time he did, cue the canned laughter. A kid saying a swear word! That was the comedy, and it worked. For better or worse, a forbidden word alters a speech.

But why? “When we hear a swear word, our brain perceives it as a threat or an emotionally charged stimulus,” Jon Andoni Duñabeitia, director of the Center for Cognitive Science at the faculty of languages and education at Nebrija University, explains to EL PAÍS. “This happens because swear words activate different brain networks and structures including the amygdala, which is fundamental for processing emotions, especially those related to fear and threat detection.” Duñabeitia points out that when someone blurts out “Fuck!” in the middle of a conversation, the amygdala interprets it as something out of the ordinary, as if it were practically a warning of danger, which provokes an immediate emotional and physiological response, such as a state of alert. “That’s why swear words instantly grab our attention and provoke such strong reactions. In a way, our brains are programmed to react to them as if they were a cry of ‘watch out!’, which explains why they are so effective in expressing intense emotions,” he says.

A ***** to make people laugh

In reality, swear words are always associated with being offensive in nature when in fact, in some cases, they can also express confidence and intimacy. Andoni Duñabeitia points out that using swear words can be a way of challenging the status quo and breaking with established norms. Sometimes, he says, saying one at the right moment can be a form of subversion, a way of claiming space and expressing discontent in a direct and unfiltered way. But one of the areas where its power is greatest is in humor.

“At times, it can be very entertaining and plays an important role in comedy. It can be amusing as well as offensive,” writes British journalist Michael Adams in In Praise of Profanity (2016). Spanish comedian Santiago Alverú considers that in comedy, the insult works as much as the costumes or the chosen themes. “A comedian begins to develop his personality from the very beginning. As he grows as an artist, he sheds certain elements and takes on others,” he explains. “If a comedian has been doing black humor for 20 years and says ‘for fuck’s sake,’ nothing comes of it. If Ramón García does it on [game show] Grand Prix, he’ll get in trouble. The swear word works because it is liberating, it is cathartic for the recipient. If the swear word offends, just as if the joke offends, it is usually because its audience has expanded involuntarily and the speech, reserved for certain listeners, reaches the mainstream or social networks, which lack the context and the necessary codes to interpret it.”

Therefore, as in other debates, context is everything. “If a comedian drops a swear word during their act, most people will laugh and not be bothered by it. But if a politician does it in an official speech, the reaction could be very different.” In politics, insults have almost always occurred when a public representative has been caught out by a microphone they assumed was off. The 2004 episode when then-Spanish defense minister José Bono was caught on camera calling then-British prime minister Tony Blair an “asshole” was notorious. In recent years, the tone has been rising in the political arena and “asshole” is no longer reserved for when someone believes the microphones are off. In 2021 a deputy for Spanish far-right party Vox shouted it at Finance Minister María Jesús Montero in Congress. Nobody laughed.

Context also affects gender unequally, creating a double standard. Studies have shown that women who use swear words are more harshly judged than men. According to different research, women who use vulgar language are viewed as less feminine and more aggressive, while men who do so do not suffer the same negative connotations. “It’s a question of gender expectations that, although they are evolving, continue to mark our perceptions,” says Andoni Duñabeitia.

The positive effects of a “f**k!”

Good news for lovers of swear words: a study titled The fluency of taboo words and knowledge of insults: deconstructing the myth of vocabulary poverty indicates that the use of swear words is a sign of intelligence. As one of the authors of the analysis, Timothy B. Jay, explains: “People that are good at language are good at generating a swearing vocabulary.” In fact, as Miguel Ángel del Corral Domínguez, an expert in linguistics and communication, points out, swearing often has a clear component of venting and can be very healthy. “Of course, we must pay attention to the communicative situation and foresee the possible effects or consequences that may derive from this action,” he warns. “However, in the reality of everyday life, in any situation that bothers or irritates us, we will not dedicate ourselves to composing sonnets with witty hyperbole, but it is normal to end up uttering the most frequent insults, which will also be the ones we are most accustomed to hearing. Sometimes even those used by friends or family members rub off on us, as happens with all kinds of vocabulary.” Del Corral points out the importance of taking the gradation that exists in the field of insults into account. “The severity of the insult depends on the context: wanker or son of a bitch can be very offensive or, depending on the tone, affectionately familiar.”

The study How swear words can affect strength: disinhibition as a potential mediator posits that repeating a swear word can promote positive emotions and good mood. Swear words distract those who use them and give them increased self-confidence. Additionally, they can reduce feelings of pain and increase physical strength. “By swearing you’re triggering an emotional response in yourself, which triggers a mild stress response, which carries with it a stress-induced reduction in pain,” psychologist Richard Stephens, one of the authors of the study, told CNN. However, notes Del Corral Domínguez, caution is vital when swearing, as well as measuring the context. “Excess is as bad as deficiency, and using vulgarisms or swear words and a colloquial tone in situations that require formality is as abnormal and inappropriate as using an absurd and ridiculous pedantic formality that is inappropriate for the situation in an informal tone of trust and familiarity where swear words slip spontaneously in with the flow of the conversation,” he says.

Back to the bleeps: is that the right way to remove swear words from television? Sometimes, censorship creates a textbook Streisand effect that only serves to glorify them. So believes the author of For F*ck’s Sake: Why Swearing is Shocking, Rude, and Fun (2023), Rebecca Roache, who in the book addresses the effects of swear words from a philosophical perspective. “When swearing offends, it’s because we are signaling disrespect and when we censor swear words with asterisks or with bleeps when it comes to spoken swear words, that message of disrespect gets replaced by a competing message, which is something like, ‘I really need to convey this word but I’m also worried about how you are going to feel about it, so I’m obscuring some of it because I care about your feelings,’” Roache said in an interview with the U.S. media outlet Vox.

Therefore, those attempts to censor swear words don’t always make sense, as Alverú points out, when talking about those moments when insults shock the audience at a comedy show, a debate that he considers comes from the United States. “They are much more susceptible there to the use of their fucks, cunts, retards etcetera, so much so that they even have ridiculous euphemisms for them: ‘f bomb’ for fuck, ‘c word’ for cunt or ‘r word’ for retard. I say ridiculous because they do not replace the use of the word, but rather they free the person who uses them from guilt, even if this continues to evoke the controversial term. They are not solutions, they are band-aids,” says the comedian. And he may be right: in principle, it was not necessary to put any beeps or asterisks in this text so as not to offend anyone.

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