Perhaps more surprising is how many profane three- and five-letter words there are. Less important but also notable is the little bump in eight-letter profane words, compared with the language in general. This is due to words composed of two four-letter words, like bullshit and shithead. So this raises the obvious question, why? Why are profane words more likely than other words to have four letters? The three-letter words included in the list are ass , cum, fag, gay, god, Jew, and tit.
And the four-letter words are anal, anus, arse, clit, cock, crap, cunt, dick, dumb, dyke, fuck, gook, homo, jerk, jism, jugs, kike, Paki, piss, scum, shag, shit, slag, slut, spic, suck, turd, twat, and wank. Do you notice any general trend in how these words are pronounced? Just a few words on the list have more than one syllable: anal, anus, homo, Paki, and, arguably, jism. The profane words are but a speck in a sea of monosyllables. They tend to be built in a particular way.
English allows many different types of syllable. Every syllable has a vowel at its core. For some syllables, the vowel is both the beginning and the end the alpha and the omega, as it were , as in words like a, I, and uh. But most syllables also have consonants in them, before or after the vowel.
So with this in mind, we can return to English profanity. If you briefly revisit the words in the lists above, you may notice something remarkable about their syllables. Almost every word on those lists ends with one or more consonants.
As you can see, many profane words even double down on their final consonants. Words like cunt and wank actually have two consonant sounds at the end. Interestingly, consonants seem pretty important in general—all but a few like ass or arse begin with at least one consonant, and many begin with two, like crap, prick, slut, and twat.
But really the strong generalization here appears to be that syllables of profane words tend to be closed. Could these two tendencies—a trend toward having just one syllable and another toward that one syllable being closed—be part of what makes profane words sound profane? We can start to answer this by splitting our data in a different way—based not on how many letters a word is spelled with but on how many syllables it has and whether those syllables are closed.
When we do that, we find that not just the three- and four-letter words are closed monosyllables; so are seven of the sixteen five-letter words, like balls, bitch, prick, and whore, but not Jesus or pussy.
In a follow up to the ice water study, for instance, the same researchers found that the pain-easing effect of uttering swear words was more acute among people who swore less. Use it all the time and you habituate; the words lose their oomph. And he can do it with all the emotion that a chemistry professor might use the word neuron is his own class. Contact us at letters time. By Katy Steinmetz. TIME Ideas hosts the world's leading voices, providing commentary on events in news, society, and culture.
We welcome outside contributions. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors. Each product we feature has been independently selected and reviewed by our editorial team. If you make a purchase using the links included, we may earn commission. Related Stories. America Needs to Get Back to Facts. Some definitions of swearing get around this issue by specifying that swearing should involve taboo ie forbidden language — but even this is not specific enough.
Taboo language includes not only the familiar, bog-standard swear words like that mentioned above, but also other sorts of words that are not my focus here. A category of non-swearing taboo language is blasphemous expressions and words that are otherwise unspeakable for certain religious groups. Another category is slurs: words that deride entire groups of people, and that are often associated with hate speech. In slurring someone — for example, by calling them a faggot — you express contempt not only for the person you are addressing, but also for a wider group to which they may belong; in this case, homosexual men.
However, there is enough of a contrast between swearing and these other categories to make it worth separating them when we consider the ethical issues.
What sets them apart from other areas of language? It is this unique role in expressing emotion that separates swearing from other uses of language, including other types of taboo language. This unique psychological role gives swearing a unique linguistic role, too. To understand this exclamation, we need to consider not what the speaker is referring to or talking about, but what he aims to indicate about his emotions.
This makes swearing, in such circumstances, more like a scream than an utterance: just like a scream, it expresses emotion without being about anything. Perhaps this explains why swear words often fail to function like other words. Quang Phuc Dong — a sweary pseudonym of the late linguist James D. And, indeed, both in the UK and in many other cultures, we do much to prevent, censor, and punish swearing.
This is often done informally: perhaps the most effective way of regulating swearing is through our awareness of attitudes towards it. Knowing that we face disapproval from others if we swear in the wrong context is effective at ensuring that we watch our language.
But there are formal efforts to police swearing, too: swearing can get you fired from your job, fined, censored, and even arrested. The taboo against swearing is, it seems, a pretty serious matter. But elsewhere, blasphemy plays a much larger role. Perhaps the most striking example is Quebec French, in which the strongest swears are terms relating to Catholicism.
These expressions are considered stronger than standard French swears like merde shit. Blasphemy plays a large role in swearing in many religious cultures including Italian, Romanian, Hungarian, and Spanish — but some highly secular cultures also find religious swearing offensive. Godverdomme Goddamn remains one of the strongest expressions in Dutch. Some swearing is characterised by taboos relating to hierarchy; specifically, expressions of disrespect for certain individuals, commonly the mother of the person insulted.
Japanese offers perhaps the most striking example of a hierarchy-themed insult. While lavatorial and sexual functions are taboo, not all ways of referring to them are indecent. Some have suggested that the sound that swear words make contributes to their offensiveness.
There is something plausible about this. Even so, the sound of swear words cannot fully account for their offensiveness. In any case, focusing on swear words themselves will not enable us to explain fully why they are offensive, because the offensiveness of a given utterance of a swear word is relative to the social and historical context. We must look beyond the words themselves, and consider the broader behavioural contexts in which they appear. O nce we do this, the explanation is easier to find.
We do, after all, have all sorts of preferences about how people behave. Many of these preferences are enshrined in our morality; others are associated with etiquette. Etiquette varies with culture and upbringing, and its conventions are applied more strictly in some settings than in others.
The fact that we have developed preferences for certain types of behaviour over others, often for apparently no good reason, makes it unsurprising that we should have preferences for certain forms of linguistic behaviour. Swearing is a form of dispreferred linguistic behaviour. How do we get from this to an explanation of why swearing is offensive?
Well, once we have established preferences about behaviour, the capacity for certain behaviour to become offensive arises quite naturally. To illustrate this, consider the following scenario based on an actual and recurring series of events.
Suppose that you make a new friend named Rebecca, and you fall into the habit of addressing her as Rachel. After you have done this a couple of times, Rebecca politely points out that her name is Rebecca, not Rachel. If, after she has drawn your attention to this, you persist in calling her Rachel, she is likely to begin to feel annoyed, and she might repeat the request to call her Rebecca. If you ignore her request a second or third time, then — provided that she has no reason to believe you have failed to understand her requests, nor that you are incapable of easily complying with them — she is likely to eventually view your behaviour as offensive.
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