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Sorry we could not verify that email address. Enter your email below and we'll send you another email. Create a new password. Thank you for signing up! An error has occurred while trying to update your details. Contextual, personality, and even physiological variables are critical for predicting how swearing will occur. While swearing crosses socioeconomic statuses and age ranges and persists across the lifespan, it is more common among adolescents and more frequent among men. Swearing is positively correlated with extraversion and is a defining feature of a Type A personality. It is negatively correlated with conscientiousness, agreeableness, sexual anxiety, and religiosity.
These relationships are complicated by the range of meanings within the diverse group of taboo words. Some religious people might eschew profanities religious terms , but they may have fewer reservations about offensive sexual terms that the sexually anxious would avoid. We have yet to systematically study swearing with respect to variables such as impulsivity or psychiatric conditions, e. These may be fruitful avenues along which to investigate the neural basis of emotion and self-control. Taboo words occupy a unique place in language because once learned, their use is heavily context driven.
While we have descriptive data about frequency and self reports about offensiveness and other linguistic variables, these data tend to come from samples that overrepresent young, White, middle-class Americans. A much wider and more diverse sample is needed to better characterize the use of taboo language to more accurately answer all of the questions here. There are some new swear words in the younger generation.
- Potty mouth: Why kids love swear words and what to do;
- The Science of Swearing – Association for Psychological Science;
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My father, a tee-totling christian could swear louder and longer than anyone I knew… without using a swear-word. We knew he was swearing, he knew he was swearing. For this research, I think it is important to understand, not only the meaning of the word, but also the sound of it. The shape and movement words bring into our minds can affect the way we feel about it. Many people can easily become desensitized to the words, whereas others might cringe to them the same way they cringe to certain undesirable sounds.
It would be an interesting study to see the effects of different sounds on the brain and its relation to language. Nice point about the sounds…tone, texture, rhythm, etc. I been thinking bout this for a long-a time…. Has there ever been a study of honesty versus swearing?
I was recently told by an acquaintance that people who swear are more honest. People I know that curse like a Scottish Sailor on a drunken holiday are really stand up people that you can put your trust in. I think a lot of what you have said is true.
Do we swear too much?
I too think that a lot of people who have strong beliefs or ideas just say it as it is. People that swear often do not even realize that they swear as much as they do because they are true to themselves and just speaking the truth with no inhibitions. I am not saying that everyone should talk like this, but maybe they are just expressing their true self. We are all different and are unique in our own skin. We all need to be true to ourselves. I agree with your point of view.
The small section second to last paragraph showng negative effects of swearing is worded awkwardly, veiling the significance. That section also shows the profane are less agreeable and conscientious, but these major issues are not dwelt upon, whereas the rest of the article speaks in favor of potty-mouth, only to mention that no real scientific studies confirm such, in most cases. So why the propoganda? So you mentioned you do not know where children learn swear words?? At home for most of them.
The others learn from kids when they get to school. Did you not have kids and learn this? Research may show that the person swearing is more trustworthy, but I would like to see the study on intelligence in those who swear a blue streak. Speaking for myself, I lose a great deal of respect for a person that uses that type of language when there are so many other words that would work much better. Personally, I find it less trustworthy, also. I found this article in a Google search. I was trying to find the supposed study showing how people who swear tend to be more trust worthy. I do see where some truth would come from it.
Simply because people who tend to swear also tend not to care about what others think about them so therefore they have less of reason to tell white lies. Having incited such violence personally, using utterances primarily constructed with swear words, and having witnessed the same in close proximity on more occasions than I am proud to admit, it strikes me as though the research may have had biases that tainted the results. Swearing at Disney world be expected to result in fewer negative outcomes than f-bombs tossed strategically at a bar, a ballgame, or family reunion.
Watch your mouth!
For as long as I remember, I have considered that folks who use swearwords had not developed sufficient vocabulary to say what they had in mind. This was an article clearly describing explorations into the social mechanics of the use of profanity and it consequences, with what was obviously an exhortation for more investigation into the phenomenon, not liberal propaganda note how this word is spelled correctly. All that, without a single profanity. Try to ignore the trolls.
Swears, swears everywhere?
Leave those clodhoppers to me. Have just read the article today and the comments. Keep fighting the good fight against the trolls. You are guilty of the same logical fallacy. I totally disagree with this finding, if it really is a finding. Half the time the person swearing is swearing because they are covering up a lie, or trying to prove a point that is unrealistic. I notice that people tend to swear just to relieve anxiety and stress.
Believe me, my daughter swears like a sailor and so did one of my sisters. To heck with Behavioral Studies.
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I spent 45 years in engineering on the shop floor where swearing was the norm, I never got used to it. I compared it to picking your nose in public, i. It will probably become socially unacceptable though time. As well as the example above, if the words were substituted with a loud hand clap, I think that would have a similar effect. As these two words are between 3 and 4 times older than the US they clearly fulfil some type of linguistic need, which must be worthy of a level of attention above the tut-tuttery and value judgements of some of the posters here.
This was apparently a commonly used street name in medieval England. Apparently, so named because of the prostitution which was rife. This name was actively used until Victorian times when use of what they saw as obscene language came to be frowned upon in polite society — the source of much of our current attitudes towards swearing, not to mention their legacy of sexual hypocrisy which was partially responsible for this stance on linguistic mores. There were at least 3 streets of this name in London, one of which was euphemistically renamed as Threadneedle Street — now the location of the Bank of England.
More research on this rich and interesting linguistic heritage and the role that it seems to have played in human history would seem to be more than justified. According to HBO dramas, ancient Rome and the American frontier West were scenes of far more potty-mouth than contemporary society. SIL strode upstairs and read the three women, the riot act. If my SIL has a rather irrational approach to a famly member getting easily and emotionally reactive by swearing, then pehaps it is SHE who needs he counseling.
I do have bipolar disorder so there might be some impulse control issues. I am working towards finishing my M. I promise you there are plenty of intelligent people who swear on a regular basis. It is not speculation.
- Kids' Health - Topics - Swearing - using bad words!
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It is just like you learned in school—do some research on the topic you are targeting, forming a hypothesis, designing an experiment to test that hypothesis, then doing it and finally analyzing the data, drawing a conclusion and writing up your findings. So FairBairn— you say people who swear when they are hurt are babies. The swearing helps bear the pain. Remember the part where the author mentioned that children start this fairly young? Not liking swearing does not make it untrue that there is a correlation between wearing and honesty.
Have you no understanding at all of the concept of science, or of its methodology? I never used to swear. I have always leaned way to far on the soft heart scale, far to passive when i believe you need to balance between a harder heart, and softer one, somewhere in the middle. I never have to worry about the balancing act because my tendencies for compassion, and a soft heart i dont think i can lose , so i just try to be as hard as i can , and the balance takes care of itself.
I know exactly why I swear. Just ask Joe Cormack. Like any bartender, Cormack, of Fort Dodge, Iowa, hears a lot of talk. But sometimes, a customer will unleash the F-word so many times, Cormack just has to jump in. Or on the Senate floor, for that matter, where Vice President Dick Cheney used the F-word in a heated argument two years ago. Irene Kramer, a grandmother in Scranton, Pa. For Kramer, a major culprit is television.
In that battle, Kramer has a willing comrade: Judith Martin, who writes the syndicated Miss Manners column. And then those who want to be offensive will find another way. People divided by age, gender Perhaps not surprisingly, profanity seems to divide people by age and by gender.