What is the deal with people and good old natural expletives?
Just the other day I was left hanging on the phone for about 40 minutes while trying to report an extensive list of blown appliances to City Power, owing to a power surge in our area.
When the person on the other end came back I asked her how she could keep me hanging on for so fucking long?
She acrimoniously accused me of swearing at her — and when I explained I was not actually swearing at her but swearing about a situation, she put the phone down in my ear.
Perhaps I should have gone down there with a baseball bat and wrecked the metro offices instead.
In fact, if using an expletive was not an option I might have done just that. Swearing actually helped me avoid the liability of a physically violent act, which just might have landed me in jail.
Although swearing is an age-old marvel, it is only recently that studies are being conducted into its whys and wherefores.
The Western world has finally woken up to the fact that, although taboo, swearing has been around for hundreds of years and this phenomenon shows no signs of abating.
Unlike other taboos, which people generally respect, they do not avoid swearing. In fact most people swear at least once a day, if not much more often.
It is almost second nature to swear when the need arises, a trend that our ancestors made full use of until the 18Â 00s, when those stuffy Victorians started to label certain words as “dirty” or “bad”.
Swearing, it turns out, is a very useful thing.
A study published in the journal, NeuroReport in July last year measured for how long college students could keep their hands immersed in cold water. During this exercise, they could repeat an expletive of their choice or chant a neutral word.
When swearing, the 67 student volunteers reported less pain and on average endured about 40 seconds longer.
Psychologist Richard Stephens of Keele University in England, who led the study, says: “Swearing is such a common response to pain that there has to be an underlying reason why we do it.” He adds: “I would advise people, if they hurt themselves, to swear.”
Although swear words exist within every culture and language in the world, swearing has always been a notoriously decried topic in the public arena. But since this experiment the focus has changed and the question now asked is whether swearing is a necessary component of being human.
Sadly, there are those who cringe at the sound of an expletive, whether from the top or the bottom of the hierarchy of swearwords (which range from mildly offensive to virtually unspeakable). Linguists refer to the words that make up this hierarchy as the “big six”.
Piss is the least unspeakable and resides at the bottom of the profanity chain, followed by fart and shit.
The next three words relate to the sex act and as such cannot be mentioned in this forum (other than as the F-word and the two C-words) – the female version of which continues to remain the most unspeakable.
In Swearing, author Geoffrey Hughes says of the first three words: “It is a curious feature in the taxonomy that of the various forms of excretion and eructation, shit should be the most used term (German scheiss, French merde, Italian stronzo, English turd).
By comparison, fart has diminished force; piss has little currency (beyond the contemptuous piss artist and the unceremonious piss off) while burp has none whatsoever.
It would seem that the two dominant factors in making terms in this field highly charged or otherwise are their degree of solidity and their proximity to the genital/anal area.”
Also peculiar is the fact that most of the traits we share with other animals (excretion, sexual intercourse and organs) are traits that polite society prefers not to discuss and words that would be used in an informal discussion about these topics, become taboo.
This leads to the words being reduced to use only in instances of anger or despair, or sadly, not at all.
But I say let’s look back to the wisdom of our pagan ancestors and swear more. It may reduce our doctors’ bills and even alleviate the overcrowding in our jails.
Perhaps the stiff upper lip, straight-laced approach to life is more insidiously dangerous than we care to admit.