Explosive Language Can Help Keep You From Exploding, Experts Say

Modern science says that peppering your speech with salty words is good for your body as well as your brain.

For starters, the wordsmiths at editor.net define four specific types of nasty language. Profanity such as goddamn are words that show disrespect for religious things or concepts. Curses are stronger expressions of extreme anger demanding intervention from Fate such as “Damn that car!” or “Go to hell!” Obscenities, which are banned from polite society, are sexually or morally offensive or just plain disgusting. The F-word (or its softer “screw”) always takes first place. Vulgar words are milder versions such as “bitch,” “bastard,” and “ass.”

Faced with these facts, Time magazine responded with a roundup of supporting science and scientists such as psychologist Richard Stephens of Britain’s Keele university who say that cursing reduces sensitivity to pain. Their proof is a study in which, after saying something naughty, volunteers could keep their hand in ice water longer than could those who stuck to polite pronouncements.

In 2022 and then again last December, the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology found that repeating swear words seems to enhance strength, particularly tightening hand grips, something that might come in handy when trying to open that stuck jar of olives from the fridge.

Sixty-two volunteers told the European Journal of Social Psychology that repeating a swear word for a full two minutes when writing about times when people had not been nice to them made them feel better. Swearing also tamps down anger behind the wheel when caught in a traffic jam or cut off by another driver, says Timothy Jay, author of Why We Curse and Cursing in America, because it “allows us to vent and cope with emotions such as anger and frustration.”

Perhaps most fascinating is the effect one person’s swearing has on another. Ben Bergen, the author of What the F: What Swearing Reveals About Language, Our Brains, and Ourselves, teaches cognitive science at the University of California, San Diego, where his students learn that “swearing can lead others to believe that the person speaking is honest because they’re saying what they really believe.”

Nonetheless, before using those words two cautions apply. First, people who swear frequently are sometimes perceived as angry, hostile, or aggressive. Second, and even more important, it’s vital to read the room and recognize your audience. Like much in life, there is a code of etiquette to swearing based on social hierarchy and power dynamics. For example, just because the boss curses doesn’t mean you can, and when there are kids in the room, restraint rules.

As to the actual issue, which words work?

Good Will Shakespeare offers a number of elegant insults, such as Aaron’s quote in Titus Andronicus: “Villain, I have done thy mother.” Other writers have presented a variety of substitutes for the infamous “F.” James Dasher’s Maze Runners books serve a rhyme: shuck. Beth Revis’s teen novel Across the Universe uses Frex. Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 has two words for one: Ficky-fick. (For those who may have missed the point, Heller’s more direct expletive was Furgle.)

But the all-time topper still dates back to 1948 when then-25-year-old Norman Mailer published his classic war novel, The Naked and the Dead. His publisher, Rinehart (now Henry Holt & Company), forbade his using the actual F-word, so he wrote it as the euphemistic fug. That led to what Mailer afterward always regarded as an embarrassment when Tallulah Bankhead’s press agent planted a fake story saying that upon meeting Mailer her words were: “Oh, hello, you’re Norman Mailer . . . the young man that doesn’t know how to spell [asterisks].”