research paper curse words

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How to handle swear words in quote / transcription?

In my research, I interview practitioners/real users. One of them, a native english speaker, used a lot a swear words (basically the f-word).

Question: how to deal with curse words in content you need to quote?

Since I use transcripts for a content (and not formal) analysis, I sometime 'smooth' interviewee wordings (like removing " hum ", " well ", " you know ", and other recurring verbal tics). In some case, I could remove the f-word:

it's just super f*cking slow, and really f *cking annoying

However, in some cases it is less harmless, because it more deeply changes the perceived meaning:

if you don't want to do things, just don't f*cking do it oh f *ck, we'll just go back to do, as we were doing

and in some other, I simply cannot change interviewee's words:

[...] he really tried and wanted to build up, but he completely f*cked up every single part of every single thing.

Since I am not a native speaker, I don't know how "bad" would using the f-word be perceived (which is why I tried to be careful here.)

In some cases, I could do a cut quote, e.g. " it's just super [...] slow, and really [...] annoying ", but it looks like I'm not accurately depicting the wordings.

I've also seen on the internet people using 'f*ck' standing for the f-word. Could this be a solution? (I personally find this solution a bit prudish.)

Otherwise, could I simply quote them? Should I put a warning somewhere?

• writing-style

• 9 In a formal paper, should I censor “brainf**k”, the name of a programming language? is related, but I think different. (Even if this answer suggest quoting swearwords is allowed.) –  ebosi Commented Nov 10, 2016 at 17:28
• 3 What do other academics in your field do in this situation? (In the papers you read, how is this handled?) –  ff524 Commented Nov 10, 2016 at 17:40
• 2 An example of a formal paper which contains the word "bullshit" almost 200 times : journal.sjdm.org/15/15923a/jdm15923a.html –  vsz Commented Nov 11, 2016 at 9:23

4 Answers 4

If you're quoting someone, quote them as they said it. We're all adults. In the literature world, we quote swear words and other potentially offensive things all the time and no one bats an eye. I've no doubt other fields are the same.

Personally, if I saw an asterisk or similar, I would presume you interviewed them via chat or email, and they actually self-censored. If it were a printed text, I'd think it a part of the edition you used.

• 5 @JDługosz it's possible in academia to be not yet be adults, but I think we can confidently say that 99.9% or more are. I would imagine the same could be said of the average person reading a research paper. If a non-adult were to be reading (or writing) such a paper, they're probably at the very least mature enough to handle it. –  user0721090601 Commented Nov 13, 2016 at 22:35
• 10 @JDługosz Anyone mature enough to read a paper in a journal is mature enough to read the word fuck , regardless of age. –  Chris Cirefice Commented Mar 12, 2017 at 13:19

In research, you should quote them verbatim. Editing, or censoring, swearing is wrongly representing your research subjects and is thus a form of scientific misconduct. If you need to edit the quote for specific audience you must make it clear that you have done so:

It's just so [obscenity] slow, it really [obscenities] me off.

With a note saying that you have edited the text to remove swear words. Partial censorship such as you used above (e.g. f*ck, c*nt) is both utterly pointless and misleading; either completely remove the word (indicating where you have done so) or quote properly:

It's just so fucking annoying; it really fucks me off.

• 10 And as it should already be absolutely clear what's a direct quote and what isn't, no-one should get the impression that your academic writing style involves liberal use of swearwords. –  Chris H Commented Nov 11, 2016 at 9:24
• 6 I was always wondering why the word "fstarck" was abbreviated as "f*ck". With this answer so many texts I read came under a new light... (on the serious side +1 in the name of sanity) –  WoJ Commented Nov 11, 2016 at 15:30
• 1 @WoJ: for those knowing a bit of German f*ck could stand for Frühstück (breakfast) :-) –  LorenzoDonati4Ukraine-OnStrike Commented Nov 13, 2016 at 14:22
• 1 @LorenzoDonati, I think the most similar abbreviation for Frühstück you could get to which still makes sense would be Frstk. ( Stk. is an acceptable abbreviation for the word Stück ) --- cf. a website for a bed and breakfast in Warnemünde : 2 P. Frstk. u. TG 325,00 € (lit. "two persons breakfast and meal du jour €325.00"); Sorry to rain on your parade. –  errantlinguist Commented Nov 13, 2016 at 14:52
• 2 @errantlinguist I should have added a disclaimer to that comment: "Not necessarily a linguistically-correct German abbreviation" :-D –  LorenzoDonati4Ukraine-OnStrike Commented Nov 13, 2016 at 14:59

I'm a history student currently working with oral history. You should not smooth anything on a transcript — when quoting you should do exactly as said or written. There are certain ways to indicate that something is a grammar mistake or a phonetic(?) transcription to clarity that there's no mistake on your part; usually those things are put in foot notes.

I'll edit this later to give you some resources for that, but for now if you put any notes make sure to do it as a footnote. You can use the brackets too, they indicate some comment of the author outside the context of the quote.

• 10 One very strong argument for not censoring is that what we consider obscene is very much time and place dependent. –  gerrit Commented Nov 11, 2016 at 10:56
• 1 Are the mentioned resources coming at some point, or should that part be edited away from the answer? –  Tommi Commented Feb 19, 2019 at 10:05

If this is for publication, check with the editor.

If this is for a working (non-published) paper that you, and perhaps som collaborators, will be working with, then you get to decide, based on subjective considerations, such as, will it be irritating for you to read the f-word 200 times a day? If so, you are free to choose a euphemism.

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The sound of swearing: Are there universal patterns in profanity?

• Brief Report
• Open access
• Published: 06 December 2022
• Volume 30 , pages 1103–1114, ( 2023 )

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• Shiri Lev-Ari 1 &
• Ryan McKay 1  

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Why do swear words sound the way they do? Swear words are often thought to have sounds that render them especially fit for purpose, facilitating the expression of emotion and attitude. To date, however, there has been no systematic cross-linguistic investigation of phonetic patterns in profanity. In an initial, pilot study we explored statistical regularities in the sounds of swear words across a range of typologically distant languages. The best candidate for a cross-linguistic phonemic pattern in profanity was the absence of approximants (sonorous sounds like l , r , w and y ). In Study 1, native speakers of various languages (Arabic, Chinese, Finnish, French, German, Spanish; N = 215) judged foreign words less likely to be swear words if they contained an approximant. In Study 2 we found that sanitized versions of English swear words – like darn instead of damn – contain significantly more approximants than the original swear words. Our findings reveal that not all sounds are equally suitable for profanity, and demonstrate that sound symbolism – wherein certain sounds are intrinsically associated with certain meanings – is more pervasive than has previously been appreciated, extending beyond denoting single concepts to serving pragmatic functions.

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Introduction

Aficionados of Star Wars, Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica know that the words “ fierfek ”, “ grozit” and “frak” are not to be used in polite company. Writers who invent such alien profanity may rely on their intuitions about what makes swear words offensive and transgressive here on earth. The notion that the sounds in such words – their phonemes – contribute to their offensiveness itself transgresses a fundamental linguistic principle: that the connection between the sound and meaning of a word is arbitrary (Hockett, 1959 , 1963 ; de Saussure, 1966 /1916). Footnote 1 Nevertheless, a range of authors have suggested that swear words have sounds that render them especially fit for purpose (e.g., Bergen, 2016 ; Hughes, 2006 ; Pinker, 2007 ; Roache, 2016 ; Vallery & Lemmens, 2021 ; Wajnryb, 2005 ). To date, however, there has been no systematic cross-linguistic study of the phonetic patterns in profanity. Here we investigate whether speakers of disparate languages deem certain sounds to be better at expressing profanity than others.

Sound Symbolism

The general idea that certain phonemes or phoneme combinations are intrinsically associated with certain meanings is known as sound symbolism (D’Onofrio, 2013 ; Sidhu & Pexman, 2018 ). For example, across languages the nasal sound n is much more likely to occur in words for “nose” than in other words (Blasi et al., 2016 ; Johansson et al., 2020 ), and when presented with spiky and curved line drawings, speakers of different languages overwhelmingly favour names such as “takete” and “kiki” for the spiky drawings and “maluma” and “bouba” for the curved ones (Köhler, 1929 ; Ramachandran & Hubbard, 2001 ). Sound symbolism can also manifest in a perceived mismatch between a sound and a meaning. Thus, across languages, the sound m is statistically unlikely to appear in the word for “skin” (Blasi et al., 2016 ; Joo, 2020 ).

Sound symbolic associations are probabilistic, rather than deterministic, in nature. Thus, while the sound n is over-represented in words for “nose”, there are many languages in which the word for “nose” does not include it. Similarly, while the sound m is under-represented in words for “skin” (Blasi et al., 2016 ; Joo, 2020 ), there are languages in which the word for “skin” includes this sound.

Some sound symbolic effects may reflect awareness of reliable co-occurrences in nature. For example, smaller objects tend to produce higher frequencies than larger objects (Coward & Stevens, 2004 ; Spence, 2011 ), and adults tend to assign novel words with high formant-frequency vowels, such as mil , to small rather than large objects (Sapir, 1929 ; Thompson & Estes, 2011 ). Sensitivity to these natural co-occurrences should not rely on linguistic knowledge. Correspondingly, an association between the vowel i and the concept “small” occurs persistently across languages from different continents and linguistic lineages (Blasi et al., 2016 ; replicated in Johansson et al., 2020 ), and even infants preferentially look at a small rather than a large circle upon hearing vowels with high formant frequencies (Peña et al., 2011 ).

Sound Symbolism in Swearing

Several authors have suggested that the main function of sound symbolism is to scaffold language acquisition in childhood (Imai et al., 2008 ; Kantartzis et al., 2011 ; Monaghan et al., 2014 ; Perry et al., 2018 ; Thompson et al., 2012 ). But sound symbolism may also facilitate the expression of emotion, attitude or arousal. Humans and nonhuman animals produce harsh, abrasive sounds when distressed and smooth sounds when calm and contented (Nielsen & Rendall, 2011 ). These tendencies may underpin sound symbolic associations between certain phonemes and profanity (Nielsen & Rendall, 2013 ).

Numerous authors have offered speculations about specific phonetic patterns in swearing and their potential functions, often suggesting that swear words are rich in plosives (e.g., p , t, k ; Hughes, 2006 ; Nielsen & Rendall, 2013 ; Vallery & Lemmens, 2021 ; Wajnryb, 2005 ). What is the evidence for such patterns? Van Lancker and Cummings ( 1999 ) found that the involuntary swearing of English-speaking patients with Tourette syndrome was phonetically atypical, for example being unusually likely to contain a plosive or fricative consonant (in particular, f or k ) at the beginning of the word. Yardy ( 2010 ) compared sounds in English swear words with those in carols and lullabies, reporting that the swear words contained a relatively higher proportion of plosive consonants (e.g., k , t ), while the carols and lullabies contained proportionately more sonorant consonants (e.g., l , w ). Bergen ( 2016 ) reported that profane English monosyllables are more likely than control monosyllables to end with a plosive (e.g., k ). Aryani et al. ( 2018 ) found that German speakers rate pseudo-words as more arousing and negative if they include short vowels, voiceless consonants, and – to a degree – plosives. Finally, Reilly et al. ( 2020 ) examined predictors of tabooness for both existing English words and novel taboo compounds (e.g., shitarm , doorass ). Words with a higher proportion of plosives (e.g., k, t ) and affricates (e.g., ch, j ) were rated as more taboo and considered better candidates for taboo compounding.

The Present Studies

As reviewed above, there is provisional evidence that English swear words contain a relative preponderance of plosive consonants, and that English natives are sensitive to this pattern. However, previous studies have focused on specific sounds (in particular, plosives) rather than systematically testing for patterns across the full range of phonemic groups. Moreover, it is unknown whether a pattern for plosives – if robust – extends beyond a handful of related Indo-European languages. In some cases, associations between sound and meaning may emerge in a given language due to random co-occurrences of phonological and semantic features. Phonaesthemes are small clusters of words with similar meanings that – initially through coincidence – also have similar phonemic forms, and function as attractors for new words, snowballing into larger language-specific clusters (e.g., in English, 39% of words beginning with gl - relate to vision or light, such as glisten and gloaming ; Bergen, 2004 ). It may be that any association between plosives and profanity is an oddity of English and related languages, attributable to historical and cultural contingency in a particular language rather than to an underlying cognitive bias. In the present studies we explored sound regularities in swearing across several distant languages, combining real-world and experimental data.

In an initial, pilot study we explored whether particular sounds are over-represented or under-represented in the swear words of typologically distant languages. This investigation suggested that the strongest candidate for a cross-linguistic phonemic pattern in profanity was the absence of approximants (sounds like l , r , w and y ). We thus focused on approximants for our two subsequent studies.

We predicted that individuals would consider words without approximants to be better candidates for swear words, and correspondingly, that one way to sanitize swear words would be to introduce approximants into them. Thus, Study 1 tested experimentally whether native speakers of typologically distant languages are less likely to guess that foreign words are swear words if they contain an approximant versus a control phoneme. Study 2 examined whether, when speakers attempt to reduce the offensiveness of swear words, they do so by introducing approximants. Together the studies investigate whether part of the effectiveness of swear words comes from their sound. In doing so we demonstrate both that sound symbolism is more prevalent than was previously suggested and that the functional role of sound symbolism is broader than has previously been appreciated, extending beyond single concepts to broad pragmatic functions.

Pilot Study

The goal of our pilot study was to explore whether certain sounds appear less or more frequently in real-world swear words across languages than would be expected by chance, suggesting these sounds are particularly (un)suitable for expressing profanity. We recruited fluent speakers of several typologically distant languages to generate a set of swear words, and compared the frequency of each phonemic group in these swear word sets to the corresponding frequencies in control words. As prior research had suggested that plosives are over-represented in English swear words, we conducted a pre-planned analysis testing plosives’ representation in swear words and exploratory analyses testing the frequency of other phoneme groups against chance. In a follow-up study (see the Online Supplementary Material ( OSM ) for details) we tested the occurrence of approximants specifically in two further languages.

Participants

We used Prolific ( www.prolific.co ) to recruit native speakers of each of six languages: Arabic, Chinese, Finnish, French, German and Spanish. We had planned to test native speakers of a new set of typologically distant languages (i.e., distinct from the languages we had included in our pilot study and its follow-up), but decided to add a subsample of French native speakers as in our follow-up to our pilot study (see OSM for details) French had been an exception to the rule that approximants are under-represented in swear words. We reasoned that including French speakers would allow a strong test of the hypothesis of an underlying cognitive bias to associate swear words with a relative dearth of approximants. We aimed to recruit 40 participants per language, but after applying pre-registered exclusion criteria (see below), the final sample comprised 215 participants: 30 Arabic natives (14 female, age: 18–50 years, M = 28.3 years), 37 Chinese natives (24 female, age: 19–47 years, M = 27.3 years), 40 Finnish natives (16 female, age: 19–44 years, M = 31 years), 33 French natives (13 female, age: 18–52 years, M = 29.3 years), 36 German natives (13 female, Age: 19–61 years, M = 29.8 years) and 39 Spanish natives (16 female, age: 19–50 years, M = 26.2 years).

Stimuli and Procedure

Participants enrolled in a study entitled How good is your "sweardar"? They were told they would hear pairs of words in different languages and that one member of each pair would be a swear word. Their task was to indicate which of the two words they thought was the swear word. Unbeknownst to the participants, the words were in fact pseudo-words, based on existing words in 20 languages (see Table 1 ).

Each experimental pair of words was a minimal pair that differed only in that one of the words included an approximant and the other one included an affricate (i.e., ts, ch, or j) in the same position. As per our pilot study, we defined approximants as phonemes coded as ‘l’, ‘L’, ‘w’, ‘y’ and ‘r’ in the ASJP database (Brown et al., 2008 ; Wichmann et al., 2022 ), which cover the phonemes /l/, /L/, /ʅ/, /ʎ/, /w/, /j/, and “all varieties of “r-sounds” (IPA: r, R, etc.)” (Brown et al., 2008 , p.307). At the same time, we decided to avoid trills when generating words with approximants, as they seem to not belong naturally with the other phonemes, and are indeed not usually defined as approximants (International Phonetic Association, 1999 ). We contrasted approximants with affricates because our pilot study indicated that affricates were not over- or under-represented in swear words. Therefore, selecting words containing affricates as better swear word candidates would not be due to the suitability of affricates for swear words but to the unsuitability of approximants.

Words were generated by selecting an existing noun that did not include any approximants or affricates (e.g., the word zog , meaning “bird”, in Albanian). We then replaced one of its phonemes once with an approximant (e.g., y og ) and once with an affricate ( ts og ). The replaced phoneme (boldfaced in Table 1 ) was always a vocalised one, that is, a phoneme followed by a vowel. For each language we generated and presented four pseudo-word pairs: two experimental (affricate vs. approximant, order counterbalanced) and two filler pairs (containing neither approximants nor affricates). Participants were thus presented auditorily with 80 unfamiliar word pairs.

Sound files for the pseudo-words in Albanian, Catalan, Chinese, Czech, Italian, German, Greek, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Korean, Russian, Tamil, Thai, Turkish and Vietnamese were synthesized using the language-specific speech synthesizers of https://texttospeech.io/text-to-mp3-online . Pseudo-words in Arabic were synthesized using https://ttsmp3.com/text-to-speech/Arabic/ , pseudo-words in Bangla with https://www.googletexttospeech.com/p/bangla-text-to-speech-mp3-downloader.html , pseudo-words in Basque with https://www.ehu.eus/seg/ahotss/init.html , and pseudo-words in Japanese with https://www.googletexttospeech.com/p/free-text-to-speech-for-japanese.html . In all cases, we ensured that both words in the pair were generated with the same tone, where relevant, and the same stress pattern.

Trials were presented using Gorilla ( gorilla.sc/ ). On each trial the sound played automatically, but participants could choose to replay the audio files up to three times each if they so desired. To give their response on each trial, they moved a cursor to click a box on the left of the screen labelled “First word” or a box on the right labelled “Second word”.

Attention Check and Exclusions

In addition to the 80 pseudo-words, we included several pairs of real words in English to serve as attention checks. Each pair comprised a real English swear word paired with a minimal phonetic variant (e.g., fuck/tuck , shit/sit ). Participants who failed to correctly identify the swear word in more than 25% of these trials were excluded ( n = 18). We also eliminated any participant who responded before the end of the second audio file on 10% or more trials ( n = 6). We had planned to exclude any participant who took more than three times the median response time (RT) to respond (without having replayed either of the audio files) on 10% or more trials, but the only participant who met this criterion had already been excluded. In addition, we excluded any trial where the participant responded before the second audio file had finished playing (0.3% of all trials), or where the participant did not replay the audio files yet responded at an RT that was more than three times the median RT for trials where the audio files were not replayed (1.2% of all trials).

Our pre-registration stipulated one final exclusion criterion: that we would remove any participant who made 10 (or more) of the same response in a row. We had reasoned that such behaviour would reflect a lack of proper engagement with the task, but on reflection we realized that runs of 10 or more could occur quite easily by chance in a sequence of 88 trials (such that our criterion would exclude 7.58% of attentive participants on average). We therefore opted not to exclude such participants in our main analysis, but we report an additional analysis with these exclusions in a footnote (yielding virtually identical results; see footnote 3).

To test whether participants were less likely to select the words with approximants as the swear words, we coded selection of the word with an affricate as 1 and selection of the word with an approximant as 0. We then used the lme4 package (Bates et al., 2010 ) in R (R Core Team, 2020 ) to run an intercept-only logistic mixed effects model on swear word selection with Participants and Items as random variables. As predicted, this analysis revealed that participants were significantly less likely to judge that the words with approximants were swear words (β = 0.52, SE = 0.08, z = 6.76, p < .001). This is equal to selecting the affricates on 63% of trials. Footnote 3

Exploratory analyses indicated that this pattern held across all participant groups (see Appendix A Tables 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 and 8 and Fig. 2 ). Notably, French speakers, whose native language does not align with the cross-linguistic pattern but instead is rich with swear words that include approximants (see OSM), also selected the affricates over the approximants on around 63% of the trials. This suggests that the task taps underlying cognitive biases rather than reflecting specific linguistic knowledge.

Proportion of trials in which participants (grouped by native language) identified the word with the affricate rather than the approximant as the swear word. Diamonds depict group averages, and the dashed line denotes chance. Plot generated using the tidyverse package (Wickham et al., 2019 )

The results provide strong evidence that participants are less likely to select words with approximants than words with affricates when asked to detect the swear word (to ensure that this result was not due to participants identifying which stimulus was most word -like, we ran a follow-up experiment – see OSM for details).

Study 1 showed experimentally that individuals judge words containing approximants as less likely to be swear words, implying that approximants are less suitable than other sounds for giving offence. Here we tested this idea using a different type of real-world data: minced oaths (Hughes, 2006 ; McCord, 1968 ). Minced oaths are sanitized versions of swear words formed by altering one or more sounds in the original word (e.g., transforming damn to darn ). If approximants are perceived as particularly inoffensive, one might expect that when altering a swear word’s sounds so as to render it more suitable for polite company, speakers will be particularly likely to introduce an approximant. We thus hypothesized that minced oaths would contain more approximants than the swear words they were derived from.

Data Collection

To test our hypothesis, we collected all words in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED,  n.d.) whose definition included the words euphemism , euphemistic, minced or mincing together with alteration . We complemented this list with additional examples that were listed in the Wikipedia entry on Minced Oaths (“Minced oath”, 2021 ). As we were only interested in swear words whose alteration is intended to decrease offensiveness, we excluded references to God or Christ, as alterations in those cases are intended to avoid saying God’s name. Additionally, we ignored Cockney rhyming slang. Lastly, we excluded cases where the minced oath was only the first letter of the original word, as no sound substitution had taken place in these instances. Our dataset included 67 minced oaths that were altered versions of 24 swear words, as some swear words had many minced versions (e.g., fucking has many altered versions including frigging and effing ). While the set is relatively small, it includes all altered swear words in English attested by the OED ( N = 43) and all the additional minced oaths that were listed in the Wikipedia entry on Minced Oaths ( N = 24).

For each minced oath, we counted how many approximants it included as well as how many approximants the original version had (e.g., frigging – 1, fucking – 0). We used British rather than American pronunciation, for example “darn” was scored as having no approximants. Because the approximant counts are discrete, the data did not meet the assumptions of a paired t-test. We therefore conducted a Wilcoxon signed rank test with the Pratt method for incorporating differences of zero, using the scipy package (Virtanen et al., 2020 ) in Python 3. The results showed that approximants were more frequent in minced oaths than in the original swear words (29 vs. 12; W = 58, p < .001), indicating that when speakers altered swear words to render them less offensive, they did so by introducing approximants. In the OSM we demonstrate that this result is robust irrespective of sample selection and coding choices.

General Discussion

Trying to express anger using a swear word full of gentle, soft sounds... would be the verbal equivalent of angrily trying to slam a door fitted with a compressed air hinge. ~ Rebecca Roache ( 2016 )

Swear words have a unique linguistic power. Swearing in public is illegal in many countries and profanity is a major target for censorship in the arts and entertainment industries (Bergen, 2016 ). Swearing elicits physiological responses such as elevated heart rate and increased galvanic skin response (Bowers & Pleydell-Pearce, 2011 ; Buchanan et al., 2006 ; Harris et al., 2003 ). Moreover, swearing aloud increases tolerance to pain (Stephens et al., 2009 ; Stephens & Robertson, 2020 ; Stephens & Umland, 2011 ) and boosts physical performance (Stephens et al., 2018 ).

What gives swear words their potency? Part of the answer, of course, may lie in what these words literally refer to: after all, the usual suspects include taboo topics such as excretion and sex. However, the sounds in swear words may also play an important role.

Our findings indicate that not all sounds are equally suitable for profanity. In an initial, pilot study we explored statistical regularities in the sounds of swear words across a set of typologically distant languages. The most promising candidate for a universal phonemic pattern in profanity to emerge from this analysis was the absence of approximants (sonorous sounds like l , r , w and y ). Study 1 confirmed that native speakers of various typologically distant languages were relatively unlikely to identify words containing an approximant as swear words. It may be that approximants are sound-symbolically associated with calm and contentment, and so are unsuitable for giving offence (Nielsen & Rendall, 2011 , 2013 ; Yardy, 2010 ). In Study 2 we found that sanitized versions of swear words – minced oaths – contain significantly more of these sounds than the swear words they were derived from. According to Hazen ( 2020 ), minced oaths allow “for restrained fist-shaking at the universe”. Our findings suggest that approximants are a relevant “restraint” – the verbal equivalent of fitting a compressed air hinge to a door (Roache, 2016 ).

Though we focused primarily on approximants, future studies may identify other phonemic groups particularly suitable or unsuitable for profanity. For example, studies with larger samples from more languages might allow other, weaker, effects to emerge. Alternatively, it may be that some phonemic effects occur only in certain word positions (e.g., stressed syllable, word ending, vocalized position) or only in combination with other phonemes. For example, Bergen ( 2016 ) reported that monosyllabic nonwords sound more profane to native English speakers when they end in a consonant than a vowel.

Our findings demonstrate that sound symbolism is more pervasive, with a broader functional role, than has previously been appreciated, extending beyond single concepts (such as object size) to broad pragmatic functions. This has both practical and theoretical implications. At the practical level, using words rich in approximants may help defuse tense social situations and so may be important in a range of real-world contexts (e.g., relationship conflict, diplomacy, hostage negotiation). At the theoretical level, our results suggest a functional role for sound symbolism that extends beyond supporting language acquisition in childhood (Imai et al., 2008 ; Kantartzis et al., 2011 ; Monaghan et al., 2014 ; Perry et al., 2018 ; Thompson et al., 2012 ). Specifically, our findings suggest that sound symbolism can facilitate the pragmatic expression of emotion, attitude or arousal (Nielsen & Rendall, 2011 , 2013 ). Other fields of linguistics, such as semantics and historical linguistics, may benefit from considering how sounds can be modified to better exploit other pragmatic functions. While Study 2 focussed on minced oaths and offensiveness, word alterations in other vocabulary domains may reflect other sound symbolic patterns and serve other pragmatic functions (e.g., cajoling, appeasing, expressing authority).

We acknowledge three caveats. First, while our results demonstrate clearly that speakers of a range of languages tend to judge that words with approximants are not good candidates to be swear words, this finding is about perceptions of swearing, rather than swearing itself. Nevertheless, our experimental approach is consistent with a long tradition in sound symbolism research. For instance, it has long been accepted that there is a sound symbolic association between high front vowels such as i and small size, yet for decades this consensus relied solely on experiments (e.g., Newman, 1933 ; Peña et al., 2011 ; Sapir, 1929 ; Tarte & Barritt, 1971 ; Thompson & Estes, 2011 ). It was only very recently that an association between the vowel i and the concept “small” was demonstrated to be a statistical regularity across actual human languages (Blasi et al., 2016 ).

Second, we do not mean to suggest that the presence of approximants is sufficient to render words inoffensive: again, our findings are probabilistic rather than deterministic. What our results point to is an underlying cognitive bias, a predisposition that will have acted in concert with historical accident to shape the evolution of swear words. Just as the association between nasal sounds and words for “nose” does not manifest in every language – or even in most languages (Blasi et al., 2016 ) – we should not expect that the pattern we have identified will manifest in every language, and even languages that reflect the pattern are likely to have swear words with approximants, though fewer than would be predicted by their sound system.

Third, although we recruited speakers of different languages for Study 1, they were all familiar with English. We cannot exclude, therefore, the possibility that their performance in the “sweardar” experiment reflected their familiarity with phonetic patterns in English. We think this unlikely, as native French speakers, whose language does not exhibit this pattern, demonstrated numerically the strongest effect in the experiment. This suggests that performance in the experiment does not simply mirror linguistic knowledge. Moreover, our pilot study results indicated that approximants were at least as under-represented in the swear words of some of the other languages we investigated (e.g., Hungarian, Russian) as they were in English.

So, are swear words “universally patterned on the basis of sound” (Wajnryb, 2005 , p. 205)? Our results point to a robust cross-linguistic sound symbolic association in the minds of human speakers. As to the wider universe, the jury is out: surprisingly, according to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the rudest word in the universe is “Belgium”, which contains an approximant. Footnote 4

Data Availability

Our hypothesis, method and analyses for our pilot study and Study 1 were pre-registered with AsPredicted.com (Pilot study, #38283: https://aspredicted.org/Z1P_KCW ; Study 1, #60913: https://aspredicted.org/blind.php?x=/V51_7J4 ). Our data, analysis scripts and materials for all three studies are available on the Open Science Framework at https://osf.io/fp92q/?view_only=622565ff35ed454fad386c42c10106b0

It is worth noting that many thinkers arguing for arbitrariness as a fundamental aspect of language, such as Hockett, were active after Sapir and Köhler’s findings on sound symbolism were already well known. Their argument was not necessarily that sound symbolism is completely absent in language but that its presence is limited to a few words here and there, and that it does not play a meaningful role in communication. Thus, Hockett writes: “Human language is almost wholly arbitrary” (Hockett, 1959 , p. 34; emphasis added).

This analysis differs from the one we pre-registered because once we carried out the pre-registered analysis, we realised it was biased in that it led to some languages receiving higher weight than others. See the Online Supplementary Material ( OSM ) for the pre-registered analysis. The main result reported here – under-representation of approximants - is significant in the pre-registered analysis.

We then repeated the analysis after removing 31 participants who provided the same response 10 or more times in a row (as per our pre-registration). Participants were again less likely to select the words with approximants as swear words (β = 0.53, SE = 0.08, z = 6.90, p < .001).

We can’t resist noting that, in reality, the Belgium case accords with our thesis, because in this context “Belgium” is actually a minced oath – a substitute for “fuck” (Inglis-Arkell, 2012 ). Douglas Adams’ American publishers objected to the word “fuck” in the original text of Life, the Universe, and Everything (the third book in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series), and Adams responded by replacing it with “Belgium” and adding some embellishments about the word “Belgium” being forbidden everywhere but Earth (where people were too stupid to know what it meant). The joke plays on the stereotype of Belgium as bland and inoffensive (Mason, 2022 ), but the approximant in the word might have helped seal the deal.

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Acknowledgements

We are grateful for valuable conversations with Kathy Rastle, Ana Ulicheva, Heather Burnett, Lilla Hodossy, Gabriella Horváth, Saloni Krishnan, Johnnie Pascalidis and Mark Wildon. We also thank Ivet Kancheva and Arianna Weaving for their help with creating the stimuli for Study 1. This research project and its results were made possible with the support of the NOMIS Foundation.

The second author was supported by a grant from the NOMIS Foundation.

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Lev-Ari, S., McKay, R. The sound of swearing: Are there universal patterns in profanity?. Psychon Bull Rev 30 , 1103–1114 (2023). https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-022-02202-0

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Words and Phrases to Avoid in Academic Writing

Published on February 6, 2016 by Sarah Vinz . Revised on September 11, 2023.

When you are writing a dissertation , thesis, or research paper, many words and phrases that are acceptable in conversations or informal writing are considered inappropriate in academic writing .

You should try to avoid expressions that are too informal, unsophisticated, vague, exaggerated, or subjective, as well as those that are generally unnecessary or incorrect.

Bear in mind, however, that these guidelines do not apply to text you are directly quoting from your sources (including interviews ).

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Too informal, too exaggerated, too subjective, generally incorrect, other interesting articles.

Academic writing is generally more formal than the writing we see in non-academic materials (including on websites). It is also more formal than the ways in which we normally speak. The following words and phrases are considered too informal for a dissertation or academic paper.

Informal sentence starts

Some words are acceptable in certain contexts, but become too informal when used at the beginning of a sentence. You can replace these with appropriate  transition words  or simply remove them from the sentence.

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Using vague terms makes your writing imprecise and may cause people to interpret it in different ways. Always try to be as specific as possible.

Academic writing is usually unadorned and direct. Some adverbs of frequency (such as always and never ) and intensifiers (words that create emphasis, such as really ) are often too dramatic. They may also not be accurate – you’re making a significant claim when you say something is perfect or never happens.

These terms do sometimes add value, but try to use them sparingly.

Some words and phrases reveal your own bias. For instance, if you state that something will obviously happen, you are indicating that you think the occurrence is obvious – not stating a fact.

Expressing your opinion is appropriate in certain sections of a dissertation and in particular types of academic texts (such as personal statements and reflective or argumentative essays ). In most cases, though, take care when using words and phrases such as those below – try to let the facts speak for themselves, or emphasize your point with less biased language.

Certain words and phrases are often used incorrectly, even by native speakers of a language. If you’re exposed to such mistakes often enough, you may start to assume they are correct – but it’s important that you don’t let them creep into your writing.

You should also bear in mind that some of these mistakes relate to things we all frequently mishear (for instance, we often think the speaker is saying would of instead of would have ).

In general, you should also try to avoid using words and phrases that fall into the following categories:

• Jargon (i.e., “insider” terminology that may be difficult for readers from other fields to understand)
• Clichés (i.e., expressions that are heavily overused, such as think outside of the box and at the end of the day )
• Everyday abbreviations (e.g., approx. , ASAP, corona, stats, info )
• Slang (e.g., cops , cool )
• Gender-biased language   (e.g., firemen , mankind )
• Generally unnecessary (e.g., redundant expressions that do not add meaning, such as compete with each other instead of simply compete)

Reflective reports and  personal statements  sometimes have a less formal tone. In these types of writing, you may not have to follow these guidelines as strictly. The preface or acknowledgements of a dissertation also often have a less formal and more personal voice than the rest of the document.

If you want to know more about AI for academic writing, AI tools, or fallacies make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples or go directly to our tools!

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December 6, 2022

The Linguistics of Swearing Explain Why We Substitute Darn for Damn

Languages from Hindi to Korean tone down swear words by inserting gentler consonants into speech. Here’s how “Let’s go Brandon” got started

By Emily Willingham

Peter Dazeley/Getty Images

When Douglas Adams’s U.S. publisher asked him to substitute something less offensive for the f-word in in his novel  Life, the Universe, and Everything (one of the sequels to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy ), Adams made a cheeky decision to swap in the name of an entire country with a reputation for maintaining a diplomatic middle ground. A new linguistic analysis suggests that the choice Adams made—substituting in the word “Belgium” at every instance—may unconsciously have reflected a cross-language pattern of using certain consonant sounds to soften “taboo” words.

The findings, published on December 6 in Psychonomic Bulletin & Review , support the idea that speakers may euphemize swear words, or “mince oaths”—think using “darn” for “damn”—by substituting harder consonant sounds with softer ones known as approximants. The pattern was detectable among speakers of several different languages , hinting at a possible universality to softening swears by swapping in more subtle sounds.

Linguists have found that the sounds of a word can sometimes mirror its meaning. A shared “sound symbolism” across languages is not especially surprising when it reflects a real sound in nature, says Benjamin K. Bergen, a professor of cognitive science and director of the Language and Cognition Lab at the University of California, San Diego, who was not involved in the work. Words can indicate something concrete, such as the way that “snap,” “crunch” and “cock-a-doodle-doo” evoke the sounds they represent.

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But the sounds in “taboo words” tend to be specific to a given language and not to show the same pattern for similar words in another language. English, for example, relies on “k,” “t” and “p” in such words (you can probably think of a few that contain these consonants), yet that’s not necessarily a pattern in other languages.

The surprise with these new findings, Bergen says “is that this is the first time someone has documented a [sound symbolism] effect with something as abstract as taboo language” across different languages. Using less harsh sounds to mince oaths could be related to mitigating the intended force behind the words. The results may have more general implications and “raise questions about whether words that serve other communicative functions” also might share patterns among different languages, he says.

To detect these patterns for swearing, Ryan McKay, a professor of psychology at Royal Holloway, University of London, and his colleague Shiri Lev-Ari, a lecturer in psychology at Royal Holloway, first conducted a pilot study of 100 people who spoke one of five languages that are only distantly related: Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Korean or Russian. Participants listed the most offensive swears in their language (not including racial slurs). Across the five languages, swear words, compared with nonswear words, tended to be devoid of approximants, including “l,” “r,” “w” and the “y” consonant sound (as in “yawn” or “few”).

The results suggested that approximants might sound too moderate for swears. To test this idea, Lev-Ari and McKay recruited 215 people who spoke one of six languages: Arabic, Chinese, Finnish, French, German or Spanish. Each participant listened to 80 pairs of made-up words, all based on real nonswear words from 20 languages that did not include English.

None of the original real terms contained approximants. To make the word pairs, the authors modified each word to contain either an approximant or a more forceful paired consonant sound known as an affricate (such as “ts” in “tsar”). For example, they took “zog,” the Albanian word for bird, and subbed in the approximant “y” to make “yog” or the affricative “ts” to make “tsog.” Then participants heard the pair and decided which of the two words sounded more sweary.

Terms with approximants (yog) tended to get “not swear” ratings, and those without the more understated sounds (tsog) tended to be rated as swears. Even listeners whose first language was French—which is loaded with approximant-heavy swears (think “ merde ”)—were likelier to rate affricative-bearing pseudowords as the swearier option.

Finally, the researchers examined whether approximants were often the sounds that are swapped into minced oaths in English. They found that the gentler sounds were far more common in the toned-down versions of swear words.

All three investigations offer different types of evidence “that when you try to make a word less offensive, you introduce approximants,” Lev-Ari says.

What is not clear is how the ear might universally assign sounds as markers of taboo and nontaboo words. “We are not sure what mechanism it is,” she says.

Some researchers have suggested that in English, for example, all of those “p,” “t” and “k” sounds in swear words sound strong and require physical force to produce, perhaps allowing the words to serve as a pressure release valve. But before this study, the pattern was thought to be specific to English, Bergen says. “It’s possible we were looking at things the wrong way,” he says, “that it’s actually approximants that de-taboo words in English and maybe other languages,” whether the taboo versions contain those satisfying consonants or not.

Neither Bergen nor the study authors are comfortable speculating much on practical implications of the findings. It’s possible, Lev-Ari says, that to reduce tension in a stressful or delicate situation, a speaker might go for soothing sounds such as approximants. But “we can’t conclude that from our study right now,” she adds.

The aftermath of the 2020 U.S. presidential race offered a memorable example of mincing an oath, even though it wasn’t one the authors specifically examined. The infamous “Let’s go Brandon” slogan started cropping up on bumper stickers and t-shirts. The expression originated at an October 2011 NASCAR race where attendees were chanting “Fuck Joe Biden,” and a national sports reporter interviewing winner Brandon Brown at the time thought they were saying “Let’s go, Brandon.”

The error quickly became a meme and then a coy slogan, perhaps allowing nonfans of Biden to express their ire on shirts and cars without actually swearing. Even though the phrase “Let’s go Brandon” is “just a coded version of ‘Fuck Joe Biden,’ happily for us, it conforms to our pattern because [it] has a couple of approximants,” compared with none in the original chant, says McKay. “That fits to a nicety.”

For next steps, Lev-Ari and McKay want to look for other cross-linguistic patterns. They are “interested in religion, wondering about words from the bible, including words for God,” McKay says. “Might there be particular sounds that people across different languages associate with a being of power and resonance?”

Member Article

The science of swearing.

• Communication
• Language Development
• Personality/Social

Why would a psychological scientist study swearing? Expertise in such an area has different practical significance inside and outside the community of psychological science. Outside the scientific community, expertise on taboo language is justification for frequent consultation about contemporary issues that are perennial: Is swearing harmful? Should children be allowed to swear? Is our swearing getting worse? One of us has been interviewed over 3,000 times by various media with respect to the questions above, as well as those about the use of taboo words in television, advertising, professional sports, radio, music, and film. In addition to consultation with mass media, expert testimony has been needed in cases involving sexual harassment, fighting words, picket-line speech, disturbing the peace, and contempt of court cases.

Considering the persistent need for an expert to consult for the above issues, it is odd that swearing expertise is weighted so differently when swearing is viewed from the perspective of psychological science. While hundreds of papers have been written about swearing since the early 1900s, they tend to originate from fields outside of psychology such as sociology, linguistics, and anthropology. When swearing is a part of psychological research, it is rarely an end in itself.

Kristin Janschewitz

It is far more common to see strong offensive words used as emotionally arousing stimuli — tools to study the effect of emotion on mental processes such as attention and memory.

Why the public-versus-science disconnect? Is swearing, as a behavior, outside the scope of what a psychological scientist ought to study? Because swearing is influenced so strongly by variables that can be quantified at the individual level, psychological scientists (more than linguists, anthropologists, and sociologists) have the best training to answer questions about it. Another explanation for the relative lack of emphasis on this topic is the orientation of psychological science to processes (e.g., memory) rather than life domains (e.g., leisure activities), a problem described by Paul Rozin. Arguably, a more domain-centered approach to psychological study would better accommodate topics such as swearing and other taboo behaviors.

Regardless of the reason for the relative lack of emphasis on swearing research per se inside psychological science, there is still a strong demand from outside the scientific community for explanations of swearing and associated phenomena. To give the reader a sense of the work that we do as psychological scientists who study swearing, let’s consider some of the common questions we’re asked about swearing.

Is swearing problematic or harmful?

Courts presume harm from speech in cases involving discrimination or sexual harassment. The original justification for our obscenity laws was predicated on an unfounded assumption that speech can deprave or corrupt children, but there is little (if any) social-science data demonstrating that a word in and of itself causes harm. A closely related problem is the manner in which harm has been defined — harm is most commonly framed in terms of standards and sensibilities such as religious values or sexual mores. Rarely are there attempts to quantify harm in terms of objectively measurable symptoms (e.g., sleep disorder, anxiety). Psychological scientists could certainly make a systematic effort to establish behavioral outcomes of swearing.

Swearing can occur with any emotion and yield positive or negative outcomes. Our work so far suggests that most uses of swear words are not problematic. We know this because we have recorded over 10,000 episodes of public swearing by children and adults, and rarely have we witnessed negative consequences. We have never seen public swearing lead to physical violence. Most public uses of taboo words are not in anger; they are innocuous or produce positive consequences (e.g., humor elicitation). No descriptive data are available about swearing in private settings, however, so more work needs to be done in that area.

Therefore, instead of thinking of swearing as uniformly harmful or morally wrong, more meaningful information about swearing can be obtained by asking what communication goals swearing achieves. Swear words can achieve a number of outcomes, as when used positively for joking or storytelling, stress management, fitting in with the crowd, or as a substitute for physical aggression. Recent work by Stephens et al. even shows that swearing is associated with enhanced pain tolerance. This finding suggests swearing has a cathartic effect, which many of us may have personally experienced in frustration or in response to pain. Despite this empirical evidence, the positive consequences of swearing are commonly disregarded in the media. Here is an opportunity for psychological scientists to help inform the media and policymakers by clearly describing the range of outcomes of swearing, including the benefits.

Is it bad for children to hear or say swear words?

The harm question for adult swearing applies to issues such as verbal abuse, sexual harassment, and discrimination. When children enter the picture, offensive language becomes a problem for parents and a basis for censorship in media and educational settings. Considering the ubiquity of this problem, it is interesting that psychology textbooks do not address the emergence of this behavior in the context of development or language learning.

Parents often wonder if this behavior is normal and how they should respond to it. Our data show that swearing emerges by age two and becomes adult-like by ages 11 or 12. By the time children enter school, they have a working vocabulary of 30-40 offensive words. We have yet to determine what children know about the meanings of the words they use. We do know that younger children are likely to use milder offensive words than older children and adults, whose lexica may include more strongly offensive terms and words with more nuanced social and cultural meanings. We are currently collecting data to better understand the development of the child’s swearing lexicon.

We do not know exactly how children learn swear words, although this learning is an inevitable part of language learning, and it begins early in life. Whether or not children (and adults) swear, we know that they do acquire a contextually-bound swearing etiquette — the appropriate ‘who, what, where, and when’ of swearing. This etiquette determines the difference between amusing and insulting and needs to be studied further. Through interview data, we know that young adults report to have learned these words from parents, peers, and siblings, not from mass media.

Considering that the consequences of children’s exposure to swear words are frequently cited as the basis for censorship, psychological scientists should make an effort to describe the normal course of the development of a child’s swearing lexicon and etiquette. Is it important to attempt to censor children from language they already know? While psychological scientists themselves do not establish language standards, they can provide scientific data about what is normal to inform this debate.

Has swearing become more frequent in recent years?

This is a very common question, and it’s a tough one to answer because we have no comprehensive, reliable baseline frequency data prior to the 1970s for comparison purposes. It is true that we are exposed to more forms of swearing since the inception of satellite radio, cable television, and the Internet, but that does not mean the average person is swearing more frequently. In our recent frequency count, a greater proportion of our data comes from women (the reduction of a once large gender difference). We interpret this finding as reflecting a greater proportion of women in public (e.g., many more women on college campuses) rather than a coarsening of women. Our forthcoming research also indicates that the most frequently recorded taboo words have remained fairly stable over the past 30 years. The Anglo-Saxon words we say are hundreds of years old, and most of the historically offensive sexual references are still at the top of the offensiveness list; they have not been dislodged by modern slang. Frequency data must be periodically collected to answer questions about trends in swearing over time.

Thus, our data do not indicate that our culture is getting “worse” with respect to swearing. When this question arises, we also frequently fail to acknowledge the impact of recently-enacted laws that penalize offensive language, such as sexual harassment and discrimination laws. Workplace surveillance of telephone and email conversations also curbs our use of taboo language.

Do all people swear?

We can answer this question by saying that all competent English speakers learn how to swear in English. Swearing generally draws from a pool of 10 expressions and occurs at a rate of about 0.5 percent of one’s daily word output. However, it is not informative to think of how an average person swears: 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. Inappropriate swearing can be observed in frontal lobe damage, Tourette’s disorder, and aphasia.

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.g., schizophrenia and bipolar disorder). 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.

Amazingly interesting.

There are some new swear words in the younger generation. Probably they define a loose, age-specific, “cloud grouping.” What do you think about “new” swear words?

My father, a tee-totling christian could swear louder and longer than anyone I knew… without using a swear-word. I.e. “carn-sarn-nit,” “yellow-bellied-wood-pecker,” “son-of-a-biscuit-eater,” “crim-a-nelly,” on and on. Hmm. We knew he was swearing, he knew he was swearing.

As a long-time teacher and professor I have noted a few things on both sides: The swear words addiction reminds me of youngsters in locker rooms when they first begin boasting with smutty words and innuendos to show off their “sophisticated masculinity.” It then rubs off as they get older onto others who look upon them as more sophisticated than the younger students. Later, even some professors use these words to show they are “with it.” My judgment? If you were really that learned and sophisticated, you would not need to use those words in public (sometimes with a tongue-in-cheek attitude). Many today would like less pollution of dirty language and anger–because there is always an element of anger in these words, even if it is hidden. And people using the word conservative as a slander should realize that many of these “conservatives” are so innovative that they have succeeded not only in doing good for the public with their successful modern ideas and products but steer clear of anger and hate and harm to others with their “labels.” Pandering to the lowest level is not productive. It only gives fuel to more smut.

“like less pollution of dirty language and anger–because there is always an element of anger in these words, even if it is hidden.”

That is not objective at all. Where is this hidden element of anger you assert is always there? The article shows that it substitutes aggression among other positive effects. How can you conclude that it hides anger if the evidence shows it substitutes violence and reduces stress? I think you are steering a little bit away from measurable evidence here on this.

I do agree though with many people not needing to swear, but that could be from so many other reasons. Perhaps they have other methods and habits of stress management? Maybe the group of friends they are with also happen to swear less? Maybe the geographical area swears less? Who knows. But I still don’t see any evidence supporting your assertion of ever-present hidden anger in certain choices of vocabularity disregarding so many other variables. I’ll defend my friends any day of the week if people levy accusations against them for their choices of vocabularity. There are so many other clearly measurable bad things than to waste time with that.

Profanity is the diction of the indolent, unburdening the perpetrator of lexical exertion. The syntactic versatility of the curse is boundless, conveniently obeying regular rules of inflection. Like a furtive vandal, the obscenity nestles effortlessly anywhere into any sentence, destroying its nuance. Hardly a brain cell need be inducted to create an offending phrase. Rather than expend energy selecting the precise noun, verb, or adjective that accurately embodies intent, the debauchee resorts to the makeshift swear. A profane Marc Antony hovering over the bloodied corpse of Caesar, rather than expressing Shakespeare’s poetic portent “Woe to the hand that shed this costly blood” might otherwise say, “Screw the bastard who did this crap.” The image conveyed by the profane Marc Antony, one of illegitimate men being raped for defecation, is a less accurate, less poignant depiction than the original, which inspires desire for revenge against the murderer whose callous hand spilled the blood of the mighty Caesar. Swearing ruins language and stains those engaging in it with the mark of sloth and doltishness.

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…

It would be interesting to study whether people who are more sensitive to sound are also more negatively effected by swear words.

Has there ever been a study of honesty versus swearing? I was recently told by an acquaintance that people who swear are more honest. I don’t see how there could be a correlation, but she insists it was studied and its true.

Based on personal experience, I’d have to say yes. 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 cuss like a loon, but I’d give you the shirt off my back, open my home to you for shelter, put food in your mouth if you were hungry, and never put up a false pretense. I’ve never heard of such a study myself and I’m about to go look into it after typing this because it sounds intriguing. However, I can say, that based off myself, and experiences with other avid samplers of the verbally profane (lol), that we’re pretty damn honest. 😀 Maybe it’s because we don’t shy away from profanity that we don’t shy away from much else, including being straight with people. 🙂

I think a lot of what you have said is true. I too think that a lot of people who have strong beliefs or ideas just say it as it is. They don’t seem as vulnerable and are maybe more literal in their thinking therefore speaking from the heart so to speak. 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.

You said: “They’re not vulnerable. They’re literal. They swear more than they think they do. Therefore, they are speaking from their heart” That makes completely no sense. If they were speaking from their heart, then they would not “be literal”, instead, they would be loving and kind and compassionate instead; and likewise, if they were speaking from their heart, they would be vulnerable, and they would also speak important things, instead of repetitive trash.

It’s an assumption that those words are “trash”, which seems to be based on a prejudice you have against the words and I am wondering where your idea that they are “trash” has come from? I make no such judgement either way myself, being (probably inappropriately) objective on the matter. If they are “repetitive”, this rather misses their point that they will be the ‘same old words’ and that underlines why they are used. You speak of “speaking about important things” but what are you giving importance to and why? Where has your judgement that swear words are thereby not “important” come from? In fact they form a vital part of the language. It’s also possible to use swear words in a kind and compassionate way, and even a loving way, because they are words used between friends (and the closer they are, the more ‘severe’); however this may not be true for yourself because they are not used in this way in some generations that misuse the words by using them in anger and therefore carry a different association. It’s also possible to be very nasty as well as to talk complete trash without using swearing. Therefore, the presence of swearing neither shows “trash” and nor does the lack of swearing show kindness or compassion. It is possible to talk trash with or without swearing, and possible to be kind or compassionate or to be angry and disrespectful with or without swearing. You say swear words are designated in the dictionary as swear words – the use of the word “the” suggests that there is one dictionary; however there are different dictionaries and they designate different words as swearing because some words that continue to be listed as swearing in some dictionaries, in another dictionary are now merely slang. This suggests a change in the language whereby some words have ceased to be swear words, although I don’t know whether you still think they are swearing because you speak of them being designated by “the dictionary”. When people speak “from the heart”, that does not necessarily mean they are vulnerable. Some vulnerable people are indeed in a worse position because of their vulnerability and thus not able to voice their feelings therefore would not be using swearing and might also avoid much else as well perhaps with certain people. Their lack of swearing, indeed lack of conversation, might mean they are vulnerable rather than their ability to speak from the heart demonstrating a lack of vulnerability.

So you mentioned you do not know where children learn swear words?? Are you serious? At home for most of them. The others learn from kids when they get to school. Did you not have kids and learn this? lol

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.

If there is a study were can we view it or read there findings? I find this hard to believe.

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. Haven’t found it yet but I will continue to look. I do see where some truth would come from it. Not so much as oh this person cusses like a sailor there for he/she won’t steal my purse, but more from a standpoint of I can trust them to tell me if these pants make my butt look big. 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.

This is an interesting article, though I started to question the research design after reading, “…we have recorded over 10,000 episodes of public swearing by children and adults, and rarely have we witnessed negative consequences. We have never seen public swearing lead to physical violence.”

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.

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.

Is there ANYWHERE conservative trolls will NOT go? 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). Tomorrow’s child is without a doubt attempting to make readers feel they are somehow remiss to even have read this, in a most puerile, opinionated way that, given even the misspelling of the words “venereal” and “propaganda” achieve little but generate disdain for a squandered intellect. All that, without a single profanity. And I haven’t even begun to describe his family tree. Terrific article. Needs expansion. Try to ignore the trolls. Leave those clodhoppers to me.

Thanks, James. Have just read the article today and the comments. Keep fighting the good fight against the trolls. For the Trolls out there – We’re just trying to understand the mechanics of how humans work rather than lay on guilt, etc.

You are guilty of the same logical fallacy. Ad hominems are common known in politics as “mudslinging.” Also evident by pointing out spelling errors

“appeal to hypocrisy” because it distracts from the argument by pointing out hypocrisy in the opponent.

well about the swearing vs honesty thing if swearing has a direct correlation to a type A personality one of the defining traits of a type A personality is honesty

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. I doesn’t matter if you swear or not, honesty is in the person’s upbringing and natural character in my opinion. To heck with Behavioral Studies.

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.e. your not doing anybody any harm, but it is bad manners and repulsive. I havn’t observed any relationship between IQ, honesty, temper or manners in the frequency of swearing. I don’t get that it helps someone to stand pain as some of the biggest babies (adults) would come out with a string of cursing at the slightest twinge. 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. i.e. a nuisance and unnecessary. Sorry to be a prig, but I’m right!

Given that, of the 2 words seen as the most obscene in English – 1 dates back to at least 1290 and the other to around 1470, I don’t see swearing being replaced by hand clapping anytime soon. 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. The earliest recorded use of the c-word was a street name in Oxford, Gropec@&£ Lane. 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.

Matt Van Wagner, love your comment.

As far as exploiting my limited vocabulary, that’s taurine fecal matter! According to HBO dramas, ancient Rome and the American frontier West were scenes of far more potty-mouth than contemporary society. In France, higher class women fart at the dinner table, giggle, and say, “Je m’excuse!”, say ‘merde’ without batting an eye; near as i can tell, the filthiest expletive one can utter is ‘punaise’ meaning ‘gnats’ or bedbug… although ‘putard’ [prostitute] and its slang derivative ‘petang’ [whore] may be a close second. [this information is several decades dated] I suspect the use of Anglo-Saxon rooted vocabulary is directly related to the social mores of particular times and places, more than any intrinsic meaning or sound of the words themselves… Cheese and crackers, got all muddy! Squeamish people probably can’t help themselves – that’s just the way they were raised!

My sister-in-law is a devout christian and considered the “f”g-word, or effg….vile and disgusting and refused to come to our home after one such incident. I was frustrated with the thoughtless of the people above us (rented apartment (flat)stomping up and down, the young 20-someting daughter who should have been living on her own,) and turned to hubby and bottom line mentioned those f*g tenants, a woman, her daughter and the woman’ grandmother. SIL strode upstairs and read the three women, the riot act. She barely tolerates s*t, damn, hell from my hubby.

I don’t see anything wrong cursing once in a while to show my frustration and the pain I suffer from. She LOATHES it. Having read a Toronto Star, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, article from Reuters by Star Reporter, Katelyn Verstaten, I thought, ‘Ah, someone who feels the way I do. 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.

@Dr. Sharlene Peters: What I find interesting is you say “My father, a tee-totling christian could swear louder and longer than anyone I knew… without using a swear-word. I.e. “carn-sarn-nit,” “yellow-bellied-wood-pecker,” “son-of-a-biscuit-eater,” “crim-a-nelly,” on and on. Hmm. We knew he was swearing, he knew he was swearing”.

What I proffer is that a child of any age wouldn’t say “carn-sarn-it” (or any of those other words you said your father used) to a friend for shock value, or to a parent to show rebellion, but WOULD use the “F” word for the same purpose. So if a word doesn’t bring forth shock, is not profane or obscene, then it’s not swearing. At least IMHO.

Re: some of the comments, I can swear up a storm when I’m angry but I also swear in everyday speech. I do have bipolar disorder so there might be some impulse control issues. And on a question of intelligence, I don’t believe that has anything to do with it. I am working towards finishing my M.S. and then my PhD and I can make a sailor blush if I were so inclined. I promise you there are plenty of intelligent people who swear on a regular basis.

So science doesn’t really have a lot to do with what lay people believe. It is systematic. Orderly. Not impulsive. It is not speculation. 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? They don’t use words that are as strong as older people, but I’m sure you’ve seen a kid say “Shoot!” when she’s stubbed her toe. It’s cathartic. Applying “common sense”… well, yeah, no, that’s problematic for a number of reasons.

Dear right wing people who do not like swearing:

1. Not liking something does not make it go away.

2. Not liking swearing does not make it untrue that there is a correlation between wearing and honesty.

3. Today’s world, apparently, has less swearing than the world in the past, not more. Read the article: the authors say “…our data do not indicate that our culture is getting “worse” with respect to swearing”.

4. “To heck with Behavioral Studies”? Really? 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. I swear because it is the only way I can find, and feel the aggression I need to meet the aggression that life throws at me. I not talking about people Im talking about the thing that you wake up to every morning trying to bring you down. Swearin has really made a difference in my aggression of spirit. You have to be harder then life or life will break you.

A certain person spying on me told me that she herself has been studying my own behavior in what she herself has called a “Bad Mouth” study. She told me that she has noticed me starting to cuss recently and asked me why. I told her that the reason is because I am not being cushioned by the presence of my own fiancé. She told me that that same answer of mine to her same question has tempted her to bring my own fiancé to me to determine whether or not I really would stop cussing at that point. She also told me, however, that she, in order to determine the continued results of her own study, would have to keep spying, on not only me but also my own husband.

I’m curious on how & why ppl use words such as Jesus Christ & the F*** words in negative, stressful situations? Isn’t the F-bomb related to sex which is something adults find pleasurable yet it’s used in negative situations? Wouldn’t it make more sense to say something like evil, crap or sh*t that have more negative connotations behind the definition? I guess there must be more rationale behind the use of profanity in language….so much more than I thought of. It would be interesting to see more studies about the use of profanity.

Interesting article, but in my opinion it is not always a good approach to omit certain findings from similar scientific studies done from a different area of specialization, as they can lend credence to the psychological study done here. Neurolinguistics, for example, could give some useful background on just why it is that aphasics swear more prolifically than other psychosociological groups. When I was in college working towards my BA in linguistics I had a work study job with a professor of neurolinguistics, whose team was developing the first ‘talking computer’, for use by stroke victims, aphasics and victims of other language disorders. While I was there, it was discovered by accident, that we actually use a completely different part of our brain to swear than we do for ‘normal’ speech. A nurse was bringing hot coffee to a patient in the hospital where we worked; he had had a severe stroke and was unable to speak at all. The nurse accidentally spilled the hot coffee all over him… and he let out a blue streak like none you’ve ever heard! That incident opened up an area of study in neurolinguistics that has helped many patients, mute for whatever medical reasons, to relearn how to produce speech by repurposing the pathways the brain normally reserves for swearing. The original patient was taught to speak again after a prolonged period of no doubt frustrated silence, using those neuropathways… His family was beyond grateful and he himself was thrilled to no end. To get back to my original point, what I believe is that overspecialization in a given area of science can sometimes put the blinders on, even to the extent of reinventing the wheel sometimes. Better to cull from several areas of study, to round out your psychological findings and to give them a broader context. Oh! And by the way, the F word came to us from the Latin form, probably through the Norman rule of England for over 200 years. The slang term may be from the agricultural tool used to cultivate hard soil, the farmer’s fuck. Popular use arrived in America via the British pop rock bands of the ‘sixties… Not sure about the C word; have to look that one up in my dusty linguistics textbooks! But the description provided by 2manyprojex definitely has a ring of truth to it (see the March, 2014 comment above). I love this stuff!

“Why the public-versus-science disconnect?”

Was this a rhetorical question raised for effect to draw attention to the fact the disconnect certainly seems to exist? This is an interesting question that exceedingly relevant in politics. Why such a large disconnect between the folk psychologies of average American communities and the formal communities of the softer sciences known as psychology and sociology? I think a Chomskian (or Freireian, if you prefer) response might simply point out that it’s not politically expedient for the masses to possess genuine critical thinking skills, and rather to encourage simple worldviews such as Judeo-Christian or jingoistic mythologies.

The subject of this article is interesting, as are some of the questions. However, I’ll admit the reason I’m here is because I expected to find more of the unrealistic information that Matt Van Wagner and Cora referenced in posts above. The second and third paragraphs under “Is Swearing Problematic of Harmful?” were cited (although heavily paraphrased) in an article I was reading, and it had a link to this page. If you want to seriously pursue the topic scientifically, you’re going to have incorporate some real-life experiences (ie. life domains, leisure activities, social activities). For anyone to say, “We have never seen public swearing lead to physical violence. Most public uses of taboo words are not in anger; they are innocuous or produce positive consequences (e.g., humor elicitation).” I’m not being facetious when I say that makes me wonder if you’ve been home-schooled your entire life and led a dramatically sheltered life (ie. no life domains). After obscene gestures and racial epithets, swearing is likely the biggest precursor (no pun intended) to violence. In addition, to the examples given in the above post, there’s road rage. I went to a public school in a middle=class, suburban area, but I’ve seen swearing escalate to violence many times. Do all people swear? In my experience yes, although frequency varies greatly from person to person. I don’t swear much, but I definitely have. For myself, and for most of what I’ve seen in life, swearing is a barometer of someone’s anger. There are exceptions of course – like Tourette Syndrome. I’ve also heard an occasional “Oh, H— Yeah!”, but for every one of the positive swears, I’ve heard 100 negative ones. Cursing ‘seems’ one of very universal themes – as it seems whenever people learn a new language – the first words they want to learn are the swear words. I’ve got so much more to say, but besides the fact that nobody may want to hear what I have to say, I noticed this article is 3 years old.

Kudos to the people whose entitled moral ground makes them think they know more and better than a Behavioral Science PhD. Do they really think the world revolves around their own moral values? If it doesn’t fit with how we want and what we want, it’s hokey. Well, it’s not.

As for the article. Well written and informative, as much as should be. I don’t see a bias, unless uncertainty and reluctance to make unfounded correlations is now called bias. I would be interested to know how the research progresses.

Reference anger to infantile expression shows a lack of connection to our language. I do not choose to revert to anal attachment to feces, when I am frustrated. To pout and holler ‘feces’ shows a lack of higher cognizance to what is obviously frustrating me. Likewise, I do not choose to use a word for intercourse, inviting people who I do not even like to intercourse. That sex and hatred are so intertwined speaks volumes of our inability to differentiate between the two. To reference a woman as a female breeding dog and then teach her to be proud to insult herself, defies all logic. I could get more into profanities, if they made more sense, raising themselves out of poop, piss, sex, into words that make logical sense.

Exactly, Mac

Well, Mac your remarks were hilariously forthright and candidly serious. Your colorful discourse was quite amusing to me, although you appear to be quite sincere with no intention of being comical. I like. Thank you for sharing. 🙂

Here is a great explanation on how context makes all the difference. And how in the wrong context, swear words will increase stress levels/negative emotions:

http://harvardsciencereview.com/2014/01/23/the-science-of-swearing/

Of course saying words with negative associations, are going to give rise to negative feelings (and stress). This does not apply to light-hearted situations in which the swear words are being used for dramatic effect. A cleverly placed swear word in a funny situation can be very amusing. However, a mother calling her child a ‘piece of s****’- does not make that child feel trusting (and I hope they don’t believe their mother is being honest).

I’m mildly offended that one would even insinuate that because an individual swears they are less honest, less intelligent or capable, or viewed as irresponsible, irrational, etc. I “swear a blue streak” all day, but I know that it should be restricted in certain venues or circumstances. Just because an individual curses, they shouldn’t be judged. There is no credible evidence to back up your preconceived notions. We don’t hide who or what we are. Perhaps those who are more reserved with their use of language are fraudulent, and limit themselves as to who or what they can be due to fear of judgement. Cry babies. Get over it. I grew up in a home with parents who swear. What happened? My repertoire is just more extensive and colorful than some. I’m not a drug addict, alcoholic, convict, neglectful or abusive in my parenting, nor do I believe that my integrity has at all in any manifestation been compromised. That said… i’m pretty sure we all learned that language is subjective. It’s not the word itself that bothers an individual but rather their interpretation of it. Cry me a river….seriously, people.

Hi Kristin and Timothy, Enjoyed your piece about the benefits of swearing on Mind Body Green site. When I was going to school I had a woeful stammer in my speech and had great difficulty conversing socially and answering questions at school. Found that when I swore before starting to recite a poem especially in class it got the first word out easier especially if the poem began with a broad consenant. If the poem began with a vowel it made it that bit easier to start the recitation. I had to swear under my breath of course as swearing might not go down well if expressed loudly. Stammer is hardly noticeable nowadays. Thanks for your inspirational findings. Regards. Pat.

I guess I like a more ‘civilized society”,where people use language in respect to others. It seems that the ME generation prefers to use the F”’k word because they like to shock, saying “look at me”, rather than showing respect for you. It’s become a normal word in some groups without regard for others. I cringe at the sound of it, or any of the other curse words that people use. It is offensive in mixed company . I know there are similar words in other languages and as long as those of us don’t appose them it will always be so’

I just don’t have to like it, please show some respect.

I was wondering what y’all feel like a bad word is and what your own definition on a bad word.

I am a student at medina valley isd writing a paper for my dual credit

I personally feel that when someone swears, they are displaying the fact that they do not have a good vocabulary. Most of the people in my school swear just for fun. For example, one of the sentences I overheard in the lunch-line contained at least 10 swears, in like a 20 or so word sentence. This problem has to stop. I’m pretty sure that my school has a “no swearing” rule, but almost no one follows it.

Swearing isn’t a matter of what is being said, but what people intend when they say them. Excuse the profanity, but “Sh*t” and “Crap” are used on the same level, for the same purposes. It is in a manner similar to using the word “angry” in place of “mad.” There is very little difference, besides the syllable being uttered. Thus, it isn’t the word that is the problem: only the people who place a stigma toward it.

Swear words are designated in the dictionary as swear words. When they are used, you, by definition, are swearing. If used in a different context, of course, they are not swearing, but that does not excuse the offensive nature of swear words.

This is supposed to be a psychology oriented site, yet the authors of the article seem to be focusing with predilection on the linguistic aspect of the issue. By the time I read the passage where the authors claim we do not know how our children learn to swear, though, I was looking for a disclaimer announcing this is only for entertainment and that it is a fake news site.

Not only do they offer very little data in support of their claims, their claims defy rational logic, which is probably the reason we find no significant data in the article, other than the claim that the authors were interviewed 3,000 times regarding this issue, which is obviously not true.

This kind of articles explain why according to recent studies, a vast majority of the population of America does not trust scientists and science journalists. What is even more depressing is the fact that the authors teach in our colleges and universities, which seems to account for the state of profound ignorance of our society.

On that note, as a personal observation, I noticed that most of the swearing is done by individuals that are poorly educated on the subjects they discussed, and that swearing it is used as a cover for their lack of knowledge, as a form of defense mechanism against those who expose them for making false claims.

Through my Sophomore year of High school, I never cussed. My friends did, and I didn’t find it offensive, but I simply abstained, assuming that this way when I cussed, it would get their attention. A higher shock value, you know? Yeah, that didn’t happen. I found it to be a burden, as it lessened some humor, so I took it up my senior year. No one noticed.

They all assumed that I wasn’t cussing. Even when I dropped a swear word or two, they didn’t notice. It was the strangest thing, as their assumptions that I didn’t cuss simply censored my speech automatically.

Just an amusing anecdote.

It would be really nice if any of the studies the authors consulted were cited in this article. It is really difficult to trust the veracity of the information here if none of it is backed up.

Why do people think that cursing is “speaking from the heart?” If they were speaking from their heart, the they would be ***loving and kind and compassionate; ***vulnerable, ****speak important things, instead of repetitive trash.

I realize that this is now a few years old but it has given me a laugh. My SO says I insult her when I swear at her, I don’t understand her, I AM INTENDING to insult her because she has frustrated me by doing something that I have asked at least a dozen times for her not to do! So, swearing can be a safety valve to let off steam when you experience stressful events most significantly from those close to you. Before people think I am a brain challenged moron, I am an Oxford qualified pathologist and to be frank, I like swearing. Some of the people responding here are straight from Victoiana and I shoukd know as I am living with one!

I am doing a research on “curse/wishing ill/imprecation” in a religious context and came across this site. In other cultures, people, especially older folks, will utter ill wishes upon someone else when he/she gets upset, like “may you die of hunger!, may you never see happiness in your life!, may your hands get cut!, etc”. Most of these have no religious connotations but the underlying emotional outburst by the speaker seems to stem from the root words of “curse” in major world religions. I have specific questions. While the word “curse” has been replaced by “profanities, swearing, etc”, do people in American still curse/wish ill upon others, the old way? Thank you.

Sexual anxiety is positive. Ask any father of three daughters.

After seeing so much profanity on the Social sites. I got curious and wound up here. After reading the article and comments, I was struck that Communication Theory wasn’t mentioned.

To put it simply, there are 3 things that are basic. You need a sender, a receiver and a medium to communicate a subject matter. In my case, the medium is the internet.

When the communication is sent there is a context. The receiver evaluates the message and responds. The use of the internet as the medium is important to the context by veiling the sender and receiver. With face to face there is the advantage of seeing facial expressions as tone of speech.

As already stated the message can be good or bad. Since the message is written, you know the sender had time to think of the words they will use.

All of this causes me to conclude the profanity used in the internet social media is mostly pejorative.

Thank you for this input. I have been working on some research on swearing which was participated by college students. One area that I want to find out is whether those who swear try not to swear and why/why not. This might answer our question if swearing should be avoided or not as perceived by those who swear. However, this could be not enough, so it is also a good thing to consider why some people do not swear which might also answer the same queation.

This article is helpful to understand the teen psychology. Though, swearing words sound bad but their effects are very positive in anger management at least, and what I observed. Those teens are less illusive and avoid fanaticism.

Here in this neck of the woods (do woods have necks?) we generally swear for one of two reasons: firstly, in casual speech, to indicate that we are capable of looking after ourselves, so don’t mess with us; like the wearing of tattoos by people wanting to look tough, same sort of idea. Second type of swearing is more emotionally driven (eg by anger or frustration) and expresses how close we are to losing self-control (or we’ve already lost it), so again, tells people: don’t mess with us or it will turn out badly. I started swearing after about ten years as a senior research scientist, as a way of releasing the build-up of stress from the demands of the job and from having to deal with belligerent members of the public who thought they knew better than someone who had studied their particular area of expertise more carefully than those members of the public could ever do. So my advice to people who are criticising the original authors here is to go do a PhD on the subject area and call back when you’ve finished. That’s not elitism, it’s just that unless you’ve spent the best part of your life studying a particular subject, why do you think you know better than someone who has? Sheesh!

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About the Authors

Timothy Jay is a professor of psychology at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. When he’s not studying taboo words, he serves as a psycholinguistics consultant for school systems and legal cases. He can be contacted at [email protected] ;

Kristin Janschewitz is an assistant professor at Marist College. Her research interests include taboo language, emotion regulation, and cognitive control. She can be contacted at [email protected] .

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Science Says That People Who Curse a Lot Have Better Vocabularies Than Those Who Don't

If someone's ever accused you of sounding less intelligent because you swear too much, don't worry - science has got your back. A 2015 study found that those who have a healthy repertoire of curse words at their disposal are more likely to have a richer vocabulary than those who don't.

This challenges the long-held stereotype that people swear because they can't find more intelligent words with which to express themselves.

As Stephen Fry once said , "The sort of twee person who thinks swearing is in any way a sign of a lack of education or a lack of verbal interest is just f*cking lunatic."

Psychologists Kristin Jay and Timothy Jay of Marist College and the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts (not clear if related) came up with the hypothesis that people who are well-versed in curse words are more likely to have greater overall language fluency too.

For the first experiment, they gathered 43 participants (30 women) aged between 18 and 22 years, and first asked them to rattle off as many swear or taboo words as they could in 60 seconds.

Next, they had to recite as many animal names as they could in 60 seconds. The researchers used animal names as an indication of a person's overall vocabulary and interest in language.

As any intelligible American English taboo word or phrase was considered fair game, the participants ended up generating a total of 533 taboo words, including the rather obscure "cum dumpster" and "ass pirate".

The participants also submitted to so-called FAS tasks , which are standardised verbal fluency tests.

In a second experiment, another 49 participants (34 women) aged between 18 and 22 were asked to perform a similar task - this time they were asked to write down as many curse words and animal names starting with the letter "a" as they could.

They also completed FAS tasks to assess their overall language fluency.

Publishing in the journal Language Sciences , the researchers also found that expressive curse words were generated at higher rates than slurs, and there was little difference between what the female and male participants could come up with.

"[C]onsistent with findings that do not show a sex difference in taboo lexicon size, no overall sex difference in taboo word generation was obtained," they reported.

They found that the ability to generate curse words was not an index of overall language poverty - in fact, they found that taboo fluency is positively correlated with other measures of verbal fluency.

"That is, a voluminous taboo lexicon may better be considered an indicator of healthy verbal abilities rather than a cover for their deficiencies," the researchers concluded .

"Speakers who use taboo words understand their general expressive content as well as nuanced distinctions that must be drawn to use slurs appropriately.

"The ability to make nuanced distinctions indicates the presence of more rather than less linguistic knowledge, as implied by the POV [Poverty of Vocabulary] view."

Now, of course, it should be said that the sample size for this study was small, but until a larger cohort can be assessed, we can look to one of the greatest living masters of the English language, Stephen Fry , for his view.

Watch below as he discusses the joys of swearing, and feel that sweet, sweet vindication. But just remember: dropping "ass pirate" into a job interview is still not advised.

This article was originally published in December 2015.

The nature, types, motives, and functions of swear words: a sociolinguistic analysis

International Journal of Development Research

Received 22nd January, 2019; Received in revised form 05th February, 2019; Accepted 20th March, 2019; Published online 29th April, 2019

Copyright © 2019, Loae Fakhri Jdetawy. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

This theoretical paper discusses swearwords. It is based on the data drawn from the wide literature of swearing and taboo language. A sociolinguistic approach was adopted to discuss and analyze various aspects of swearing. This paper aims to identify the nature, types, motives, and functions of swear words. Based on the analysis, this study concluded that there are several and different classification systems of ‘bad language’ and ‘swear words’ and that is due to the fact that the value of ‘badness’ in all languages are constantly changing. The study has revealed many types of swear words; namely epithet, profanity, obscenity, cursing, blasphemy, taboo, vulgarity or the use of substandard vulgar terms, slang, insults, scatology, semantic derogation, ethnic/racial/ gender slurs, animal names mentioning, ancestral allusions, and propositional and non- propositional swearing which include dysphemistic, euphemistic, abusive, idiomatic, cathartic and emphatic swearing. It is also found that despite the various classification systems of swear words, however it is still difficult to reveal clear cut differences between the proposed types. It was inferred by the results of this discussion that there are many reasons, motives, and functions for swearing among both genders which include: expressing the speaker’s feelings in certain situations, achieving positive or negative impact on others, producing a pain lessening (hypoalgesic) effect, venting the emotions and non-emphatic feelings such as anger, frustration, surprise, sorrow, surprise, humor, and joy. Finally, it was inferred by this study that gender and age play a powerful role in swearing among both males and females.

The power of swearing: how obscene words influence your mind, body and relationships

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Richard Stephens has prevously received research funding from Nurofen.

Catherine Loveday, Karyn Stapleton, and Kristy Beers Fägersten do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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Swearing was long dismissed as a topic of serious research because it was assumed to be simply a sign of aggression, weak language proficiency or even low intelligence. We now have quite a lot of evidence that challenges this view, prompting us to reconsider the nature – and power – of swearing.

You can listen to more articles from The Conversation, narrated by Noa, here .

Whether we are fans of swearing or not, many of us are likely to resort to it now and again. To estimate the power of swearing, and work out where it comes from, we recently carried out a review of more than 100 academic papers on the subject from different disciplines. The study, published in Lingua , shows that the use of of taboo words can deeply affect the way we think, act and relate to each other.

People often associate swearing with catharsis – the release of strong emotion. It is undeniably different from – and more powerful than – other forms of language use. Interestingly, for speakers of more than one language, the catharsis is nearly always greater when swearing in one’s first language than any languages learned subsequently.

Swearing arouses the emotions. This can be measured in autonomic responses such as increased sweating and sometimes increased heart rate. These changes suggest that swearing can trigger the “fight or flight” function.

Neuroscientific research suggests that swearing might be located in different parts of the brain from other speech regions. Specifically, it might activate parts of the “ limbic system ” (including features known as the basal ganglia and the amygdala). These deep structures are involved in aspects of memory and emotion processing which are instinctive and difficult to inhibit . This might explain why swearing can remain intact in people who have suffered brain damage and struggle to speak as a result.

Laboratory-based experiments also show cognitive effects. We know that swear words command more attention and are better remembered than other words. But they also interfere with the cognitive processing of other words/stimuli – so it seems swearing can sometimes get in the way of thinking, too.

This may, however, be worth it – at least sometimes. In experiments requiring people to submerse a hand in icy water, swearing produces pain relief. In these studies, vocalising a swear word leads to higher pain tolerance and higher pain threshold compared with neutral words. Other studies have found increased physical strength in people after swearing.

But swearing doesn’t just influence our physical and mental selves – it also affects our relationships with others. Research in communication and linguistics has shown an array of distinctive social purposes of swearing – from expressing aggression and causing offence to social bonding, humour and story-telling . Bad language can even help us manage our identities and display intimacy and trust as well as boosting attention and dominance over other people.

Digging deeper

Despite having such a noticeable effect on our lives, we currently know very little about where swearing gets its power. Interestingly, when we hear a swear word in an unfamiliar language, it seems just like any other word and will not produce any of these outcomes – there’s nothing particular about the sound of the word itself that is universally offensive.

So, the power does not come from the words themselves. Equally, it is not inherent in the word meanings or sounds: neither euphemisms nor similar sounding words have such a profound effect on us.

One explanation is that “aversive conditioning” – the use of punishment to prevent continued swearing – typically occurs during childhood . This may establish a visceral connection between language use and emotional response. While this hypothesis sounds correct, it is weakly evidenced by only a handful of studies that have investigated memories of childhood punishment for swearing. There are almost no empirical studies of links between such memories and adult responses to swearing.

To get to the bottom of why swearing has such a profound effect on us, we need to investigate the nature of people’s memories for swearing. What were their significant swearing incidents? Did swearing always bring about unpleasant consequences, such as punishment, or were there benefits too? What about people’s ongoing experiences of swearing throughout the lifespan? After all, our research shows that swearing can sometimes help people bond with one another.

We think it might be possible for swearing to show a similar memory pattern to that for music – we remember and like the songs best that we listened to during adolescence. That’s because, like music, swearing possibly takes on new meaning in adolescence. It becomes an important way to respond to the intense emotions we tend to have during this time, and an act that signals independence from parents and connection with friends. So, swear words and songs used during this time may become forever linked with important and highly memorable experiences.

Research also needs to examine whether there is a link between memories of swearing and the effects observed in experiments. This could show whether people with more positive memories respond differently to those with negative memories.

A final point to consider is whether swearing will start to lose its power if it becomes more socially acceptable and thus loses its offensiveness. For now, however, it certainly remains a faux-pas.

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50 Useful Academic Words & Phrases for Research

Like all good writing, writing an academic paper takes a certain level of skill to express your ideas and arguments in a way that is natural and that meets a level of academic sophistication. The terms, expressions, and phrases you use in your research paper must be of an appropriate level to be submitted to academic journals.

Therefore, authors need to know which verbs , nouns , and phrases to apply to create a paper that is not only easy to understand, but which conveys an understanding of academic conventions. Using the correct terminology and usage shows journal editors and fellow researchers that you are a competent writer and thinker, while using non-academic language might make them question your writing ability, as well as your critical reasoning skills.

What are academic words and phrases?

One way to understand what constitutes good academic writing is to read a lot of published research to find patterns of usage in different contexts. However, it may take an author countless hours of reading and might not be the most helpful advice when faced with an upcoming deadline on a manuscript draft.

Briefly, “academic” language includes terms, phrases, expressions, transitions, and sometimes symbols and abbreviations that help the pieces of an academic text fit together. When writing an academic text–whether it is a book report, annotated bibliography, research paper, research poster, lab report, research proposal, thesis, or manuscript for publication–authors must follow academic writing conventions. You can often find handy academic writing tips and guidelines by consulting the style manual of the text you are writing (i.e., APA Style , MLA Style , or Chicago Style ).

However, sometimes it can be helpful to have a list of academic words and expressions like the ones in this article to use as a “cheat sheet” for substituting the better term in a given context.

How to Choose the Best Academic Terms

You can think of writing “academically” as writing in a way that conveys one’s meaning effectively but concisely. For instance, while the term “take a look at” is a perfectly fine way to express an action in everyday English, a term like “analyze” would certainly be more suitable in most academic contexts. It takes up fewer words on the page and is used much more often in published academic papers.

You can use one handy guideline when choosing the most academic term: When faced with a choice between two different terms, use the Latinate version of the term. Here is a brief list of common verbs versus their academic counterparts:

Although this can be a useful tip to help academic authors, it can be difficult to memorize dozens of Latinate verbs. Using an AI paraphrasing tool or proofreading tool can help you instantly find more appropriate academic terms, so consider using such revision tools while you draft to improve your writing.

Top 50 Words and Phrases for Different Sections in a Research Paper

The “Latinate verb rule” is just one tool in your arsenal of academic writing, and there are many more out there. But to make the process of finding academic language a bit easier for you, we have compiled a list of 50 vital academic words and phrases, divided into specific categories and use cases, each with an explanation and contextual example.

Best Words and Phrases to use in an Introduction section

1. historically.

An adverb used to indicate a time perspective, especially when describing the background of a given topic.

2. In recent years

A temporal marker emphasizing recent developments, often used at the very beginning of your Introduction section.

3. It is widely acknowledged that

A “form phrase” indicating a broad consensus among researchers and/or the general public. Often used in the literature review section to build upon a foundation of established scientific knowledge.

4. There has been growing interest in

Highlights increasing attention to a topic and tells the reader why your study might be important to this field of research.

5. Preliminary observations indicate

Shares early insights or findings while hedging on making any definitive conclusions. Modal verbs like may , might , and could are often used with this expression.

6. This study aims to

Describes the goal of the research and is a form phrase very often used in the research objective or even the hypothesis of a research paper .

7. Despite its significance

Highlights the importance of a matter that might be overlooked. It is also frequently used in the rationale of the study section to show how your study’s aim and scope build on previous studies.

8. While numerous studies have focused on

Indicates the existing body of work on a topic while pointing to the shortcomings of certain aspects of that research. Helps focus the reader on the question, “What is missing from our knowledge of this topic?” This is often used alongside the statement of the problem in research papers.

9. The purpose of this research is

A form phrase that directly states the aim of the study.

10. The question arises (about/whether)

Poses a query or research problem statement for the reader to acknowledge.

Best Words and Phrases for Clarifying Information

11. in other words.

Introduces a synopsis or the rephrasing of a statement for clarity. This is often used in the Discussion section statement to explain the implications of the study .

12. That is to say

Provides clarification, similar to “in other words.”

13. To put it simply

Simplifies a complex idea, often for a more general readership.

14. To clarify

Specifically indicates to the reader a direct elaboration of a previous point.

15. More specifically

Narrows down a general statement from a broader one. Often used in the Discussion section to clarify the meaning of a specific result.

16. To elaborate

Expands on a point made previously.

17. In detail

Indicates a deeper dive into information.

Points out specifics. Similar meaning to “specifically” or “especially.”

19. This means that

Explains implications and/or interprets the meaning of the Results section .

20. Moreover

Expands a prior point to a broader one that shows the greater context or wider argument.

Best Words and Phrases for Giving Examples

21. for instance.

Provides a specific case that fits into the point being made.

22. As an illustration

Demonstrates a point in full or in part.

23. To illustrate

Shows a clear picture of the point being made.

24. For example

Presents a particular instance. Same meaning as “for instance.”

25. Such as

Lists specifics that comprise a broader category or assertion being made.

26. Including

Offers examples as part of a larger list.

27. Notably

Adverb highlighting an important example. Similar meaning to “especially.”

28. Especially

Adverb that emphasizes a significant instance.

29. In particular

Draws attention to a specific point.

30. To name a few

Indicates examples than previously mentioned are about to be named.

Best Words and Phrases for Comparing and Contrasting

31. however.

Introduces a contrasting idea.

32. On the other hand

Highlights an alternative view or fact.

33. Conversely

Indicates an opposing or reversed idea to the one just mentioned.

34. Similarly

Shows likeness or parallels between two ideas, objects, or situations.

35. Likewise

Indicates agreement with a previous point.

36. In contrast

Draws a distinction between two points.

37. Nevertheless

Introduces a contrasting point, despite what has been said.

38. Whereas

Compares two distinct entities or ideas.

Indicates a contrast between two points.

Signals an unexpected contrast.

Best Words and Phrases to use in a Conclusion section

41. in conclusion.

Signifies the beginning of the closing argument.

42. To sum up

Offers a brief summary.

43. In summary

Signals a concise recap.

44. Ultimately

Reflects the final or main point.

45. Overall

Gives a general concluding statement.

Indicates a resulting conclusion.

Demonstrates a logical conclusion.

48. Therefore

Connects a cause and its effect.

49. It can be concluded that

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The brain science of cursing: how swear words work to inflict and relieve pain.

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Swearing has become a normal part of society’s universal conversation. Whether you’re in the nosebleeds cheering on your favorite team and a hearty “f--- yeah!” helps to get the crowd rallying together, or you’re running to answer the phone and stub your toe along the way, something about yelling “damnit!” makes it easier to stomach the sharp pain in your pinky toe.

The cathartic practice of swearing is born from a general pool of 10 expressions, which are exercised at a rate of 0.5 percent of a person’s daily 80- to 90-word output, according to the Association for Psychological Science . It has become a natural part of human speech development. In fact, through childhood and adolescent trial-and-error we test words to see where the line of appropriateness is drawn in certain social circles.

Throwing out the word “motherf-----” in a business meeting is out of place compared to happy hour in your local bar. All curse words were not created equal and should be carefully tailored for each befitting situation. Lacing the word f--- into a sentence immediately escalates the meaning of the phrase and should not be held to the same standards as using the less provocative “crap” in the conversation, according to psychologist Dr. John Grohol .

F--- can be traced back to the 16th century Norwegian word “fukka” and Swedish “focka,” meaning “to copulate,” or have sexual intercourse. It’s a harsh word that’s adapted a wide array of meanings used outside of its translational definition. Profanity precedes a long history, each word with its own etymology found hundreds of years ago derived from different nationalities, cultures, and regions, all molded into the exclusive club of expletives.

The Freedom of F U (Speech) :

The First Amendment in the Bill of Rights stands as one of the coveted founding tenets of America’s democratic society. But — and this is a big but — there’s a little legal loophole the Supreme Court calls “ unprotected speech ,” which explains an instance where speech can be restricted. Slander, libel, and words of instigation, also known as “fighting words,” are all examples of language bearing power to inflict harm on others. It's one of the most basic human lessons and laws of the land — hurting others is illegal.

This is where it gets tricky. In 1964, former Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart attempted to define profanity. He famously explained he could not describe it, “But I know it when I see it” ( Jacobellis v. Ohio ). He exemplified the difficult society has providing a universal definition that captures how every person interprets what is to be considered offensive. Studies on how people react to certain curse words and taboo phrases were categorized with visceral or social reactions, according to the Harvard Science Review .

Neuroscientists from Weill Medical College of Cornell University searched the brain to understand how swearing reverberates inside the intricate wiring of our minds using the neuroimaging technique PET (positron emission tomography) scans. By 1999, they found the amygdala, which is responsible for processing emotion and memory, was highly active when exposed to swear words.

But because the amygdala is also connected to the memory function part of the brain, repetition decreases the activity. Basically, if you grew up hearing your older brother or sister slinging some curse words around their friends, the likelihood of curse words shocking you in other social circles lowers. The emotional potency of the curse is diluted as it's used more and more. So save your s--- for when you really need it.

The amygdala is part of the limbic system, which is emphatically involved in interpreting and expressing emotions — intrinsic to cursing. Swear words are an important component of human beings’ emotional language. But, going back to legalities, obscenity is considered a type of unprotected speech because offensive words constitute a form of harm, especially for the vulnerable and young.

Sticks and Stones

Does the childhood rhyme hold any merit? It turns out psychological studies reveal context is everything. Verbal harassment and aggression causes clear negative and harmful psychological effects, while the isolated cursing is much less detrimental. A study published by the American Psychological Association found when children are victims of obscene telephone calls, there was little difference in the amount of damage caused from having a few curse words thrown into the conversation and not having any at all.

When it comes down to it, cursing isn’t all about verbally drilling fear into a perceived attacker. Flip the coin and you'll see it has its positives, too. Take pain, for starters. Dropping the F-bomb and other expletives are more than just an expression of agony, but also a way to alleviate it.

To test the theory, researchers measured how long college students could keep their hands immersed in cold water and compared their time to how many curse words they dished out in the challenge. They were allowed to repeat an expletive, chant, or neutral word of their choice. When participants cursed, not only did they report less pain than those who abstained from swearing, but they also lasted in the water for 40 seconds longer.

Researchers speculate the brain circuits linked to emotion, such as those found in the amygdala, have evolved over the years. Inside that almond-shaped group of neurons is a defense reflex that turns on when a person is suddenly injured or trapped. The lash out of language is the mind’s interpretation of verbal fighting designed to intimidate their attacker. It dulls the pain and soothes the fear as adrenaline follows closely behind the “ass----” aspirin you just swallowed.

But it’s more than just a way to defend ourselves; cursing has become a way to express happiness, sadness, stress, fear, surprise, and to vent emotional buildup. Expletives have become an undeniable part of how we create camaraderie, defiance, and identify with others. Its emotional usefulness in relieving pain has allowed taboo speech to weave itself into our everyday with no f---s given.

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• Arch Physiother

Frankly, we do give a damn: improving patient outcomes with swearing

Nicholas b. washmuth.

1 Department of Physical Therapy, Samford University, 800 Lakeshore Dr, Birmingham, AL 35229 United States

Richard Stephens

2 School of Psychology, Keele University, Keele, Staffordshire ST5 5BG UK

Associated Data

Not applicable, no data.

Words can change the way a patient thinks, feels, and performs. Swearing, or uttering a word that is considered taboo, is an often-ignored part of our language, even though over 50% of the population swears “sometimes” or “often”. If used correctly, within a biopsychosocial approach to care, swearing has the potential to significantly improve patient outcomes.

Swearing can create tighter human bonds and enhance the therapeutic alliance between a patient and a physical therapist. Improvements in social pain, physical pain tolerance, and physical pain threshold can occur by strategic swearing by our patients. Even physical performance measures, such as power and force could be enhanced if patients swear.

Although the mechanism by which swearing is effective is unclear, swearing deserves attention in the physical therapy setting based on evidence indicating potential positive effects on patient outcomes.

Introduction

We were first introduced to the quote, “words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind”, in a previous Viewpoint, which discusses how the words used by physical therapists have the capacity to either heal or cause harm [ 1 ]. Like drugs, words have an ability to change the way another person thinks, feels, and performs. As physical therapists managing patients within a biopsychosocial approach, the language used may be just as important as, if not more important than, any examination finding or intervention.

Swearing, or uttering a word that is considered taboo, is an often-ignored part of our language due to the controversial nature of the topic and the potential negative consequences of swearing. In 1901, Patrick [ 2 ] concluded that swearwords are primarily used by soldiers, sailors, laborers, uneducated people, and criminals, and men make up the majority of these social groups. While swearing has been considered a predominately masculine activity, women now tend to swear as much, or even more often, then men [ 3 ]. Since swearing is considered taboo, these words are usually judged as shocking, and the swearer may be considered antisocial and offensive. Consequently, swearing can negatively impact how the swearer is perceived by others, which may lead to social isolation and depression. In groups of women with rheumatoid arthritis or breast cancer, Robbins et al. [ 4 ] found that swearing was related to increases in depressive symptoms, and this association remained significant even after accounting for variances in the depressive symptoms associated with disease severity. Interestingly, only swearing in the presence of others, and not swearing alone was correlated with increased depressive symptoms [ 4 ]. In specific contexts, swearing has been shown to produce negative outcomes.

Swearing may also be a sign of intelligence, is associated with less lying and deception at the individual level and higher integrity at the society level, and may be a sign of creativity [ 5 ]. The offensiveness and the positive or negative consequences of swearing is highly dependent on the context. While it is not fully understood why swear words are so powerful, it has been suggested that swearing is learned during childhood and that aversive classical conditioning contributes to the emotionally arousing aspect of swear words [ 6 ]. Swearers who disregard social codes and are at odds with the context, may offend the audience and break social convention, leading to negative consequences such as less positive attitudes towards the swearer [ 7 ]. This can occur by swearing in front of children or around people of higher status. To optimize the positive outcomes from swearing, physical therapists can use social codes cues of the situation which includes their intent, patient’s facial expressions, tone and gestures, and the relationship between the physical therapist and patient [ 7 ].

Humans have been swearing since the emergence of language [ 3 ] and is quite common, with evidence suggesting 58% of the population swears “sometimes” or “often” and less than 10% of the population report “never” or “rarely” swearing [ 8 ]. Most often, it is the swear word itself that is considered taboo rather than the semantic meaning it conveys. For example, talking about sexual intercourse by itself is not considered swearing; however, the F-word is a well-recognized swear word considered “very severe” by 71% of the population [ 9 ].

Benefits of swearing

Swearing in the physical therapy setting should be used to accomplish specific goals, such as relief from pain or stress. When swearing is based on biopsychosocial utility, it may add significant value if used correctly. Swearing tends to be more tolerated in private settings and among peers as opposed to a more formal and public setting. Swearing can lead to tighter human bonds and create informal environments where people are more likely to be themselves [ 3 ]. Social groups depend on some degree of shared willingness to participate in risks or taboo practices, swearing being one of them. In the physical therapy setting, an improved relationship or positive connection between a patient and a physical therapist, otherwise known as the therapeutic alliance, has been linked to improvements in musculoskeletal pain.

Language used by the physical therapist and the patient can impact social, psychological, and biological factors, all of which heavily influence symptoms presentation and prognosis [ 1 , 10 ]. Social pain, described as a feeling of suffering brought on when social connections are lost or threatened, is biologically coupled with physical pain [ 11 ]. Similarly, the therapeutic alliance that decreases physical pain also mitigates social pain [ 12 ]. Establishing a strong, positive therapeutic alliance is valuable for addressing the psychosocial influence of pain. Swearing has also been shown to reduce social pain [ 13 ], which may be related to improved social connections.

Swearing has also been found to decrease physical pain. Repeating a swear word while your hand is immerged in ice-water will allow you withstand the cold for 40 s longer, on average, compared to repeating a non-swear word [ 14 ]. This ice-water immersion yields scores for pain threshold (time at which pain is reported) and pain tolerance (time at which the hand is removed) and swearing has beneficial effects on both pain tolerance and threshold. It appears swearing is most effective at increasing pain thresholds among people who swear less often [ 14 ].

There is evidence that swearing out loud can also increase physical performance. Uttering a swear word every three seconds for the entire 30-s Wingate Anaerobic Power Test allows you to exert greater levels of peak power and average power compared to repeating a non-swear word [ 15 ]. Evidence also suggests you can exert a greater level of maximal force while squeezing a grip dynamometer while repeating a swear word [ 15 ]. In fact, many athletes admit to regularly using swearing words [ 16 ], which may be related to the improvements in physical performance that occur when swearing.

Swearing can modulate physical and social pain, and increase physical performance; however, we don’t yet know the mechanism by which swearing works. Stephens et al. [ 15 ] did not find measurable cardiovascular or autonomic arousal effects, with no clear changes in heart rate, skin conductance, or blood pressure when swearing. Therefore, increased muscular performance during swearing may be achieved by mechanisms other than sympathetic activation. Distraction of one’s attention away from a painful stimulus is known to reduce pain perception. It may be that we are distracting ourselves when we swear, thereby decreasing our pain perception. It is possible that swearing-induced distraction produced the improved performance during the Wingate Anaerobic Power Test and grip tasks, making it more tolerable to pedal hard and produce force while griping; however, future research is required to determine the mechanism by which swearing is effective.

What swear word should be used to get these pain and physical performance improvements? It is advised to use a swear word that you would use in response to banging your head accidentally [ 15 ]. If no clear swear words come to mind, the S-word and F-word are the two most common swear words [ 8 , 9 ] and were used by many of the subjects in the research showing the positive effects of swearing. There is evidence that a patient needs to use an actual swear word, not a made up or bad sounding word, to elicit the pain and physical performance improvements. Stephens et al. [ 17 ] discovered that pain tolerance and pain threshold improved in subjects that repeated the F-word , but pain metrics did not improve when subjects repeated the made up swear words “fouch” or “twizpipe”.

To elicit the positive effects on pain and physical performance, without negative consequences, patients should not swear at the physical therapist. The research showing positive effects on pain and physical performance had their subjects swear out loud, not at a specific individual. Being the target of verbal aggression by asking a patient to swear at a clinician appears to lead to a high degree of distress among health care workers [ 18 ].

Due to the potential negative effects of swearing, physical therapists should carefully determine which patients are likely to experience the greatest benefit from swearing, without risking negative consequences. The patients most likely to benefit from swearing are those who have strong rapport and therapeutic alliance with their clinician [ 8 ], those who use swearing sparingly which will preserve the hypoalgesic effects of swearing [ 14 ], and those who can swear privately or among their peers [ 4 ].

Patients’ dysfunctions develop from a combination of biological, psychological, and social factors that may also influence how their dysfunctions progress and their prognosis. Swearing deserves attention in the physical therapy setting based on evidence indicating positive effects on physical pain, social pain, and physical performance (Table ​ (Table1). 1 ). Swearing has positive and negative effects. Obviously, the possible use and effect of swearing may be highly dependent on its context. The relationship between the swearer and others in the social context, the formality of the situation, and the public or private nature of the situation are examples of such contextual factors that can influence the functionality of swearing. Many factors will play into whether including swearing will improve patient outcomes, one of which is the need for clinicians to have excellent relationship skills to help patients strategically incorporate swearing into their treatment plan. If words are the most powerful drug used by mankind, then the physical therapy profession should embrace swearing to change the way our patients think, feel, and perform.

Possible Improvements in Patient Outcomes Due to Swearing

Acknowledgements

Authors’ contributions.

NBW was responsible for idea conceptualization. NBW and RS were responsible writing and approving manuscript prior to submitting. Both authors read and approved the final manuscript.

No funding is affiliated with this project.

Availability of data and materials

Declarations.

Not applicable. This viewpoint uses no patient data and does not require institutional ethics approval.

We consent to have this work published in Archives of Physiotherapy. The work is not submitted elsewhere, and the work is original to the authors.

NBW and RS declare no competing interests.

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• 20 August 2024

The citation black market: schemes selling fake references alarm scientists

• Dalmeet Singh Chawla

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Citations for cash: researchers have identified services where scholars can buy citations to their papers in bulk. Credit: Vergani_Fotografia/Getty

Research-integrity watchers are concerned about the growing ways in which scientists can fake or manipulate the citation counts of their studies. In recent months, increasingly bold practices have surfaced. One approach was revealed through a sting operation in which a group of researchers bought 50 citations to pad the Google Scholar profile of a fake scientist they had created.

The scientists bought the citations for US$300 from a firm that seems to sell bogus citations in bulk. This confirms the existence of a black market for faked references that research-integrity sleuths have long speculated about, says the team.

The science that’s never been cited

“We started to notice several Google Scholar profiles with questionable citation trends,” says Yasir Zaki, a computer scientist at New York University (NYU) Abu Dhabi, whose team described its sting operation in a February preprint 1 . “When a manuscript acquires hundreds of citations within days of publication, or when a scientist has an abrupt and large rise in citations, you know something is wrong.”

These practices are troublesome because many aspects of a researcher’s career depend on how many references their papers garner. Many institutions use citation counts to evaluate scientists, and citation numbers inform metrics such as the h -index, which aims to measure scholars’ productivity and the impact of their studies.

Citation manipulation can have real consequences. In June, Spanish newspaper El País reported that the country’s Research Ethics Committee has urged the University of Salamanca to investigate the work of its newly appointed rector, Juan Manuel Corchado, a computer scientist accused of artificially boosting his Google Scholar metrics. (Corchado did not respond to Nature ’s request for comment.)

References for sale

Research-integrity watchers had already suspected that citations are for sale at paper mills , services that churn out low-quality studies and sell authorship slots on already-accepted papers, says Cyril Labbé, a computer scientist at Grenoble Alpes University in France. “Paper mills have the ability to insert citations into papers that they are selling,” he says.

In November 2023, analytics firm Clarivate in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, excluded more than 1,000 researchers from its annual list of highly cited researchers because of fears of citation gaming and ‘hyper-publishing’.

Hundreds of extreme self-citing scientists revealed in new database

In their sting operation, Zaki and his colleagues created a Google Scholar profile for a fictional scientist and uploaded 20 made-up studies that were created using artificial intelligence.

The team then approached a company, which they found while analysing suspicious citations linked to one of the authors in their data set, that seemed to be selling citations to Google Scholar profiles. The study authors contacted the firm by e-mail and later communicated through WhatsApp. The company offered 50 citations for $300 or 100 citations for $500. The authors opted for the first option and 40 days later 50 citations from studies in 22 journals — 14 of which are indexed by scholarly database Scopus — were added to the fictional researcher’s Google Scholar profile.

The team didn’t share the company’s name with Nature , citing concerns that revealing it could draw attention to its website, or the fake Google Scholar profile they created, because this might reveal the identities of the authors of the studies that planted the fake citations. Asked by Nature whether Google Scholar is aware that faked profiles can be created on its site, Anurag Acharya, distinguished engineer at the company said: “While academic misbehaviour is possible, it’s rare because all aspects are visible — articles indexed, articles included by an author on their profile, articles citing an author, where the citing articles are hosted and so on. Anyone in the world can call you on it.”

In another demonstration of citation manipulation, last month researchers created a fake Google Scholar profile for a cat called Larry listing a dozen fake papers with Larry as the sole author. The researchers posted a dozen more nonsensical studies on the academic social-networking site ResearchGate that cited Larry’s papers. A week or so after Larry’s identity was revealed, Google Scholar removed the cat’s studies, those citing Larry, and the accumulated citations. ResearchGate has also removed the bogus studies citing Larry.

Fake preprints

Zaki and colleagues’ sting operation was born out of a broader effort to assess the scale of the fake-citation problem. They used software to examine about 1.6 million Google Scholar profiles that had at least 10 publications. They searched for profiles with more than 200 citations and instances in which researchers’ citations increased by 10 times or more each year or when the rise represented a jump of at least 25% of their total citation count. The team found 1,016 such profiles.

The fight against fake-paper factories that churn out sham science

Zaki says that many citations to the papers on those profiles are from preprint articles that haven’t been peer reviewed and that they are typically listed in the bibliographies of papers but not cited in the main body of the manuscripts.

“Citations can easily be manipulated by creating fake preprints and through paid services,” says co-author Talal Rahwan, a computer scientist at NYU Abu Dhabi.

The authors also surveyed 574 researchers working at the 10 highest-ranked universities in the world. They found that of those universities that consider citation counts when evaluating scientists, more than 60% obtain these data from Google Scholar.

Fishy patterns

Labbé isn’t convinced by the survey’s claim that Google Scholar is widely used to obtain researchers’ citation metrics. Allegations of citation manipulation on Google Scholar have surfaced in the past, he says, and academics have long suspected that there are vendors offering this sort of service. But the sting operation to reveal a citation seller is the first of its kind, he says.

Guillaume Cabanac, a computer scientist at the University of Toulouse in France who has created a tool that flags fabricated papers that contain odd turns of phrase added to circumvent plagiarism-detection software, says that many studies are cropping up with citations to work that has nothing to do with the topic of the study.

Labbé’s team is building a tool that automatically flags fishy citation patterns that might point to manipulation.

How big is science’s fake-paper problem?

To help with that, Zaki’s team proposes a metric called the citation-concentration index, designed to detect cases in which a scientist receives many citations from few sources. Such activity is often a sign of a ‘citation ring’, in which scientists agree to cite one another to inflate each other’s metrics. “Suspicious ones tend to have massive citations stemming from just a few sources,” Rahwan says.

One fear among integrity sleuths is that fraudsters will conceive subtler practices to avoid being found out. For instance, one way to avoid being detected by the citation-concentration index, Labbé notes, is to buy a few citations at a time and not in bulk.

For Labbé, the way to address citation gaming is to change the incentives in academia so that scientists are not under pressure to accumulated as many citations as possible to progress their careers. “The pressure for publication and citation is detrimental to the behaviour of scientists,” he says.

Nature 632 , 966 (2024)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-01672-7

Ibrahim, H., Liu, F., Zaki, Y. & Rahwan, T. Preprint at arXiv https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2402.04607 (2024).

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Low-calorie diets and intermittent fasting have been shown to have numerous health benefits: They can delay the onset of some age-related diseases and lengthen lifespan, not only in humans but many other organisms.

Many complex mechanisms underlie this phenomenon. Previous work from MIT has shown that one way fasting exerts its beneficial effects is by boosting the regenerative abilities of intestinal stem cells, which helps the intestine recover from injuries or inflammation.

In a study of mice, MIT researchers have now identified the pathway that enables this enhanced regeneration, which is activated once the mice begin “refeeding” after the fast. They also found a downside to this regeneration: When cancerous mutations occurred during the regenerative period, the mice were more likely to develop early-stage intestinal tumors.

“Having more stem cell activity is good for regeneration, but too much of a good thing over time can have less favorable consequences,” says Omer Yilmaz, an MIT associate professor of biology, a member of MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, and the senior author of the new study.

Yilmaz adds that further studies are needed before forming any conclusion as to whether fasting has a similar effect in humans.

“We still have a lot to learn, but it is interesting that being in either the state of fasting or refeeding when exposure to mutagen occurs can have a profound impact on the likelihood of developing a cancer in these well-defined mouse models,” he says.

MIT postdocs Shinya Imada and Saleh Khawaled are the lead authors of the paper, which appears today in Nature .

Driving regeneration

For several years, Yilmaz’s lab has been investigating how fasting and low-calorie diets affect intestinal health. In a 2018 study , his team reported that during a fast, intestinal stem cells begin to use lipids as an energy source, instead of carbohydrates. They also showed that fasting led to a significant boost in stem cells’ regenerative ability.

However, unanswered questions remained: How does fasting trigger this boost in regenerative ability, and when does the regeneration begin?

“Since that paper, we’ve really been focused on understanding what is it about fasting that drives regeneration,” Yilmaz says. “Is it fasting itself that’s driving regeneration, or eating after the fast?”

In their new study, the researchers found that stem cell regeneration is suppressed during fasting but then surges during the refeeding period. The researchers followed three groups of mice — one that fasted for 24 hours, another one that fasted for 24 hours and then was allowed to eat whatever they wanted during a 24-hour refeeding period, and a control group that ate whatever they wanted throughout the experiment.

The researchers analyzed intestinal stem cells’ ability to proliferate at different time points and found that the stem cells showed the highest levels of proliferation at the end of the 24-hour refeeding period. These cells were also more proliferative than intestinal stem cells from mice that had not fasted at all.

“We think that fasting and refeeding represent two distinct states,” Imada says. “In the fasted state, the ability of cells to use lipids and fatty acids as an energy source enables them to survive when nutrients are low. And then it’s the postfast refeeding state that really drives the regeneration. When nutrients become available, these stem cells and progenitor cells activate programs that enable them to build cellular mass and repopulate the intestinal lining.”

Further studies revealed that these cells activate a cellular signaling pathway known as mTOR, which is involved in cell growth and metabolism. One of mTOR’s roles is to regulate the translation of messenger RNA into protein, so when it’s activated, cells produce more protein. This protein synthesis is essential for stem cells to proliferate.

The researchers showed that mTOR activation in these stem cells also led to production of large quantities of polyamines — small molecules that help cells to grow and divide.

“In the refed state, you’ve got more proliferation, and you need to build cellular mass. That requires more protein, to build new cells, and those stem cells go on to build more differentiated cells or specialized intestinal cell types that line the intestine,” Khawaled says.

Too much of a good thing

The researchers also found that when stem cells are in this highly regenerative state, they are more prone to become cancerous. Intestinal stem cells are among the most actively dividing cells in the body, as they help the lining of the intestine completely turn over every five to 10 days. Because they divide so frequently, these stem cells are the most common source of precancerous cells in the intestine.

In this study, the researchers discovered that if they turned on a cancer-causing gene in the mice during the refeeding stage, they were much more likely to develop precancerous polyps than if the gene was turned on during the fasting state. Cancer-linked mutations that occurred during the refeeding state were also much more likely to produce polyps than mutations that occurred in mice that did not undergo the cycle of fasting and refeeding.

“I want to emphasize that this was all done in mice, using very well-defined cancer mutations. In humans it’s going to be a much more complex state,” Yilmaz says. “But it does lead us to the following notion: Fasting is very healthy, but if you’re unlucky and you’re refeeding after a fasting, and you get exposed to a mutagen, like a charred steak or something, you might actually be increasing your chances of developing a lesion that can go on to give rise to cancer.”

Yilmaz also noted that the regenerative benefits of fasting could be significant for people who undergo radiation treatment, which can damage the intestinal lining, or other types of intestinal injury. His lab is now studying whether polyamine supplements could help to stimulate this kind of regeneration, without the need to fast.

“This fascinating study provides insights into the complex interplay between food consumption, stem cell biology, and cancer risk,” says Ophir Klein, a professor of medicine at the University of California at San Francisco and Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, who was not involved in the study. “Their work lays a foundation for testing polyamines as compounds that may augment intestinal repair after injuries, and it suggests that careful consideration is needed when planning diet-based strategies for regeneration to avoid increasing cancer risk.”

The research was funded, in part, by a Pew-Stewart Trust Scholar award, the Marble Center for Cancer Nanomedicine, the Koch Institute-Dana Farber/Harvard Cancer Center Bridge Project, and the MIT Stem Cell Initiative.

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Press mentions, medical news today.

A new study led by researchers at MIT suggests that fasting and then refeeding stimulates cell regeneration in the intestines, reports Katharine Lang for Medical News Today . However, notes Lang, researchers also found that fasting “carries the risk of stimulating the formation of intestinal tumors.” 

Prof. Ömer Yilmaz and his colleagues have discovered the potential health benefits and consequences of fasting, reports Max Kozlov for Nature . “There is so much emphasis on fasting and how long to be fasting that we’ve kind of overlooked this whole other side of the equation: what is going on in the refed state,” says Yilmaz.

MIT researchers have discovered how fasting impacts the regenerative abilities of intestinal stem cells, reports Ed Cara for Gizmodo . “The major finding of our current study is that refeeding after fasting is a distinct state from fasting itself,” explain Prof. Ömer Yilmaz and postdocs Shinya Imada and Saleh Khawaled. “Post-fasting refeeding augments the ability of intestinal stem cells to, for example, repair the intestine after injury.” 

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Research: How to Build Consensus Around a New Idea

• Devon Proudfoot
• Wayne Johnson

Strategies for overcoming the disagreements that can stymie innovation.

Previous research has found that new ideas are seen as risky and are often rejected. New research suggests that this rejection can be due to people’s lack of shared criteria or reference points when evaluating a potential innovation’s value. In a new paper, the authors find that the more novel the idea, the more people differ on their perception of its value. They also found that disagreement itself can make people view ideas as risky and make them less likely to support them, regardless of how novel the idea is. To help teams get on the same page when it comes to new ideas, they suggest gathering information about evaluator’s reference points and developing criteria that can lead to more focused discussions.

Picture yourself in a meeting where a new idea has just been pitched, representing a major departure from your company’s standard practices. The presenter is confident about moving forward, but their voice is quickly overtaken by a cacophony of opinions from firm opposition to enthusiastic support. How can you make sense of the noise? What weight do you give each of these opinions? And what does this disagreement say about the idea?

• DP Devon Proudfoot is an Associate Professor of Human Resource Studies at Cornell’s ILR School. She studies topics related to diversity and creativity at work.
• Wayne Johnson is a researcher at the Utah Eccles School of Business. He focuses on evaluations and decisions about new information, including persuasion regarding creative ideas and belief change.

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Research shows our bodies go through rapid changes in our 40s and our 60s

For many people, reaching their mid-40s may bring unpleasant signs the body isn’t working as well as it once did. Injuries seem to happen more frequently. Muscles may feel weaker.

A new study, published Wednesday in Nature Aging , shows what may be causing the physical decline. Researchers have found that molecules and microorganisms both inside and outside our bodies are going through dramatic changes, first at about age 44 and then again when we hit 60. Those alterations may be causing significant differences in cardiovascular health and immune function.

The findings come from Stanford scientists who analyzed blood and other biological samples of 108 volunteers ages 25 to 75, who continued to donate samples for several years. 

“While it’s obvious that you’re aging throughout your entire life, there are two big periods where things really shift,” said the study’s senior author, Michael Snyder, a professor of genetics and director of the Center for Genomics and Personalized Medicine at Stanford Medicine. For example, “there’s a big shift in the metabolism of lipids when people are in their 40s and in the metabolism of carbohydrates when people are in their 60s.”

Lipids are fatty substances, including LDL, HDL and triglycerides, that perform a host of functions in the body, but they can be harmful if they build up in the blood.

The scientists tracked many kinds of molecules in the samples, including RNA and proteins, as well as the participants’ microbiomes.

The metabolic changes the researchers discovered indicate not that people in their 40s are burning calories more slowly but rather that the body is breaking food down differently. The scientists aren’t sure exactly what impact those changes have on health.

Previous research showed that resting energy use, or metabolic rate , didn’t change from ages 20 to 60. The new study’s findings don't contradict that.

The changes in metabolism affect how the body reacts to alcohol or caffeine, although the health consequences aren’t yet clear. In the case of caffeine, it may result in higher sensitivity. 

It’s also not known yet whether the shifts could be linked to lifestyle or behavioral factors. For example, the changes in alcohol metabolism might be because people are drinking more in their mid-40s, Snyder said.

For now, Snyder suggests people in their 40s keep a close eye on their lipids, especially LDL cholesterol.

“If they start going up, people might want to think about taking statins if that’s what their doctor recommends,” he said. Moreover, “knowing there’s a shift in the molecules that affect muscles and skin, you might want to warm up more before exercising so you don’t hurt yourself.”

Until we know better what those changes mean, the best way to deal with them would be to eat healthy foods and to exercise regularly, Snyder said.Dr. Josef Coresh, founding director of the Optimal Aging Institute at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine, compared the new findings to the invention of the microscope.

“The beauty of this type of paper is the level of detail we can see in molecular changes,” said Coresh, a professor of medicine at the school. “But it will take time to sort out what individual changes mean and how we can tailor medications to those changes. We do know that the origins of many diseases happen in midlife when people are in their 40s, though the disease may occur decades later.”

The new study “is an important step forward,” said Dr. Lori Zeltser, a professor of pathology and cell biology at the Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons. While we don’t know what the consequences of those metabolic changes are yet, “right now, we have to acknowledge that we metabolize food differently in our 40s, and that is something really new.”

The shifts the researchers found might help explain numerous age-related health changes, such as muscle loss, because “your body is breaking down food differently,” Zeltser said.

Linda Carroll is a regular health contributor to NBC News. She is coauthor of "The Concussion Crisis: Anatomy of a Silent Epidemic" and "Out of the Clouds: The Unlikely Horseman and the Unwanted Colt Who Conquered the Sport of Kings." 

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Kilometer-Scale Convection Allowing Model Emulation using Generative Diffusion Modeling

Storm-scale convection-allowing models (CAMs) are an important tool for predicting the evolution of thunderstorms and mesoscale convective systems that result in damaging extreme weather. By explicitly resolving convective dynamics within the atmosphere they afford meteorologists the nuance needed to provide outlook on hazard. Deep learning models have thus far not proven skilful at km-scale atmospheric simulation, despite being competitive at coarser resolution with state-of-the-art global, medium-range weather forecasting. We present a generative diffusion model called StormCast, which emulates the high-resolution rapid refresh (HRRR) model—NOAA’s state-of-the-art 3km operational CAM. StormCast autoregressively predicts 99 state variables at km scale using a 1-hour time step, with dense vertical resolution in the atmospheric boundary layer, conditioned on 26 synoptic variables. We present evidence of successfully learnt km-scale dynamics including competitive 1-6 hour forecast skill for composite radar reflectivity alongside physically realistic convective cluster evolution, moist updrafts, and cold pool morphology. StormCast predictions maintain realistic power spectra for multiple predicted variables across multi-hour forecasts. Together, these results establish the potential for autoregressive ML to emulate CAMs – opening up new km-scale frontiers for regional ML weather prediction and future climate hazard dynamical downscaling.

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