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How to Swear: An Illustrated Guide
Even the most profane practitioner of the vulgar tongue must sometimes wonder, "Am I doing it right?" This highly entertaining and crucially informative visual guide to the art of swearing employs a variety of quick-read charts and helpful strategies to take salty skills to the next level. Offering history and etymology along with guidance, quips, insults, answers to lingering questions, and much more, How to Swear celebrates the rude ingenuity of using a naughty word to express surprise, excitement, anger, joy, or disgust, limited only by the imagination. It's inspiring. It's educational. It's dirty. It's here to change lives or, at the very least, add some f*#&ing color to the conversation.
192 pages, Hardcover
Published April 10, 2018
60 people are currently reading
1080 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 51 reviews
December 16, 2018
Great 100th book of the year. Etymology and profanity. How could it be wrong???
March 4, 2024
I abso-f***ing-lutely loved this! I appreciate it when someone takes a topic like swearing rather seriously, providing etymologies, Venn-diagrams and various charts. As a non-native, the offensiveness chart is very useful, I don't necessarily feel where an expression might fall on that scale.
However, I was not entirely pleased with the expletive infixation part as it failed to mention exactly where to insert the expletive (for an example, see the second word of this review). I understand it is not too easy to explain but as there has been proper scientific research conducted regarding this phenomenon, I would have appreciated the mention of a stressed syllable following the insertion of the swearword.
Anyway, it was a joy to read. It would have been a pleasure to read about etymologies or the grammar in a bit more detail, but I guess the target audience might be less interested in these, this seems to be meant for pure entertainment.
However, I was not entirely pleased with the expletive infixation part as it failed to mention exactly where to insert the expletive (for an example, see the second word of this review). I understand it is not too easy to explain but as there has been proper scientific research conducted regarding this phenomenon, I would have appreciated the mention of a stressed syllable following the insertion of the swearword.
Anyway, it was a joy to read. It would have been a pleasure to read about etymologies or the grammar in a bit more detail, but I guess the target audience might be less interested in these, this seems to be meant for pure entertainment.
August 1, 2023
3,5 stars
Pretty funny quick comic read. Not as educational as I thought it might be but to be honest at this point I don't really need the education. Also thought there would be more personal attacks on celebrities in here but there kind of wasn't. The idea with the 1880s-looking characters gave it an overall very Monty Python effect, which gets my approval!
Pretty funny quick comic read. Not as educational as I thought it might be but to be honest at this point I don't really need the education. Also thought there would be more personal attacks on celebrities in here but there kind of wasn't. The idea with the 1880s-looking characters gave it an overall very Monty Python effect, which gets my approval!
August 26, 2025
this helps you swear grammatically correctly, precisely, and creatively. sweet book tho...
December 5, 2022
not only entertaining, but also educational
September 10, 2018
Een gezellig overzicht van mijn favoriete Britse scheldwoorden, inclusief al hun mogelijke toepassingsvormen. Veel liefde voor de venndiagrammen, want venndiagrammen. Ook props voor de bijzonder uitgebreide analyse van alle toepassingsvormen van fuck, in alle mogelijke soorten semantische diagrammen en etymologische kruisverbanden.
Het boek heeft als logisch probleem dat je vanaf hoofdstuk 3 het wel weet (hee, nog een historisch perspectief, en nog een woordenwolk, en en en...), en er dan nog een stuk of 7 moet. Ik had - denk ik - liever gezien dat elk scheldwoord zijn eigen type hoofdstuk had gekregen, in plaats van deze soms nogal repetitieve aanpak. Afijn, het is maar 15 minuten lezen, dus het is vooral een uitstekend cadeau, en misschien iets om uit voor te te lezen tijdens een nachtelijk bacchanaal met idealiter veel ex-studievrienden.
Het boek heeft als logisch probleem dat je vanaf hoofdstuk 3 het wel weet (hee, nog een historisch perspectief, en nog een woordenwolk, en en en...), en er dan nog een stuk of 7 moet. Ik had - denk ik - liever gezien dat elk scheldwoord zijn eigen type hoofdstuk had gekregen, in plaats van deze soms nogal repetitieve aanpak. Afijn, het is maar 15 minuten lezen, dus het is vooral een uitstekend cadeau, en misschien iets om uit voor te te lezen tijdens een nachtelijk bacchanaal met idealiter veel ex-studievrienden.
December 17, 2021
Entertaining and informative.
July 11, 2022
Short guide about swearing. Quick read.
January 7, 2024
Picture book. Swearing is funny sometimes so there are funny parts.
Sadly, this book explains verb tenses better than most grammar books. It does it with style and humor.
I now get some British swear words I hear on tv.
Short but good book
Sadly, this book explains verb tenses better than most grammar books. It does it with style and humor.
I now get some British swear words I hear on tv.
Short but good book
July 29, 2018
They say people who swear lack intelligence and that we can't hold an intelligent argument. We swear to make up for our lack of vocabulary.
Then they did the research and it turns out people who swear a lot are not only more intelligent but also more honest, more expressive and generally healthier.
That's why I picked up this book. To take something like the most offensive words in our language and to put them in some sort of language text book. It's broken down into chapters with etymology and sentence structures which I find really amusing. It's really very well done with line graphs and Venn diagrams with some beautiful illustrations.
It is very well done but all in all, it's just good for a laugh.
Then they did the research and it turns out people who swear a lot are not only more intelligent but also more honest, more expressive and generally healthier.
That's why I picked up this book. To take something like the most offensive words in our language and to put them in some sort of language text book. It's broken down into chapters with etymology and sentence structures which I find really amusing. It's really very well done with line graphs and Venn diagrams with some beautiful illustrations.
It is very well done but all in all, it's just good for a laugh.
July 28, 2018
Obviously don't go for this if you don't like swearing or don't approve of swearing or find it offensive. This isn't an in depth thing, it isn't a history of swearing (though it does occasionally touch on history in very brief ways). Take the title at face value. It is straight out how to swear, with charts and graphs. I appreciated the attention to parts of speech and tenses. Generally the whole thing amused me greatly.
June 7, 2018
I won this book and it was delivered very quickly. It's a really cute looking book. The graphics are really adorable. It seemed really stretched out, and based upon the information enclosed, it could have been a much shorter book. The swearing is mostly British English. I was hoping for more insight and more actual usage.
December 11, 2019
This book was hilarious and informative the whole way through. It is a great way to increase your vulgar vocabulary. It will inspire you to cuss more inventively. You can take boring old words that you've used a million times, and make them new once more.
July 10, 2021
At the beginning of the year I was finishing drafting a musical libretto and had reached the crisis point of the story. What was needed was a simple statement that would convey clearly and unequivocally to the audience that playtime was over and violence set to ensue, a sort of "Cry havoc! and let slip the dogs of war." I wanted an utterance at once pithy, punchy, brutal, and shocking. I wanted a swear word.
But why? Why do certain words and idioms seem to communicate greater potency than their literal meaning alone might suggest? It's not strictly the delivery. Shouting "Telephone!" no matter how emphatically, doesn't get you very far. Nor is it strictly a matter of spittle-spraying, fricative phonemes. "Facsimile! Flex! Ship of state! Morgenfresser!" See? Nothing.
Recently, a friend was kind enough to lend me a pair of books on swearing that I'm reviewing here. Although neither served my intended purpose (that's what Facebook friends are for), each of these Brit-authored texts has its merits. Yes, for some reason I'm getting cussing lessons from across the pond. Beggars can't be choosers, and I had bugger-all to choose from. Fuck it.
Actually, only one of the two books purports to be substantive. The promisingly-titled How to Swear is really a novelty print job, a small infographic hardback of the kind commonly found in card shops and gift racks, each page devoted to a witty wordle in black, white, and yellow, the best of which are Venn diagrams used to distinguish the nuances involved in taking names of animals as "-shit" prefixes. Thus the author observes that an apeshit dog is but a pissed-off canine while a dogshit ape is a piss-poor excuse for a primate (page 68). It's 15 minutes of amusement best bought for someone else as a gag gift. Three stars.
No, if there is real meat to be had from these tomes, it's to come from the sociolinguist Emma Byrne, author of Swearing is Good for You, who offers up a whirlwind tour of recent epithetic studies. According to Byrne, "swearing is a complex social signal that is laden with emotional and cultural significance." (page 9) As a cathartic release or expression of aggression, it can help alleviate pain, frustration, and embarrassment (as does playing violent video games, curiously enough). Of equal importance, swearing often serves as a warning or threat of impending violence that in turn invites consolation or retreat. From an evolutionary perspective, the concomitant reduction in maulings and murders that swearing affords is quite the improvement over fighting and, in communicating personal boundaries, can even promote bonding. She offers a particularly evocative example of this from an anecdotal study of a mail-order packing warehouse line (page 106). In this benighted facility, a self-appointed alpha male routinely hazed new temps until they quit or snapped. Those who snarled back with the believable viciousness would be promptly mollified, invited by the alpha to drinks that evening, a primitive, albeit effective method for storming, norming, and forming.
What constitutes a "swear" admits of no clear answer and is contingent on formative experience. "Swears" are typically taboo words or expressions learned early in life in conjunction with trauma and/or an emotional valence that leads them to be associated with, triggered by, or stored in/near the amygdala (either the literature or the author is not clear on this). Any set of vocalizations learned and consistently applied will do. Out of proper context, they may sound quite silly -- schweinhund! -- but uttered with sincere vehemence, the intent still conveys.
Byrne takes seven chapters to survey the admittedly sparse research around her subject, in the process considering Tourette's sufferers (of which she appears to be an indifferent student and mediocre judge of the literature at best), genderization of swearing, and the differences of taboos seen among various cultures, languages, and creatures (dirty chimps!), no single chapter diving too deeply into any topic. As someone in immediate need of a freakin' thesaurus of coarse American slanguage, I regret to report that this British author's catalog of bollocks wasn't worth a dingo's kidney. Bloody whatever. I found the whole shallow, but occasionally amusing, and certainly as fine an introduction to the topic as any I've come across to date. Two-and-a-half stars.
But why? Why do certain words and idioms seem to communicate greater potency than their literal meaning alone might suggest? It's not strictly the delivery. Shouting "Telephone!" no matter how emphatically, doesn't get you very far. Nor is it strictly a matter of spittle-spraying, fricative phonemes. "Facsimile! Flex! Ship of state! Morgenfresser!" See? Nothing.
Recently, a friend was kind enough to lend me a pair of books on swearing that I'm reviewing here. Although neither served my intended purpose (that's what Facebook friends are for), each of these Brit-authored texts has its merits. Yes, for some reason I'm getting cussing lessons from across the pond. Beggars can't be choosers, and I had bugger-all to choose from. Fuck it.
Actually, only one of the two books purports to be substantive. The promisingly-titled How to Swear is really a novelty print job, a small infographic hardback of the kind commonly found in card shops and gift racks, each page devoted to a witty wordle in black, white, and yellow, the best of which are Venn diagrams used to distinguish the nuances involved in taking names of animals as "-shit" prefixes. Thus the author observes that an apeshit dog is but a pissed-off canine while a dogshit ape is a piss-poor excuse for a primate (page 68). It's 15 minutes of amusement best bought for someone else as a gag gift. Three stars.
No, if there is real meat to be had from these tomes, it's to come from the sociolinguist Emma Byrne, author of Swearing is Good for You, who offers up a whirlwind tour of recent epithetic studies. According to Byrne, "swearing is a complex social signal that is laden with emotional and cultural significance." (page 9) As a cathartic release or expression of aggression, it can help alleviate pain, frustration, and embarrassment (as does playing violent video games, curiously enough). Of equal importance, swearing often serves as a warning or threat of impending violence that in turn invites consolation or retreat. From an evolutionary perspective, the concomitant reduction in maulings and murders that swearing affords is quite the improvement over fighting and, in communicating personal boundaries, can even promote bonding. She offers a particularly evocative example of this from an anecdotal study of a mail-order packing warehouse line (page 106). In this benighted facility, a self-appointed alpha male routinely hazed new temps until they quit or snapped. Those who snarled back with the believable viciousness would be promptly mollified, invited by the alpha to drinks that evening, a primitive, albeit effective method for storming, norming, and forming.
What constitutes a "swear" admits of no clear answer and is contingent on formative experience. "Swears" are typically taboo words or expressions learned early in life in conjunction with trauma and/or an emotional valence that leads them to be associated with, triggered by, or stored in/near the amygdala (either the literature or the author is not clear on this). Any set of vocalizations learned and consistently applied will do. Out of proper context, they may sound quite silly -- schweinhund! -- but uttered with sincere vehemence, the intent still conveys.
Byrne takes seven chapters to survey the admittedly sparse research around her subject, in the process considering Tourette's sufferers (of which she appears to be an indifferent student and mediocre judge of the literature at best), genderization of swearing, and the differences of taboos seen among various cultures, languages, and creatures (dirty chimps!), no single chapter diving too deeply into any topic. As someone in immediate need of a freakin' thesaurus of coarse American slanguage, I regret to report that this British author's catalog of bollocks wasn't worth a dingo's kidney. Bloody whatever. I found the whole shallow, but occasionally amusing, and certainly as fine an introduction to the topic as any I've come across to date. Two-and-a-half stars.
December 29, 2021
This book honestly wasn’t for me. I don’t swear but I thought that the smoke will be funny because I don’t mind swearing. And this Book was given to me as a gag gift. I just felt kind of boring for something that was supposed to be silly. It felt like a bunch of filler pages. It was good for me trying to reach mine yearly reading goal. But I wouldn’t recommend unless you somebody who has potty humor. I was also annoyed with the reference to the C word Being the most offensive word in The English language. I don’t think that that’s true. I think that there are words that have been used to oppress people that would be considered way more offensive. Overall this book was pretty Bleh. I can see the market. I just think it could’ve been done better.
July 27, 2018
|This book was won from a Goodreads Giveaway|
This was interesting! I thought it was really entertaining and also vaguely informative--if there was one thing, I would have appreciated more etymology and less charts, but I did like the charts. Maybe just add some more pages with more etymology.
But overall? Decent. Thirteen or so chapters, each focused on a different expletive. Short bit of history on the word. A bunch of ways to use the word. Straight forward and to the point. This book did exactly what it told me it was going to do.
This was interesting! I thought it was really entertaining and also vaguely informative--if there was one thing, I would have appreciated more etymology and less charts, but I did like the charts. Maybe just add some more pages with more etymology.
But overall? Decent. Thirteen or so chapters, each focused on a different expletive. Short bit of history on the word. A bunch of ways to use the word. Straight forward and to the point. This book did exactly what it told me it was going to do.
November 11, 2020
So because of covid everyone, and I mean EVERYONE I know has been getting spam calls and text messaging. I decided to borrow a few books about insults and swearing just to joke around with these spammers. This one was at the top of the list. On pg 43 there is a graph called " Fucking Tenses". It has the tense, meaning and examples. And oh how I wish I had this in my Latin course in college! This book is easily 5 stars for all the laughs I got while reading this.
April 10, 2018
I won a copy of this book.
This book was just a little bit awesome. So many fun, proper ways to use curse words (along with phrases you may not have heard before). Might be good for ESL students (adult language). I was *really* excited that Wildish included "Bollocks"! Get this for your favorite logophile or English major.
This book was just a little bit awesome. So many fun, proper ways to use curse words (along with phrases you may not have heard before). Might be good for ESL students (adult language). I was *really* excited that Wildish included "Bollocks"! Get this for your favorite logophile or English major.
April 11, 2018
Oh, YES! I got a sneak peek of this book from a friend who won it! This one is a keeper. Loads of fun, and unique, ways to curse. Cursing explained. Stephen Wildish has a winner of a book, in my opinion! It would make a great gift for the bud who swears like a Marine. Entertaining from front to back cover.
October 22, 2019
Of course this book is not to be taken too seriously, it's just trying to put a smile on your face by showing you real English grammatical rules being applied to swearing. Which accidentally might teach you some obscure grammar rule! Did you know that, when using more than 1 adjective in insults, descriptions of size should go before descriptions of color? Now you know!
April 7, 2021
Maybe i had a different expectations before started reading, but it did not impress me that much. Thgough it gave me a few giggles. :)
It got 1 star more due to the chapter of sign gestures for swearing.
It got 1 star more due to the chapter of sign gestures for swearing.
June 20, 2022
Interesting and fun to flip through. Great book to keep in the shelf or inn the coffee table to encourage adult conversations about swear words. Some of the historical information was interesting but overall it’s just a fun book about swearing!
June 28, 2025
How to Swear by Stephen Wildish – This is on kindle unlimited. If you love grammar, word origins, or naughty history, this was a lot of fun! Honestly, if you want to trick someone into learning grammar, this would be very handy! Happy Reading!
September 14, 2025
This is a clever take on the grammar and science of swearing. It includes Venn diagrams, charts, and other diagrams explaining how swear words are related. This would be fun for grammarians, scientists, and anyone who enjoys the finer points of swearing.
April 20, 2018
Such a comical, gag book. I don’t curse that much, definitely not in any of my conversations but a book on when the words become “necessary.” And I use that word very loosely.
July 10, 2018
Great fucking book.
September 19, 2018
Brilliant! I especially enjoyed the sentence diagrams!
November 27, 2018
Where was this book when I was taking my English Grammar class. The sentence structure part alone could have really saved me.
January 30, 2019
Not really worth the read. Nothing you can’t learn from walking around the city and hearing.
February 27, 2019
This is as hilarious as it is informative. Way more etymology than I expected, and the book has many helpful infographs.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 51 reviews