Swearing Is Good for You Quotes

“We should keep at it. Swearing is a powerful instrument, socially and emotionally. If women and men want to communicate as equals, we need to be equals in the ways in which we are allowed to express ourselves. Sod social censure. Let us allow men to cry and women to swear: we need both means of expression.”
― Emma Byrne, Swearing Is Good For You: The Amazing Science of Bad Language

“We should keep at it. Swearing is a powerful instrument, socially and emotionally. If women and men want to communicate as equals, we need to be equals in the ways in which we are allowed to express ourselves. Sod social censure. Let us allow men to cry and women to swear: we need both means of expression. I like this observation from British-American anthropologist Ashley Montagu, writing in the 1960: 'If women wept less they would swear more... Today instead of swooning or breaking into tears, she will often swear and then do whatever is indicated. it is, in our view, a great advance upon the old style.'
Too fucking right.”
― Emma Byrne, Swearing Is Good for You: The Amazing Science of Bad Language

“Even having to consider whether to make a self-indulgent choice causes some fatigue to our inhibitions and self-control, both of which are essential ingredients in our willingness to persevere in doing something frustrating but necessary.13 Which is why I don’t even think about dieting.”
― Emma Byrne, Swearing Is Good for You: The Amazing Science of Bad Language

“childhood reprimands and swearing are the two categories of language that are most often retained, even after strokes that rob the sufferer of all other types of speech. In their study, Professors Catherine Harris, Ayşe Ayçiçeği, and Jean Berko Gleason wired thirty-two native Turkish speakers to galvanic skin-response monitors. Importantly, none of these volunteers had learned English before the age of twelve, so all their tellings-off in childhood had been heard in Turkish. The scientists had them hear or read words that were neutral (e.g., “door”), positive (e.g., “joy”), negative (e.g., “disease”), taboo (e.g., “asshole”), and childhood scolds (e.g., “Don’t do that!” and “Go to your room!”). The scientists found that the volunteers didn’t react particularly strongly to the neutral, positive, or negative words, regardless of language. They reacted similarly strongly to the taboo words that they heard, regardless of whether they were in English or Turkish; their exposure to swearing in late adolescence had been enough to make English swearing an emotionally effective part of their language. However, the volunteers did respond very differently to the childhood reprimands depending on the language used. Even though the volunteers all understood the reprimands, their skin conductivity remained low—they showed no stress—when they heard the words in English. When they were exposed to the tellings-off in Turkish, and in particular when they heard rather than read them, their galvanic skin response went through the roof. Being told off in their native language was enough to make these volunteers (average age twenty-eight) break out in a cold sweat. This shows that understanding a word and feeling its emotional impact are two very different processes. We have to have experience of the emotional consequences of words if they are going to affect us.”
― Emma Byrne, Swearing Is Good for You: The Amazing Science of Bad Language

“When women swear they tend to do so for the same reasons that men do. But discovering that women do, in fact, swear has perplexed some researchers. While there hasn’t been a study to look specifically at the reasons why men swear—perhaps because it’s seen as the default, normal, not in need of explaining—women’s swearing seems to have demanded an explanation.”
― Emma Byrne, Swearing Is Good for You: The Amazing Science of Bad Language

“In a brand-new study, set to be published in 2018, Professor McEnery analyzed about 10 million words of recorded speech, collected from 376 volunteers. Women’s use of “fuck” and its variants has increased fivefold since the 1990s, whereas men’s use has decreased. If you’re interested in the exact scores, women now use “fuck” and its variants 546 times per million words, while men use them only 540 times per million.12”
― Emma Byrne, Swearing Is Good for You: The Amazing Science of Bad Language

“Perhaps because of the shame associated with it, DIRTY soon became an insult, used when people or other animals didn’t do what Washoe wanted. This wasn’t something Washoe was taught to do; she spontaneously began using DIRTY as a pejorative and as an exclamation whenever she was frustrated. When we internalize a taboo, chimpanzees and humans alike create an emotional connection with the concept. The words for taboo subjects don’t just cause strong emotions; they leap to mind whenever we experience strong emotions. For example Washoe signed DIRTY ROGER when Fouts wouldn’t let her out of her cage and DIRTY MONKEY at a macaque who threatened her. In fact, MONKEY became Washoe’s somewhat derogatory sign for any other primate who couldn’t sign. Somewhat depressingly, it seems as though slurs are another deeply ingrained part of our language.”
― Emma Byrne, Swearing Is Good for You: The Amazing Science of Bad Language

“Among Washoe and the other chimpanzees raised by the Gardners and their team, the DIRTY sign was consistently used by chimpanzees and humans alike for feces, dirty clothes and shoes, and for bodily functions. Double use of the word DIRTY was used to intensify the meaning, either in anger or shame. DIRTY DIRTY SORRY was a phrase used to apologize for accidents, while DIRTY GOOD was the name that Washoe used for her potty.22 This name, invented spontaneously by Washoe, shows a surprisingly nuanced understanding of the excretion taboo: pooing in a potty is necessary and acceptable, but shit out of context is shameful and wrong.”
― Emma Byrne, Swearing Is Good for You: The Amazing Science of Bad Language

“Give most children crayons and paper and they’ll happily draw for the fun of it; the intrinsic reward of doing something creative keeps them happy and interested. But as soon as you pay children for their art, their drawings get sloppy and less detailed. They also don’t seem to enjoy the process of drawing anywhere near as much when they are offered a treat in return for each piece produced. In studies, children who know they will be rewarded for their drawings spend only about half as much time playing with crayons as those children who aren’t offered a reward.5 In fact, the exact same behavior had already been observed in the 1960s with chimpanzees in the wild. Desmond Morris, a man with “surrealist painter” and “children’s author” alongside “world-renowned zoologist” on his CV, observed that wild chimpanzees stopped drawing for its own sake as soon as they learned that drawings earned treats. Those drawings that they could be persuaded to produce were made with less time, care, and attention. “Any old scribble would do and then it would immediately hold out its hand for a reward. The careful attention the animal had paid previously to design, rhythm, balance and composition was gone and the worst kind of commercial art was born.”
― Emma Byrne, Swearing Is Good for You: The Amazing Science of Bad Language

“Professor Roger Fouts, founder of the Chimpanzee and Human Communication Institute in Washington state, has spent his career adopting chimpanzees and studying their behavior. He taught an extended family of chimpanzees to use sign language, and watched as they passed that language on to their children in turn. It was this extended family of apes that first convinced me that chimpanzees can do more than simply communicate; they spontaneously learned to swear. These apes were taught language (and toilet trained) by Professor Fouts. In the process of picking up both language and taboos about bodily functions, the sign they used for excreta took on a special power. Like the human swear word “shit,” the sign DIRTY and the idea it conveyed became taboo. At the same time, DIRTY became a sign that the chimpanzees used emotionally and figuratively, also like the way you or I might use “shit.” If Roger made them angry they would call him “Dirty Roger,” the way we might say, “Roger, you shit.” Unlike their wild cousins, these chimpanzees would throw the notion of excrement instead of throwing the stuff itself.”
― Emma Byrne, Swearing Is Good for You: The Amazing Science of Bad Language

“So swearing, when used reciprocally and in good fun, might help to bond a team, but does swearing really help you get things done? In their paper “Indecent Influence,” Dr. Cory Scherer and Dr. Brad Sagarin from the Northern Illinois University decided to test the use of a single, mild swear word on the way in which a message is received.6 Scherer and Sagarin knew from previous research carried out in the 1990s that—at least when we hear a message we disagree with—we tend to react with disgust and reject both the messenger and the message. They wondered whether the same effect held true for a message that the audience was sympathetic to. They showed a video of a speech to eighty-eight of their undergraduate students individually. The speech was about lowering tuition fees at a neighboring university. What the students didn’t know was that each person saw one of three different versions of the speech at random. One version included a mild swear word (“Lowering of tuition is not only a great idea, but damn it, also the most reasonable one”), one opened with it (“Damn it, I think lowering tuition is a great idea”), and one had no swearing at all. The actor delivering the speech did his best to keep every other part of his delivery the same between speeches. The students who saw the video with the swearing at the beginning or in the middle rated the speaker as more intense, but no less credible, than the ones who saw the speech with no swearing. What’s more, the students who saw the videos with the swearing were significantly more in favor of lowering tuition fees after seeing the video than the students who didn’t hear the swear word.”
― Emma Byrne, Swearing Is Good for You: The Amazing Science of Bad Language

“Of all the insults and jokes that Barbara observed, very few seemed to overstep people’s boundaries. Some people were never teased about their weight, for example. Barbara noticed that “fat jokes” were leveled only at people who made the same joke about either themselves or others. The backslapping, laughter, and smiles that went with these jokes meant that they didn’t appear to cause offense. In order to come off well, jocular abuse either has to stay within the boundaries that people set for themselves by making their own self-deprecating jokes first, or it has to be so outrageous that it can’t possibly be meant seriously. Barbara had expected that jibes about race, sex, and all the other modern taboos that come under the umbrella of political correctness would be treated with extreme caution but instead the insults were raucous, risqué, and reciprocal. There’s an odd effect at play with some of these racial insults—at least in theory. Research conducted in the 1970s suggests that the more outrageous the insult the more intuitively it is construed as a joke, whereas milder insults are more likely to be heard as “meant.”
― Emma Byrne, Swearing Is Good for You: The Amazing Science of Bad Language

“Swearing and insults—even ones that can sound quite vicious to the uninitiated—are all part of the banter in many workplaces. It’s good for group bonding, and inclusivity makes for a productive workforce. As Dr. Barbara Plester wrote in her 2007 paper, “Taking the Piss: Functions of Banter in the IT Industry”: “Banter occurs when people are in good humor; when people are playful, they are at their most creative.”
― Emma Byrne, Swearing Is Good for You: The Amazing Science of Bad Language

“The mistaken belief that TS was psychological led to some interesting and misguided “cures” over the years. In 1957 the British Medical Journal reported on the (in hindsight) extraordinary treatment given by Dr. Richard Michael of the Maudsley Hospital in London to a man in his late twenties after using cutting-edge psychoanalytical approaches. Dr. Michael looked at the man’s home life (strong mother, weak but caring father) and sexuality (the “active participant” in same-sex relationships during his army service) and decided that the patient’s need to repress his sexuality in civilian life was probably the issue. The treatment administered by Dr. Michael was “carbon dioxide therapy,” in which the unfortunate patient was made to breathe air that was 70 percent CO2. Just to put that in perspective, that’s nearly twenty times the concentration of carbon dioxide we exhale during normal breathing. After thirty sessions of being gassed—during which Dr. Michael says he observed “violent sucking movements” and dreams that were “full of obviously phallic imagery”—the patient reported that he was pretty much fully cured, thank you kindly! Whether this was due to the efficacy of the treatment or simply the desire not to be gassed is open to question.”
― Emma Byrne, Swearing Is Good for You: The Amazing Science of Bad Language

“While some patients find it easier to suppress their swearing in public (where anxiety levels are high, but the social penalties for swearing are higher), others find it easier to suppress their swearing among friends and family, in settings where they are more relaxed. Stress might increase the severity of the urges that some TS patients feel, which would explain the greater severity of tics in high-stress situations. For others, the fear of social consequences acts as a very strong motivator to suppress swearing and other tics, no matter what the cost. To make sense of this, Professor Conelea set up an experiment to differentiate between situational stress and social pressure. She set TS patients time-limited mental arithmetic problems in order to induce a baseline level of stress. She told these patients that they could swear or tic as much as they wanted. When allowed to tic freely, these patients’ tic rates were slightly lower while doing the maths challenge than when they were just resting, possibly because of the amount of concentration that the mental arithmetic required. She then asked them to try again, but this time to try to suppress their tics. As a result, the number of tics per minute almost doubled under stress. The very stress of trying not to act on ticcish urges made it much more likely that the volunteers would suffer from tics.”
― Emma Byrne, Swearing Is Good for You: The Amazing Science of Bad Language

“In a lab, with a bucket of ice, swearing helps women as much as men, but in the real world, with long-term, life-changing pain, women lose out when they swear. Professor Megan Robbins and her colleagues at the University of Arizona wanted to know whether women with breast cancer and other long-term conditions swore, and, if so, whether it did them any good. From everything that we know about pain and swearing you might expect that a good swear would help these women cope better with their illness but, in a finding that both surprises and depresses me, women who swore ended up more depressed and had less support from their friends than those who were less likely to let rip with the swear words.”
― Emma Byrne, Swearing Is Good for You: The Amazing Science of Bad Language

“The relationship between physical pain and emotional states is definitely a complicated one, made more so by the fact that we all experience something called social pain. Social pain, feelings of being rejected or excluded, is as real as physical pain. Experiments with acetaminophen10 and marijuana11 (not at the same time) show that identical analgesics can relieve both social and physical pain. It makes a lot of evolutionary sense. For most of human history, experiencing loss or rejection could have been as detrimental to your survival as appendicitis or a broken leg. One of the most astounding experiments to demonstrate the equivalence between social and physical pain looks at the way two pains that are experienced in quick succession tend to interact. We know, from other studies, that two physical pains experienced in quick succession have an entirely unexpected effect on the way we perceive them. A mild pain makes us temporarily more sensitive to discomfort whereas severe pain numbs us and makes us more able to bear further trauma.12 There might be an excellent reason for this: if you’re bitten by a dog, the fight-or-flight instinct kicks in. We become highly vigilant to other pains either as extra motivation to get out or fight back, or as a way of avoiding further trauma in our fight or flight. In contrast, for the kind of pain where curling up in a defensive ball is the best course of action—a broken limb, for example—further pain tends to feel much less severe than it would otherwise. We can stand a further mauling, because fighting or fleeing are not an option.”
― Emma Byrne, Swearing Is Good for You: The Amazing Science of Bad Language

“It turned out that, when they were swearing, the intrepid volunteers could keep their hands in the water nearly half as long again as when they used their table-based adjectives. Not only that, while they were swearing the volunteers’ heart rates went up and their perception of pain went down: in other words, the volunteers experienced less pain while swearing.”
― Emma Byrne, Swearing Is Good for You: The Amazing Science of Bad Language

“Given that our right hemispheres do the rapid emotional processing, Dr. Tim Indersmitten and Professor Ruben Gur from the University of Pennsylvania hypothesized that we might actually make more sense of expressions on the right side of the face if these were presented for a very short period of time. They flashed up faces made of right or left sides of the face only, but because pictures of half a face look so strange, Indersmitten and Gur did something very cunning. They used “symmetrical chimeric faces”—photographs of faces where either the left or right half is duplicated and flipped to make a symmetrical face (Figure 2). Although the facial expressions were indeed more exaggerated in pictures made up of two left halves of the face, volunteers made far fewer mistakes when interpreting the emotions in the pictures made up of two right halves of the face, particularly when asked to make decisions in under six seconds.9”
― Emma Byrne, Swearing Is Good for You: The Amazing Science of Bad Language

“A Victorian-style sensibility still held sway throughout the English-speaking world well into the twentieth century. Winston Churchill claimed that he was rebuked by one American society hostess for asking for breast meat when offered chicken. According to Sir Winston she replied: “In this country we ask for white meat or dark meat.” To make amends, he sent the offended lady an orchid. Being Winston Churchill, he attached a note that read, “I would be obliged if you would pin this on your white meat.”
― Emma Byrne, Swearing Is Good for You: The Amazing Science of Bad Language

“In Germany, for example, you can be fined anywhere from €300 to €600 for calling someone a daft cow, and up to €2,500 for “old pig.”4 Dutch, meanwhile, has a whole host of bad language to do with illness: calling a police officer a cancer sufferer (Kankerlijer) can net you two years’ incarceration.”
― Emma Byrne, Swearing Is Good for You: The Amazing Science of Bad Language

“We were asked (a) how much money had been spent (wasted) on the research and (b) whether we wouldn’t be better doing something useful (like curing cancer). I replied that the entire cost of the research—the £6.99 spent on a bottle of wine while we came up with the hypothesis—had been self-funded, and that my coauthor and I were computer scientists with very limited understanding of oncology, so it was probably best if we stayed away from interfering with anyone suffering from cancer. We didn’t hear back.”
― Emma Byrne, Swearing Is Good for You: The Amazing Science of Bad Language

“The fact that swearing is lost if we lose our ability to map the emotions of others shows us just how socially sophisticated we have to be in order to swear.”
― Emma Byrne, Swearing Is Good for You: The Amazing Science of Bad Language

“So much of the way we judge women’s language, and their behavior, still rests on the antiquated double standards of a handful of long-dead churchmen.”
― Emma Byrne, Swearing Is Good for You: The Amazing Science of Bad Language

“The most common explanation boils down to the same double standard that makes “slut” an insult and “stud” a compliment.”
― Emma Byrne, Swearing Is Good for You: The Amazing Science of Bad Language

“Research shows that women are using swearing and other equally powerful forms of language more effectively than ever, but that same research shows that doing so still comes at a greater social risk for women: a man swearing is more likely to be seen as jocular or strong; women are likely to be seen as unstable or untrustworthy. To which I can only ask: where the fuck did this bullshit come from?”
― Emma Byrne, Swearing Is Good for You: The Amazing Science of Bad Language