Some years ago I was involved in a sort of candid-camera TV show: the twist being that we would set up various scenarios with actors and unsuspecting civilians while a psychologist, sitting in the truck like the one from the A-Team, would analyse their reactions. When we had extracted all we could from the situation, I would jump out of a nearby bush, accompanied by a microphone and camera, and try to convince the bewildered civilians that it was all a bit of fun and please sign this release form. Usually they did, though once or twice there were some imaginative suggestions as to what to do with the release form.
One of these set-ups took place in Galway city. We got a young actress to pose as a pollster, conducting a survey among tourists about their experience. She was instructed to be charming and friendly with everyone she approached, but as she worked through the list of questions, she was to throw in the odd swear word, increasing the frequency of usage until (we assumed) the tourists would ask her to stop.
But no one did. They were all British or Americans, and when I interviewed them afterwards, some of them claimed that they hadn’t even noticed. Some of them had noticed but hadn’t felt offended: and not because they were big swearers themselves. It was more the way our actress swore that had made it palatable. An American woman told me that she’d noticed that the Irish swear all the time: but somehow, coming out of Irish mouths, it doesn’t sound as sweary.
[ Why do we swear so much?Opens in new window ]
There is a certain outraged constituency who would have you believe that swearing is a sign of a limited vocabulary; of ignorance and laziness. This is, in fact, ignorant and lazy thinking. Swear words, when properly deployed, add a richness and texture to language. They can be a joy to wield and listen to. Every culture in the world contains swearing: and not just because it’s fun. It’s necessary. We need taboo words, and we need a certain amount of people to be offended by them. If you are one of those offended people, you’re only encouraging the rest of us. You’re the problem.
And the research, such as it is, seems to indicate that swearing isn’t the province of dum-dums: one American study found a link between swearing and fluency. If you know a lot of swear words, you know a lot of words, and you know how to use them appropriately.
If you’ve never heard your teenage offspring swear, that’s probably because they’ve already learned not to do it in front of you. You should be proud of that. Other research found that swearing can be a help with pain relief. Screaming an obscenity when you’ve stepped on a piece of Lego is actually a form of self-care.
However, I’m not making the case here for more swearing, but a little bit less of it. We need to pace ourselves. That American tourist was right. The Irish do swear a lot; possibly more than any other nation. We season our speech with it: as a noun, a verb, an adverb, an adjective, as a meaningless qualifier. We insert curses into existing words to elongate them. There are few places on earth where swearing is performed with such zest and creativity. Bad language is part of who we are: as Irish as Tayto, Hill 16 and infrastructure building delays.
But therein lies the danger. If we don’t use our curses more sparingly, we may not retain our position as the gold standard of potty mouth. Once we get to Peak Swear, it’s downhill from there. We will have exhausted swearing as an art form. Like Sinn Féin choosing a presidential candidate, we will have run out of ideas.
[ How do other people manage to have conversations without swearing?Opens in new window ]
I’d be really honked off if that happened. Honked? You know precisely what word I’m thinking of.
