What the F***?

 A bit of a content warning. While I try to keep my blog content somewhat family friendly, the subject matter at hand is likely to generate quite a bit of “colourful” language, so if that’s not something you’re currently in the mood for, you may want to give this post a pass. That being said, let’s get this shit show on the road, shall we?

Ah yes. Swear words, curse words, or however you want to call them. In school, you’re always taught not to use them and indeed, they’re pretty inappropriate in many situations. On the other hand, once you’re out in the real world, you usually find that you can’t really live without them, whether you like to or not. Life is just not that smooth that you can avoid them altogether. That’s not just my experience by the way. There’s actually a surprising body of scientific papers out there that show the benefits of dropping the occasional F bomb, as this has been shown to temporarily increase pain tolerance in laboratory experiments. That is, if you don’t overuse them, as the same research has shown that blurting expletives like you’re in a Quentin Tarantino film effectively nullifies the positive effects of cursing. While all of that may be fine and dandy, you’re probably asking yourself what the fuck this has to do with me or the topic of this post?

Quite a bit actually, as I’m about to get into. Now before I really get into things let me just say that I’m not a linguist or neuroscientist, but just an interested observer, so my thoughts will likely not survive any scientific scrutiny. I won’t let that stop me though 😉

As someone, who’s grown up in a bilingual environment, switching languages comes easy to me, and always has. This has also included the inevitable use of four-letter words that one is inevitably exposed to, both in everyday life and in the media. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not some constantly running around cursing like an old sailor, my parents actually did an admirable job bringing me up in a way that made it clear that this type of vocabulary was not acceptable in most environments. Still, you’re bound to get confronted with frustration, rejection, painful experiences, injury and so on, and sometimes you just have to let your frustration out, regardless of the situation. So, while I’d try to be perfectly well-spoken in most regular environments, with varying degrees of success, there were moments when my speech was decidedly R-rated.

It was after leaving Prague and being enrolled at a boarding school in Austria, a move that I considered a major demotion at the time, that I noticed a change coming on. Despite now being in a German-speaking environment, or whatever passes for German in Austria 😉, I tried to stay as fluent in English as possible, reading English books and magazines, watching English TV programs whenever I could get the chance and so on. As part of this effort, I tended to stick with English language cursing, which for some reason didn’t draw as much of a reaction as their German counterparts. At the time, I didn’t really pay it any heed as my mind was usually somewhere else in my school years.

This type of English cursing continued after leaving Austria in 2002, while I was trying to find my feet in the labour market in Germany, with me once again not really paying it any heed. It was only ten years later, after moving to Ireland, that I began to pay more attention to this affair. Apple, while technically a very international environment, was in reality just a collection of linguistic monocultures, with support teams segregated along language lines, something that is very much a result of the work that’s mostly happening up in the campus up in Hollyhill. As a result, the team I was with was very much a German island in a sea of English and French. Still, when one of our team had to deal with a particularly bad customer, and believe me, they were legion, the comment was usually laced with English four letter words, despite most of it being German. Thing is, this happened among the French teams as well, when the odd fuck, shit, or damn could be heard among a stream of French vocabulary that very likely wasn’t any cleaner than those English words were.

About the same time, I started getting into YouTube, mostly thanks to one very particular friend and team member in the German support team. There too, I noticed that interspersed among the more or less sensical stuff being said on the channels were English curses and phrases, with What the Fuck??? being the most common. It was during the Outtake and blooper reels that many channels still uploaded regularly at the time that I noticed just how second nature these phrases seemed to have become in everyday parlance.

The big question for me is why??? Why did these phrases make inroads into a language that isn’t exactly bereft of juicy curses of its own? I mean come on, Was zum räudigen Endzeitbums??? is practically a work of art! And before you try, no, younger generations becoming more and more rude, aggressive and degenerate is NOT the correct answer! Get the Fuck out of here if you believe that, I ain’t got time for that shit! There is certainly more than a little bit of media conditioning involved here. Starting in your early teenage years, all that “grown-up” stuff suddenly becomes very interesting, particularly music with more explicit lyrics, or games like the GTA series, which has actually been a juggernaut in the gaming world since I was a teenager! Add to that the rise of filmmakers like Quentin Tarantino, whose movies aren’t exactly PG rated at the best of times, and you have a very potent mixture of expletives to choose from, and a lot of supposed “role models” who make almost constant use of them. 

However, as far as I’m that alone is not the whole story. Another key aspect is the fact that those F-Bombs and other similar terms simply may simply not carry the same stigma in other languages, say German. As such, they’re less likely to be called out for their usage compared to the respective German counterpart, while still packing the same punch for the person uttering them. Think of it as analogous to the use of Frack in Battlestar Galactica, which gave the writers, particularly those of the Ron D. Moore reboot, the license to drop F-Bombs all over the place like a B-52 over Vietnam without it affecting their rating. And let me tell you, they went frakkin’ overboard with it once they knew that they would get away with it. On a related note, does anyone know which bloody streaming service Battlestar Galactica is currently available on outside the US?

But back to the topic at hand. For the third and final component, I’ll circle back to the scientific studies I mentioned at the beginning of this blog post. Curses have been scientifically proven to increase pain tolerance, with studies showing this going back as far as 2009. How anyone got the idea to even investigate that is completely beyond me, but I presume it involved some overworked undergrad students, a long night, and an insane amount of alcohol, with supporting performances by other mind-altering substances. Anyway, the original 2009 study by Stephens, Atkins and Kingston at Keele University that first showed this pain-lessening effect has since been followed up with two other studies, the last one being published just this April in Frontiers in Psychology. They all show that these seemingly rude and aggressive words have a definite positive effect on pain tolerance, strength and stamina when expressed in a crisis situation. 

Given that most of the increased use of the word that I’ve come across occurred in high-stress environments, such as in secondary school or in the workplace, it is my personal belief that the increase of English swearing in other language is the result of people looking for a way to vent their anger and frustration in a manner that doesn’t automatically bring the wrath of their surroundings down upon them. As such, switching to English is simply the easiest and quickest way to do it, with prolonged media exposure providing more than enough examples for swears, f-bombs and other expletives. Oh, and if you think about inventing some of your own faux swear words to teach to your kids, think again. That last paper published by Stephens et al in April 2020 deals exactly with that topic, repeating the 2009 test setup while using newly made up swear words in addition to a pre-determined neutral term and the classic F-Bomb. It turns out that the faux swear words simply don’t work, they have no influence at all on pain tolerance or any other factor. So spare your kids the embarrassment and just fucking let it be!

And that brings us to the end of this rather pointless but fun post. Well, at least it was fun to write. I hope you got a bit of a chuckle out of it. There’s no message to take away here, no grand political insight, and no recommendation for or against. Are there any cross-language swears or curses that you’ve adopted into your every day use? Let me know in the comments below.