For F*ck’s Sake

For F*ck’s Sake

Why Swearing Is Shocking,
Rude, and Fun

R E B E C C A R OAC H E
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© Rebecca Roache 2024
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Roache, Rebecca, author.
Title: For f*ck’s sake : why swearing is shocking, rude, and fun / Rebecca Roache.
Other titles: For fuck’s sake
Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2024] |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2023023399 (print) | LCCN 2023023400 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780190665067 (hardback) | ISBN 9780190665081 (epub) |
ISBN 9780197693896 | ISBN 9780190665074
Subjects: LCSH: Swearing.
Classification: LCC GT3080 .R65 2024 (print) | LCC GT3080 (ebook) |
DDC 394—dc23/eng/20230620
LC record available at [Link]
LC ebook record available at [Link]
DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780190665067.001.0001
Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America
 For my beloved M and O, the noisy centre of my world,
who charmingly believed the c-​word to be crap until they
found a draft of this book lying around.
 Contents

Why give a shit about swearing?  1

1. What is swearing?  21
S wearing =​offensiveness  21
Swearing =​offensiveness +​emotion  23
Swearing =​offensiveness +​emotion +​linguistic anarchy  26
Swearing and the brain  30

2. Swearing’s secret offensive ingredient  32

 hat we say . . . 
W 33
. . . and how we say it  35
The taboo of taboo-​breaking  38

3. There is no secret ingredient  48

 ontext is (almost) everything 
C 49
Offence escalation  50
The recipe for offensiveness  56

4. Different kinds of wrong  58

 hen is swearing inappropriate? 
W 59
Speaker intentions  66
Inappropriate swearing, wrongness, and offence  68
Swearing and moral character  73
Is swearing wrong?  75

5. Taboo, aggression, and harsh sweary sounds  77

S wearing and taboo, again  77
The sound that swear words make  83
Offence and expressing emotion  86
Offensiveness beyond words  91
viii Contents

6. How to be a really offensive swearer  96

S ome background: nuisances  96
Tone and body language  97
Direct and indirect swearing  99
Accidental or deliberate  101
Repetition  102

7. You talkin’ to me?  103

S wear power  103
Setting an example  106
Won’t somebody think of the children?  107

8. A regulatory fucking mess  113

W ho cares what we do with swearing?  113
A lack of clear fucking guidelines  115
A way forward: the nudity analogy  119

9. How to do things with swearing  121

A cts, effects, intentions, predictions  121
Sweary acts  126
Beyond speech acts  134

10. Fairer swearers  137

P utting the brakes on bias  138
Educating our intuition  140
Sweary self-​improvement  142

11. Swears vs. slurs  145

 e journey to offensiveness 
Th 146
Slurs and the feeling of offence  149
Becoming offensive, becoming inoffensive  152
Slurs, oppression, and desert  157
Comparing slurs  159

12. Cunt and cocksucker  164

 ffensiveness and misogyny 
O 165
When etiquette gets it wrong  168
A dilemma for sweary feminists  171
Gently increasing cunt love  175
 Contents ix

13. Cunt and ‘cunt’  181

Sanitisation  182
Quoting and mentioning  183
Quotation, mention, and slurs  186
The limitations of sweary quotation  190

14. How the f*** do asterisks work?  195

S anitisation: it’s not about the word  197
What we communicate besides the words  202
When asterisks don’t cut it  205

15. Swearing as a force for good  212

R espect the power of swearing  212
Swearing and intimacy  215
Swearing as a pressure valve  217

16. The value of offensiveness  219

S wearing and disability  219
Swearing in a foreign language  222
Children, again  223
Swearing on the outside  225

Conclusion: You’re all fucking superheroes  227

Acknowledgements  229
References  233
Index  245
 Why give a shit about swearing?

The late Queen Elizabeth II famously described 1992 as an annus

horribilis in her televised Christmas Message that year. (It means
‘horrible year’—​be sensible you lot, this is Oxford University Press.)
At the time, her words rippled through media reports around the
world, as journalists speculated about what particular events (and
there were a few candidates) could have pushed her to use her ad-
dress to the nation to bitch about stuff rather than to reflect on her
forty years—​it was her anniversary!—​on the throne. The speech is
still discussed more than thirty years later, and thanks to the Netflix
series The Crown, a new generation is finding out about it. Part of
what raised eyebrows at the time was the fact that Her Majesty’s
mask of propriety had slipped a bit, and revealed her to be . . . well,
pissed off. We can all relate to that, can’t we? Even if the way in
which she vented her annoyance—​in Latin, while standing in front
of a gold and red velvet throne—​is rather distant from our own
frustrated behaviour. But what if it hadn’t been? What if the way in
which she had expressed herself had been much more akin to how
old Geraint down the local pub moans about the roadworks on the
lane leading down to his farm?
Let’s picture how this might have unfolded. Christmas day,
1992, and you’re in the UK. Perhaps it’s where you live, or maybe
you’re just visiting. Bloated and snoozy after your Christmas
lunch, you give thanks for the elasticated waistband on your shell
suit and settle down in front of the TV to eat as much unhealthy
food as possible while watching the Queen’s speech. There she is
on the screen: coiffed and pearl-​necklaced in front of her Guildhall
throne, with her husband Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh on her
2 For F*ck’s Sake

left, and Prime Minister John Major on her right, just the other side
of the ermine-​clad Lord Mayor of London. In the hush that follows,
she begins to speak.
‘This is not a year on which I shall look back with undiluted
pleasure’, she says. ‘In the words of one of my more sympathetic
correspondents, it has turned out to be a fucking shit year. I sus-
pect that I am not alone in finding that it has absolutely sucked
arseholes. I’m not going to lie to you cunts. One can’t wait to see the
fucking back of it’.
What might your reaction have been to witnessing this, do you
think? You might respond, at least initially, with shock and disbe-
lief. Perhaps you glance around at your family, a mince pie hovering
between your gaping mouth and the crumb-​dusted plate on your
lap, momentarily speechless. The lot of you might wordlessly seek
reassurance from each other that yes, you really did hear what you
all thought you heard. After that, in some families, the experience
might sour the rest of the day, and you might all gravely ruminate
on what the world is coming to. But if your family is anything like
mine, your initial shock would instead give way to glee and hilarity.
The Queen said what? You open another bottle of wine. Argue
about who’s going to use the phone first to call friends. (It’s 1992,
remember: only estate agents have mobile phones, and WhatsApp
hasn’t been invented.) Tell your kids to stop scaring the cats by run-
ning around yelling SUCKED ARSEHOLES!!!!! Or perhaps, in-
stead, you would just continue watching the TV in rapt silence, not
wanting to miss any further sweary outbursts from Her Majesty.
Whatever your response, the chances of any of this not making
headlines around the world are approximately zero.
But why should any of this be a big deal? People swear all the
time. Had you decided to wander to the local pub after lunch in-
stead of watching to see what the Monarch had to say, you would
not have batted an eyelid if, during the course of an increasingly
alcohol-​fuelled afternoon, you heard Geraint embark on yet an-
other one of his sweary rants about the roadworks. On the other
 Why give a shit about swearing? 3

hand, in other contexts, your reaction to this sort of language would

be different still. If somebody had delivered anything resembling
the Sovereign’s potty-​mouthed remarks during the funeral of one
of your closest relatives while standing at the graveside watching
the coffin being lowered into the ground, it’s likely that you would
have been horrified, upset, decidedly unamused, and perhaps even
angry, even if you’re normally the sort of person who doesn’t mind
swearing at all. And if one of the staff at your toddler’s nursery used
this language in the presence of the children, you might be alarmed,
and you might worry about this person’s competence to look after
your child. What is it about swearing that leads us to react so dif-
ferently to it depending on who is swearing and where and how
they’re doing it? What—​if anything—​is wrong with swearing? And
what sort of wrong are we dealing with here?
There are many puzzling things about swearing and its effect
on us, but no less puzzling are some of the things we do to try to
avoid causing offence through swearing. Let’s return to our imagi-
nary Queen’s speech, which we left having observed that we could
expect to find Her Majesty’s tirade reported prominently and in-
ternationally in the news. Despite the inevitable interest from the
media in reporting an event like this, it’s unlikely that we would
have found many news outlets reporting an unedited account of
what was said. Instead, we’d have seen asterisks sprinkled across
the headlines like festive snowflakes. Our Head of State would have
been quoted as having described the foregoing twelve months as
a f***ing sh*t year. In other words, we could have expected to find
the newspapers censoring what the Queen said even as they aimed
to report exactly what she said. Similarly, televised news footage of
the speech would have used bleeps to replace the swear words, and
perhaps also pixelated the Defender of the Faith’s mouth in order
to thwart attempts at lip-​reading. And yet we’d all know exactly
what it was she’d said, even if we hadn’t seen the original broadcast.
This way of ‘sanitising’ swear words to communicate them inoffen-
sively is widespread and effective—​but how does it work? How does
4 For F*ck’s Sake

f*** manage to be less offensive than fuck, given that anyone who
understands f*** knows exactly what word is being communicated
to them, and given that anyone who writes f*** intends to commu-
nicate fuck to their readers? We’re going to dive into all this.
It would be difficult to characterise swearing without mentioning
its offensiveness, but swearing is much more than merely offensive
language. For one thing, it’s not always offensive. It can express trust
and intimacy, as when friends get together for a chat knowing that
they will not be judged or rejected for expressing themselves using
swear words that they would refrain from using in different com-
pany. It can sometimes be very entertaining, and it plays a large role
in comedy. It can even be funny at the same time as being offensive;
indeed, in the Queen’s speech example, part of why some people are
likely to respond with such glee to hearing Her Majesty swearing
is precisely because they recognise that it is offensive and inappro-
priate. Of course, reacting with glee to something like this can feel
a bit naughty, and when we witness it in the company of people
who are offended, we often keep a lid on our amusement until later,
when we can relax and relate the incident to our friends without
offending anyone.
Even so, although it’s usually a good and considerate thing to
avoid causing offence, there are limits to how much we do and
should care about other people being offended. In some cases,
people take offence at the wrong things—​things much more sig-
nificant than a word used in poor taste in the wrong context. Some
people claim to be offended by interracial marriage, homosexuality,
women becoming priests, and breastfeeding in public places. It’s
far from clear that we should avoid exposing those people to those
topics in order to avoid causing offence; on the contrary, more ex-
posure to gains in equality and the changing nature of society is
precisely what they need. If Amia is offended by Brandy’s homo-
sexuality, then it is Amia who is morally flawed, not those who
cause her to feel offended by discussing Brandy’s marriage in her
company. In that case, how should we respond to someone’s taking
 Why give a shit about swearing? 5

offence inappropriately? Should we avoid doing what causes them

offence? Or, alternatively, does avoiding doing what causes them to
feel inappropriately offended make us somehow complicit in their
flawed moral judgement? By shining a spotlight on our reactions to
swearing, we’re going to get at some meatier issues that have to do
with offence.
Taking care not to offend others is considerate, but here’s some-
thing that nobody talks about: having the capacity to offend people
by uttering swear words is a privilege. Most of us take for granted
that if we utter swear words in a polite context, those around us will
be offended. But some people struggle to produce this sort of re-
sponse in other people no matter what they say. They include some
people with disabilities, children, and people who have an unusual
appearance or manner. Since they are less able to cause offence,
these people lack the capacity for an important and useful way of
communicating with others and are worse off as a result. We’ll ex-
plore this issue too, and we’ll see that in an important sense, being
offended by people is a way of respecting them.
Back to the idea of avoiding causing offence. Although we gen-
erally have no problem working out when (i.e. in which social
contexts) swearing would be especially inappropriate, the norma-
tive dimension of swearing—​the details about how we ought and
ought not to swear, and why—​is mysterious to us. For some of us,
the very idea that there can be norms about how we should and
shouldn’t swear might seem senseless. Or, rather, it might seem that
there is just one norm: we shouldn’t do it, ever. (This is what many
of us were taught as children.) For others, swearing is an important
and valuable form of expression which shouldn’t be reined in be-
cause some people are too up tight to deal with it—​it’s just words,
after all. We’ll see that neither of these approaches gets things quite
right. Understanding the oughts of swearing requires digging down
below the surface and exploring what gives swearing its power
to affect us in the way that it does, what makes some instances of
swearing more offensive than others, what we do to mitigate its
6 For F*ck’s Sake

offensiveness when we really want to communicate a swear word

but really don’t want to upset anyone, and why we find the whole
topic so mysterious in the first place. We’ll see that the norms of
swearing are built upon a network of attitudes that we hold towards
each other, which we typically signal indirectly and often without
even realising what we’re doing.
You might not agree with some of my conclusions; indeed, I’d
be astonished if you were to find my entire argument—​which is, in
a nutshell, that the offensiveness of swearing isn’t about the words
at all—​uncontroversial. My hope is that I might inspire you to re-
flect on these issues, discuss them with others, draw your own
conclusions, and gain some insight into how and why you and
others use and respond to swearing in the way that you do. But
disentangling these issues is about more than merely satisfying
intellectual curiosity. It has important practical implications too.
Our attitudes and responses to swearing shape society and culture
in ways that run deep—​and this happens despite the difficulties in
articulating exactly why we have these attitudes and responses in
the first place. In fact, despite it being somewhat mysterious why
swearing bothers us so much, inappropriate swearing tends to be
dealt with confidently and firmly. And sometimes, this results in
injustice.
Let’s get technical for a moment (I promise I’m not going to make
a habit of it): individuals and organisations have a range of formal
and informal ways of discouraging, censoring, and punishing
swearing, to which I’m going to refer collectively as anti-​swearing
measures. These range from the informal social norms that reveal
themselves in our intuitive sense of when swearing is really not on,
to formal, explicit rules and even laws prohibiting swearing. The
most informal anti-​swearing measure, and also the most widely
implemented, is simple disapproval. When we find ourselves in
situations where swearing is inappropriate—​a job interview, for ex-
ample, or when meeting a romantic partner’s parents for the first
time—​our awareness that those around us will frown upon our
 Why give a shit about swearing? 7

swearing is effective as a discouragement. If we forget ourselves and

swear in a situation like this, we’re likely to feel embarrassed and
apologise. In other words, our anticipation of disapproval from the
people around us leads us to self-​censor: to keep our language clean
when we’re in polite contexts. In turn, other people’s anticipation
of our own disapproving attitudes contributes to those people self-​
censoring. In contexts where swearing is inappropriate, even if no-
body actually swears and as a result nobody expresses disapproval,
everyone’s awareness that if they did, someone might, ensures that
they don’t, and that if they do, they feel embarrassed and apologise.
As a result, without even realising, we are all signed up to an in-
formal, voluntary scheme to regulate swearing. We recognise
that there are contexts in which we should not swear, we partici-
pate in shaming others who swear in inappropriate contexts, and
we respond contritely in cases where we ourselves swear in those
contexts and suffer the disapproval of our peers.
So: it’s worse to swear in some social contexts than in others. But
our intuitions about when swearing is and isn’t inappropriate aren’t
just about what context we’re in. Who is doing the swearing also
matters. The way we respond to inappropriate swearing, and the
pressure on the swearer to apologise, are magnified in cases where
the swearer is a public figure; especially if the swearer is (like the
Monarch) the sort of public figure that we expect to be a model of
decorum. This illustrates that our intuitions about swearing are ac-
tually pretty complex: there’s a range of factors we take into account
(usually unconsciously, of course) when assessing just how bad a
particular instance of swearing is. But our example involving the
Queen raises another point about our responses to swearing too.
Inappropriate swearing by a public figure, along with any subse-
quent apology (or lack of one), is often deemed newsworthy. This
places swearing in the spotlight, in a way that doesn’t happen when
it’s Geraint down the pub who’s doing the swearing. When swearing
makes the news, a contrite response from the swearer provides a
public affirmation and reinforcement of the view that swearing is
8 For F*ck’s Sake

unacceptable; by contrast, shrugging off the incident sends the mes-

sage that swearing is no big deal. Inappropriate swearing by public
figures, then, often provides an opportunity to test wider attitudes
to swearing. Such incidents can act as a barometer of swearing’s of-
fensiveness, and when the public’s response changes over time, this
is sometimes taken to indicate that the offensiveness of swearing
has changed too.
As an example here, let’s compare two related incidents of
swearing, twenty-​eight years apart. In 1976, British punk band the
Sex Pistols famously swore while being interviewed by Bill Grundy
on the British teatime TV show, Today. The incident cost Grundy
his career; a result of the fact that not only did Grundy fail to con-
demn the first incident of swearing during the interview—​in which
guitarist Steve Jones said, of the band’s earnings, ‘We’ve fucking
spent it, ain’t we?’—​but Grundy then encouraged the band to swear
more, which gave rise to shit, bastard, fucker, and fucking. There
followed outraged headlines, cancelled gigs, and footage of the in-
cident in music documentaries for decades to come.
By contrast, the public responded more apathetically in 2004
when former Sex Pistol John Lydon called a live TV audience of
over ten million viewers fucking cunts while participating in the
British TV reality show, I’m a Celebrity . . . Get Me Out of Here! This
was despite his sweary outburst being, in an important sense that
we’ll explore in later chapters, worse than what was said in the Bill
Grundy incident. One way in which it was worse was that Lydon’s
fucking cunts directly insulted the viewing audience whereas the
Pistols’ 1976 sweary utterances were either undirected (i.e. used as
a kind of punctuation rather than addressed as insults to anyone in
particular) or directed at Grundy himself following his encourage-
ment of the behaviour. Another way in which it was worse is that
it involved a more offensive word: cunt is widely regarded as the
most offensive English swear word. Despite this, fewer than a hun-
dred official viewer complaints about this remark were received by
the UK’s communications regulator Ofcom following Lydon’s 2004
 Why give a shit about swearing? 9

outburst. The nation wasn’t scandalised, as it had been in 1976.

Nobody lost their job, as Grundy did back then. The difference in
the public’s responses to the 1976 and 2004 incidents of swearing
were widely seen as indicative of a shift in attitudes to the accept-
ability of swearing.1 Here, then, was a case of the public’s attitudes
towards swearing being tested and examined via the media, and
conclusions drawn.
While we’re on the topic of swearing on TV, let’s take a look at
another aspect of anti-​swearing measures. Swearing during a TV
show is about more than informal attitudes towards swearing. TV
broadcasts are subject to formal rules about whether, when, and
how much swearing is permitted, and what happens if these rules
are breached. There are regulations like this in place around the
world. In the UK, Ofcom’s Broadcasting Code restricts swearing to
certain contexts and can impose fines on broadcasters when these
rules are broken. In the United States, the Federal Communications
Commission (FCC) sets rules about swearing in US TV shows,
although it is not allowed to fine broadcasters who break these
rules. There has been an attempt in the US to tighten rules about
swearing: in 2003, the US government considered (but subse-
quently decided against) implementing the Clean Airwaves Act,
which forbade broadcast of

the words ‘shit’, ‘piss’, ‘fuck’, ‘cunt’, ‘asshole’, and the phrases ‘cock
sucker’, ‘mother fucker’ and ‘ass hole’, compound use (including
hyphenated compounds) of such words and phrases with each
other or with other words or phrases, and other grammatical
forms of such words and phrases (including verb, adjective,

1 Despite these claims by journalists, the diminished public outrage in response to the

second incident compared to the first does not really show that swearing has become
more acceptable over the years. More likely is that the 1976 incident was shocking largely
because it was unexpected, given that the Sex Pistols had not yet reached the height of
their fame. By contrast, in 2004, the audience knew what to expect from John Lydon,
who therefore failed to cause widespread outrage with his on-​brand remark.
10 For F*ck’s Sake

gerund, participle, and infinitive forms). (Introduction of the

Clean Airwaves Act, U.S. Cong., 149 Cong. Rec. E2486 [2003])

The general message sent by formal anti-​swearing measures is

that swearing is unacceptable, at least in certain contexts. However,
if we want more specific guidance about exactly how much
swearing, and of what sort, is acceptable in a given context, we
quickly encounter rules that are so arbitrary as to be bizarre and al-
most senseless. The UK comedy writer Richard O. Smith related (in
conversation) that in writing a half-​hour show for BBC Radio 4, he
was restricted to ‘two shits and a wank’. Leon Wilson, producer of
ITV’s Celebrity Juice, one of the UK’s sweariest TV shows, is allowed
four motherfuckers but unlimited fucks per thirty-​three-​minute
show (Zaltzman 2015). Film director Ken Loach, responding to
what he viewed as overzealous censorship by the British Board
of Film Classification (BBFC) of his 2012 film The Angel’s Share,
complained about the ‘world of surrealism’ into which discussions
descended. He commented that in order for the film to be granted
a 15 certificate, ‘We were allowed seven cunts . . . but only two of
them could be aggressive cunts’ (Higgins 2012). The ‘surrealism’ of
rules like these arises from the attempt to capture and quantify all
the nuance, vagueness, and messiness of public attitudes towards
swearing. In the absence of a rigorous rationale, these rules seem
disconnected from our everyday intuitions about swearing. (Most
of us would be hard pressed to explain why, if four motherfuckers
per thirty-​three minutes is basically fine, five crosses the line into
unacceptable offensiveness.)2 There are regular efforts to pro-
vide such a rationale—​Ofcom, BBFC, and the UK’s Advertising

2 It’s worth noting that this point isn’t unique to swearing. Any attempt to formalise

explicitly the sorts of rules that we tend to think about only in general terms is similarly
doomed to ‘surrealism’. Imagine trying to specify how close, to the nearest millimetre,
it’s appropriate to stand to an acquaintance you ran into in the supermarket without
risking their thinking you’re either uncomfortably close or weirdly distant. Or how loud
(in decibels) and how long (in seconds) a murmured conversation in the cinema can be
without annoying your fellow filmgoers.
 Why give a shit about swearing? 11

Standards Authority conduct surveys into public attitudes to

swearing and use the results to inform regulations—​but these gen-
erally take public opinion as their authority; as a result, they pro-
vide inadequate guidance in difficult or unusual cases, and they
are silent on the issue of how to recognise when the public gets it
wrong, and how to proceed in those circumstances.
Formal anti-​ swearing measures are not confined to broad-
casting, of course. A schoolteacher who swears at one of their
pupils, or a doctor who swears at one of their patients, risks
breaching professional guidelines about conduct. Athletes who
swear while competing may find themselves punished for un-
sporting behaviour. This is not to say that swearing is always ex-
plicitly prohibited in formal rules about conduct; very often, it is
not. Instead, that one shouldn’t swear in certain contexts is taken to
be implied by more general rules about professional conduct and
treating others with politeness and respect. That implication itself
contains a tangle of unquestioned views about swearing, including
judgements about when swearing constitutes disrespect—​which,
of course, it sometimes does, but not always.
The pinnacle of formal anti-​ swearing measures is the law.
Swearing can get you arrested in many places across the globe. In the
US, public swearing in the town of Middleborough, Massachusetts,
is punishable by a $20 fine. Swearing in public counts as a class 4
misdemeanor in Virginia, and can attract a $250 fine. Swearing can
count as disorderly conduct in several states including Utah, Texas,
Arizona, New Jersey, and the District of Columbia.3 In the UK,

3 See Nunberg (2012); Theoharis (n.d.); Tex. Penal Code, Disorderly conduct and re-

lated offences, tit. 9, ch. 42 (2007) (available at [Link]

PE/​htm/​[Link]); Ga. Code Ann. Disorderly conduct, tit. 16, ch. 11, art. 2, §16-​11-​
39 (2010) (available at [Link]
arti​cle-​2/​16-​11-​39); Ariz. State Legislature, §13-​2904, Disorderly conduct; classification
(n.d.) (available at [Link] New Jersey disorderly
conduct. n.d. (available at [Link] [Link]/​dis​orde​rly-​pers​ons-​offen​
ses/​new-​jer​sey-​dis​orde​rly-​cond​uct/​); Council of the District of Columbia, D.C. Code,
Disorderly conduct, §22-​1321 (2013) (available at [Link]
coun​cil/​code/​secti​ons/​22-​1321).
12 For F*ck’s Sake

arrests for swearing tend to happen under Section 5 of the Public

Order Act, which makes it an offence to use ‘threatening or abusive
words . . . within the hearing or sight of a person likely to be caused
harassment, alarm or distress thereby’ (UK Pub. Gen. Acts 1986).
In Canada, those who cause a disturbance by swearing in public
are guilty of an offence, and in February 2015 the town of Taber,
Alberta, introduced fines for swearing (CBC News 2015). You can
also get fined for swearing in several Australian states, and in 2014
New South Wales increased on-​the-​spot fines for offensive lan-
guage from $150 (£80) to $500 (£270) (Dearden 2014). In 2013, the
Australian government introduced a code of conduct for asylum
seekers, which reportedly threatened deportation for a range of ac-
tivities, including swearing (Gander 2014). In Russia, in 2014, the
government passed a bill that bans swear words from films, music,
and other works of art (Omidi 2014). In Iraqi Kurdistan, the Family
Violence Law takes domestic violence to include swearing at chil-
dren by parents (Parliament of Kurdistan-​Iraq 2011). Singapore’s
‘outrage of modesty’ laws have been invoked against swearing and
led to the arrest in 2012 of an Australian man for swearing on a
flight from Perth to Singapore (Lowe 2013). Convictions under
these laws are punishable by two years in prison, twenty-​four lashes
with a cane, a fine, or a combination of these. In the United Arab
Emirates (UAE), ‘disgrac[ing] the honour or the modesty of another
person’, including by swearing, is punishable by imprisonment
and/​or a fine, with the severity of the punishment depending on
whether the person sworn at is a public official, whether the insult
is public, whether witnesses are present, and various other factors
(Dhal 2013). Swearing is not illegal in China, but public opinion
is divided on whether it should be. In 2013, Alpais Lam Wai-​sze, a
Hong Kong primary schoolteacher, swore at police officers during
a confrontation between two political groups. A video of the in-
cident went viral, triggering a demonstration of three thousand
people at which there was some violence between Lam’s critics and
her supporters, who viewed her respectively as a potty-​mouthed
 Why give a shit about swearing? 13

upstart and a defender of free speech (Tatlow 2013). In the wake of

this, a survey of Chinese teachers found that two-​thirds believe that
swearing in their profession should be regulated by a code of con-
duct (Wei 2013).
The issue of whether and how swearing should be dealt with by
the law is controversial. There is some confusion, it seems, about
whether (and under what circumstances) swearing should count
as disorderly conduct, or fighting words, or a breach of the peace,
or threatening behaviour, or any other category of behaviour
for which one can get arrested. A landmark case here is Cohen
v. California, which we’ll return to later. This case saw the court de-
cide that wearing a jacket emblazoned with the words Fuck the Draft
warranted arrest and imprisonment, only to change its mind on
appeal. This 1971 decision marked only the beginning of US law’s
confusion over fuck. The late Christopher M. Fairman, professor at
Ohio State University Moritz College of Law, noted in his 2006 ar-
ticle ‘Fuck’ that since Cohen there have been judgements permitting
Fuck Hitler, Fucking orders, and Fucking genius; and judgements
prohibiting Fuck the ump and Fucking brilliant (Fairman 2006, 49).
Other English-​speaking countries have not done much better. In
the UK, Denzel Cassius Harvey’s conviction and £50 fine for saying
fuck while police officers searched him for drugs was overturned
in 2011; a controversial decision which prompted Boris Johnson,
who was London Mayor at the time, to pledge a zero-​tolerance
approach to swearing at the police. Four years after these zero-​
tolerance comments, Johnson was filmed yelling at a London taxi
driver, ‘Why don’t you fuck off and die?’, an outburst that suggests
that Johnson views taxi drivers as less worthy of respect than po-
lice officers, or perhaps that members of the public should be held
to higher standards of behaviour than politicians, or perhaps that
he simply doesn’t know his arse from his elbow when it comes to
politics. Confusion about fuck and the law is perhaps most com-
ically illustrated by a 2017 Australian case, in which Filip Black
replied ‘none of your fucking business’ to a police officer who asked
14 For F*ck’s Sake

him what he was doing in the area. Black was arrested, only to be
released a minute later when the arresting officer evened out the
swear tally by telling Black that he was ‘fucking worked up’. Black
was then re-​arrested when he told the arresting officer to ‘fuck it
right in your mum’s pussy’ (McGowan 2017).
Around the world, there is debate between those who oppose
harsh penalties for swearing on the ground that they are an un-
acceptable infringement on free speech and those who support
such penalties in the interest of eliminating antisocial behaviour,
which some view as likely to lead to more serious transgressions if
left unaddressed. It is possible, as we’ll see, to take a more nuanced
position than either a completely permissive approach or a zero-​
tolerance attitude to swearing. We can all agree that Filip Black’s
none of your fucking business was in some sense milder than his fuck
it right in your mum’s pussy. That this difference, and other relevant
factors, should be reflected in our anti-​swearing measures is appro-
priate. We do, after all, generally view it as appropriate that minor
wrongdoings are punished less severely than more serious ones. It
remains to map out the sweary landscape by considering what sort
of instances of swearing are more serious than others, what makes
them so, how to identify them, and how to compare them with
wrongs that do not involve swearing.
We’ve looked at anti-​ swearing measures that discourage
swearing, and those that punish swearing. But discouragement and
punishment are not the only goals of these measures. Swearing is
also censored in various ways. We’re all familiar with seeing sh*t in-
stead of shit in newspapers, and of hearing bleeped-​out swearing on
TV and radio, but censorship can take other forms too. Swearing
during a live broadcast can get you removed from the airwaves, as
happened to Sir Bob Geldof in November 2014 when he said bol-
locks twice during a Sky News interview (Perraudin 2014). Some
communication systems make it impossible to swear: the well-​to-​
do British department store Marks and Spencer hit the headlines in
March 2015 for banning the word Christ, along with the usual swear
 Why give a shit about swearing? 15

words, from gift messages when buying flowers online (Willgress

2015). (It later removed Christ from the banned list.) You can even
opt in to censorship: the Clean Reader app prevents swear words
from being displayed in e-​books, and has been heavily criticised
by writers including Joanne Harris, Margaret Atwood, and Lionel
Shriver (Furness 2015; Perry 2015; Shriver 2015). Censorship plays
an important role in mitigating the offensiveness of swearing, but
it’s not always clear exactly how it works (if we communicate fuck
by writing f***, how does the latter manage to be less offensive than
the former?) and if it’s not done right, it can actually cause more of-
fence than would have been caused were it not used at all. We’ll look
at how censorship works and how it can fail in more detail later.
By considering the various ways in which swearing is formally
prohibited, censored, and punished, it is easy to end up with a sense
that regulators are bizarrely obsessed with swearing. After all, the
planet is burning, and as I’m writing this, people around the world
are sheltering indoors while a deadly pandemic rages outside. But
it’s possible that swearing is more complicated than that. Detective
Chief Superintendent Colin Paine, Head of Professional Standards
at Thames Valley Police, has (in conversation) suggested that there
may be a more nuanced interpretation of arrests for swearing. In
some situations in which a member of the public is behaving in a
generally disruptive and unacceptable way that includes swearing,
their swearing is a behaviour that is easy to point to as a justification
for viewing their behaviour as unacceptable, and therefore (in some
cases) worthy of arrest. After all, often, when we judge someone’s
behaviour to be disruptive or unacceptable, it is difficult to articu-
late exactly why. These judgements are often heavily dependent on
context, and we take into account factors of which we may not be
fully conscious, including subtle changes in body language such as
how close they stand to us and how long they hold our gaze. This
can make it difficult to explain to a third party why we judged the
person’s behaviour to be unacceptable; a difficulty that is reflected
in some of the vague ways we formulate such explanations: ‘She
16 For F*ck’s Sake

was a bit off with me’, ‘He was a bit jumpy’, ‘She didn’t say so, but
I could tell she didn’t want me around’, ‘He didn’t respond but he
looked like he wanted to punch someone’. We can sometimes feel
foolish if pressed about accounts like this—​we might say, in such a
case, ‘I guess you had to be there’. On the other hand, if the person
whose behaviour we judge inappropriate swears, then our job is
easier. ‘He swore’ is more convincing as a justification for such a
judgement than ‘He didn’t respond but he looked like he wanted to
punch someone’. Swearing, then, can be a focus for otherwise vague
and context-​dependent judgements that a person’s behaviour or
general manner is inappropriate; and a person’s swearing can help
legitimise our negative evaluation of them. This might help ex-
plain why it is mentioned in some regulations about unacceptable
behaviour and in explanations for why certain regulations were
applied. Such regulations and explanations cannot take into ac-
count all the relevant context; swearing helps make this context less
relevant.
It is to be expected that it can be hard to explain why we form
certain judgements about a person’s behaviour, whether we judge
them to be rude, threatening, excited, amused, elated, or some-
thing else. We take our cues not only from what they explicitly say
but also from subtle aspects of body language and from context-​
dependent factors like the social setting, our history with them, and
their interactions with other people present. We shouldn’t expect
to be able to convey the nuances of these judgements to someone
who wasn’t there. Sometimes you really did have to be there. But,
when these judgements lead to a formal response like arrest, cen-
sorship in the media, or a professional reprimand, there are reasons
to be concerned. Our inability to articulate why we make certain
judgements about other people’s behaviour can conceal a variety of
biases, many of which we do not even realise we hold. In the US,
African Americans are incarcerated at more than five times the
rate of whites; in the UK, Black people are more than three times
more likely to be arrested as white people (National Association
 Why give a shit about swearing? 17

for the Advancement of Colored People 2023; UK Government

2022).4 Black men tend to be viewed as larger and more threatening
than similar-​sized white men (Wilson et al. 2017). A 2009 study
commissioned by the UK government found that job applicants
with a ‘white-​sounding’ name are 74 per cent more likely to receive
a positive response than similarly qualified applicants whose name
is associated with an ethnic minority. A 2019 Spanish study found
that female job applicants are 30 per cent less likely to be called for
a job interview than similarly qualified male applicants, and that
the penalty for having children is higher for women than for men.
These data reveal that—​without our even realising, and even if
we’re well intentioned—​our evaluations of people are influenced
not only by things like body language and social context but also by
factors that ought not to feature at all, such as ethnicity and gender.
This gives us a powerful reason to respond to swearing appropri-
ately, in order to avoid the injustice that inevitably results from our
decisions being influenced by these biases. If a person’s swearing
helps legitimise a negative evaluation of them that we have already
made but are not sure why, then people from oppressed groups are
likely to pay a higher penalty for swearing than those from other
groups. We should not expect anti-​swearing measures to be able to
correct for this bias, but by providing a clear and sensible rationale

4 Throughout this book, ‘Black’—​when used to refer to Black people—​is capitalised

but ‘white’ is not. This is increasingly conventional in many places, but not yet universal.
Luke Visconti, founder and chairman of [Link], makes the case for this approach:
‘Black’ is also accepted by many Black people as an inoffensive description. It is a
generalised description and can be supplemented by another description such as Black
Canadian, Black African American, Nigerian American or Black Latino. However, many
Black people describe themselves simply as being ‘Black’, and this reality is reflected in a
body of literature, music, and academic study.
‘I do not believe “white” needs to be capitalised because people in the white majority
don’t think of themselves in that way. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with this—​it’s
just how it is. The exception is white supremacists who have a definite vision for what
“White” means—​and they capitalise the “W” ’ (Visconti 2020).
Mike Laws of the Columbia Journalism Review succinctly echoes this approach: ‘For
many people, Black reflects a shared sense of identity and community. White carries a
different set of meanings; capitalising the word in this context risks following the lead of
white supremacists’ (Laws 2020).
18 For F*ck’s Sake

for rules about when swearing is unacceptable, we can hope that

anti-​swearing measures that reflect this rationale will promote con-
scious and reflective decisions rather than supporting the sort of
unconscious, difficult-​to-​explain, ‘gut feeling’ judgements that can
conceal a range of inappropriate biases.
This little skate through some of the ways we, as a society, deal
with swearing reveals that any confusion we feel about exactly
whether, why, and when swearing is inappropriate does not stand
in the way of responding either informally or formally to swearing.
That can be useful, for actions-​speak-​louder-​than-​words-​type
reasons: if we feel like we’re not sure what we think about swearing,
looking at how we actually respond to it can reveal attitudes that
we might not have been aware that we have, in roughly the same
way that a person can suddenly discover that they don’t actually
like their job as much as they thought they did when they get fired
and then realise that they feel relieved rather than upset. Even so,
things are more complicated than this. Our practices do not merely
reveal underlying attitudes; they also create them. Punishing,
censoring, or officially prohibiting a given behaviour reinforces the
view of that behaviour as wrong; punishing it on the grounds that
it is a form of abuse reinforces the idea that it is a form of abuse.
Our practices can also mask our uncertainty about how a given
behaviour should be dealt with. Societies, organisations, clubs,
businesses and so on often need to make a decision about how best
to deal with a behaviour in the face of disagreement and uncertainty
about how to deal with it. They need to respond to the practical
demands of keeping everything running smoothly, and sometimes
it is more important that some decision is made than what decision
is made. It is easy to overlook this and to forget that the fact that a
certain behaviour is regulated in a certain way does not settle the
question of how it is most appropriately dealt with, or dispense with
the need for further reflection. Once anti-​swearing measures are
in place, then, it is important to continue to consider whether they
are appropriate, or whether instead they are too harsh, inconsistent
 Why give a shit about swearing? 19

with the ways we deal with other objectionable behaviours, based

on misconceptions about what swearing is, and so on. For these
reasons, too, looking at some of our ways of dealing with swearing
is a good place to start.
We’re going to begin, in Chapter 1, by looking at what swearing
is. Yes, I know you already know, but it’s going to be useful to
make explicit what we all already know about swearing, and to re-
flect briefly on how it differs from other, similar uses of language.
In Chapter 2 we’re going to turn to the mysterious issue of where
swearing gets its power to shock and offend. We’ll look at some
common and plausible-​ seeming explanations that have to do
with swear words themselves, but it turns out that none of these
is quite satisfactory. Instead, as we’ll see in Chapter 3, the secret of
swearing’s offensiveness does not lie in the words themselves; we
find it, instead, in the unspoken messages that we communicate to
those around us when we swear. By the time Chapter 4 rolls around,
you’re probably going to be wondering exactly what we mean when
we talk about swearing being offensive, inappropriate, and wrong,
so I’ll clear this up there. Then, in Chapter 5, I’ll address a ques-
tion that is raised by my argument that swearing’s offensiveness
doesn’t arise from the words themselves: if it’s not about the words,
then why do swear words all tend to be similar in certain ways? In
particular, why do swear words around the world tend to be words
for taboo things, and why do they all tend to have a certain sort
of sound? Chapters 6 and 7 cover some of the factors that make
some instances of swearing significantly more objectionable than
others. In Chapter 8 we return to the problem that, as we saw above,
regulations about swearing are often confused and incoherent, and
I’ll explain why this is a problem. In Chapter 9 I’ll draw on some
influential work in philosophy of language to sketch out a frame-
work that can be used to make sensible decisions about how to reg-
ulate swearing. In Chapter 10 I’ll explain why relying too heavily
on our intuitive sense of how offensive swearing is can lead to bias
and injustice—​and how we can reflect on and revise our intuitions
20 For F*ck’s Sake

so that they point us in the right direction. The next two chapters
focus on how the offensiveness of certain terms intersects with
prejudice: in Chapter 11, we compare swearing to slurs, and look at
how and why the norms around swearing differ from those around
slurs; and in Chapter 12, we’ll see that prejudicial attitudes are to
blame for the offensiveness of cunt and cocksucker. Chapters 13 and
14 deal with some ways, including the use of asterisks, that we can
utter swear words (and other offensive terms) in a way that reduces
their offensiveness—​and with some of the pitfalls and limitations
of these strategies. After all that tortuous thought about offensive-
ness, things become more upbeat in Chapter 15, when we look at
the positive side of swearing. And finally, in Chapter 16, I argue that
those of us who find ourselves in the position of having to worry
about whether we might cause offence with the language we use
should count ourselves lucky: there are those who are simply un-
able to cause offence when they use swear words, and those people
suffer a moral wrong as a result.
Get the kettle on and the swear jar at the ready, and let’s get
started.
 1
What is swearing?

Philosophers: always making a song and dance about answering

questions to which everyone already knows the answers. But bear
with me. I know that, in an obvious sense, we all already know ex-
actly what swear words are, and that we can all rattle off a list of
them if we have to. Even so, while we have no trouble listing swear
words or identifying them when we encounter them, it’s more diffi-
cult to articulate exactly what makes a swear word a swear word and
what sets swear words apart from other words and expressions. It is
no simple matter to answer the question What, exactly, is swearing?
in a way that does not involve simply giving a list of swear words,
but let’s give it a try.

Swearing =​offensiveness

The Oxford English Dictionary defines swearing as ‘The uttering of

a profane oath; the use of profane language’, while Oxford Learner’s
Dictionaries offer the somewhat more user-​friendly definition of,
simply, ‘rude or offensive language’. This is a good start, but it is too
rough for our purposes. For one thing, ‘rude or offensive language’
need not involve swearing at all. I am rude or offensive when I tell
you that your new baby is ugly, when I respond to receiving your
thoughtful gift by complaining that it is not expensive enough, or
when I crack a tasteless joke about death after you reveal that you
have a terminal illness. Some definitions of swearing get around
this issue by specifying that swearing should involve taboo (i.e. for-
bidden) language—​but, even combined with the ‘rude or offensive’
22 For F*ck’s Sake

requirement, this is not specific enough. Not all rude or offensive

taboo language is swearing. A category of non-​sweary offensive
taboo language is slurs: words that deride entire groups of people,
and that are often associated with hate speech. The best-​known slurs
are those that deride a person on account of their race, sexual ori-
entation, disability, gender, or religion. Slurs are distinct from swear
words, but there is more to say about their relationship to swear
words, and we’ll focus on them in Chapter 11. Another example is
language that is taboo for religious reasons, including curses, blas-
phemy, and words that are otherwise unspeakable for certain re-
ligious groups. For example, the word pig is an offensive taboo to
many Muslims, but it is not offensive outside this group, and it is
certainly not a swear word. Even so, the divisions between swear
words and these other categories is not always sharp: consider the
word damn, which often functions as a swear word (albeit a mild
one these days) but which is also a religious taboo word. Slurs, as
we’ll see, can also be used as swear words. But these overlaps do not
matter. It will be useful to make the distinction between swearing,
slurs, and religious taboos even if some expressions fall into more
than one category.
Offensiveness is not an all-​or-​nothing phenomenon. There is a
spectrum of offensiveness, with some offensive words being more
offensive than others. Within the category of swear words, shit is
less offensive than fuck, which in turn is less offensive than cunt.
This spectrum allows for borderline cases; words that we’re not sure
whether or not to count as swear words. These might include crap,
screw, and minge. (Readers who are unconvinced by these border-
line cases are invited to think of their own.) We’ll investigate the link
between swearing and offensiveness in later chapters, when we ad-
dress questions like: What makes a word offensive enough to count
as a swear word? What quality is possessed by, say, shit, in virtue of
which it is a swear word, and lacked by the otherwise similar poo?
Could poo grow to equal shit in offensiveness? And, what is the link
between swearing’s offensiveness and taboo language—​could a
 What is swearing? 23

non-​taboo word like book ever attain the level of offensiveness of a

swear word, and if not, why not?
As well as varying in degree, offensiveness varies in kind too.
We’ll zoom in on what offensiveness is, and what makes swearing
offensive, in the chapters that follow—​but for now let’s simply ac-
knowledge that different offensive things are offensive in different
ways and for different reasons. Slurs offend by unjustly deriding
members of certain groups. Telling a new parent that their baby is
ugly offends by upsetting the new parent. Masturbating on a busy
train offends by forcing other passengers to witness something they
find alarming and disgusting. And so on. Swearing, too, has its own
particular flavour of offensiveness. At a deeper level, though, these
behaviours all offend in virtue of those who witness the behaviours
taking them to indicate the speaker’s (or actor’s) lack of respect for
certain other people. But we’re jumping ahead here. Your takeaway
at this stage can be that swearing is about way more than offensive
language. It’s a very particular type of offensive language.

Swearing =​offensiveness +​emotion

Aside from being offensive, what else is distinctive about swearing?

Well, swearing has a special role in expressing and communicating
emotion. The expressions My car has been stolen and For fuck’s sake,
my fucking car’s been stolen! both assert the same thing, but the
second also conveys a sense of anger and annoyance, thanks to the
inclusion of swearing. Swearing effectively (though not uniquely)
enables the speaker to communicate her emotions without having
to describe explicitly what her emotions are. Indeed, it often
happens that swearing does a better job of communicating emo-
tion than describing does: other things being equal, we would judge
someone who responds to the discovery that her car has been stolen
with the outburst, ‘For fuck’s sake, my fucking car’s been stolen!’
to be more angry and annoyed than someone who is sufficiently
24 For F*ck’s Sake

composed to articulate the sentence, ‘I’m angry and annoyed that

my car has been stolen’.
Various writers have picked up on this link between swearing
and emotion. Linguist Geoffrey Nunberg remarked, ‘[s]‌wear words
don’t describe your feelings; they manifest them’ (Nunberg 2012).
Philosopher J. L. Austin wrote, ‘[w]e might say that we use swearing
for relieving our feelings’ (Austin 1962, 105). And Timothy Jay
and Kristen Janschewitz—​two psychology professors who have
written so extensively on swearing that Jay’s institutional website
proclaims him to be ‘a world-​renowned expert in cursing’—​have
defined swearing as ‘the use of taboo language with the purpose of
expressing the speaker’s emotional state and communicating that
information to listeners’ (Jay and Janschewitz 2008, 268).
Swearing’s characteristic role in expressing emotions is linked
to a unique linguistic role, too. What does this mean? Well, sup-
pose we overhear somebody exclaim ‘Fuck it!’ when he accidentally
spills tea in his lap. We don’t arrive at an understanding of this ex-
clamation by reflecting on the literal meanings of the words used, as
we’d do if the speaker had said ‘Eat it!’ or ‘Wash it!’ or ‘Wear it!’. In
fact, trying to interpret Fuck it! along these lines would result in our
getting hold of the wrong end of the stick. Eat it!, Wash it!, and Wear
it! are imperatives (i.e. commands), but in most cases Fuck it! is not.
Someone who says ‘Fuck it!’ in response to slopping tea in his lap is
not commanding anyone to fuck anything. In fact, Fuck it! in this
instance has nothing to do with fucking at all. To understand what
a speaker means by it, there is little point in our reflecting on what
he is referring to or talking about, because someone who says ‘Fuck
it!’ is not referring to or talking about anything. Instead, we need
to consider what the expression might indicate about the speaker’s
emotions. This makes Fuck it! more like a scream than an utter-
ance: just like a scream, it expresses emotion without being about
anything.
To be sure, swear words are not always used to communicate
emotion, and the literal meanings of swear words are not always
 What is swearing? 25

irrelevant to understanding what people say when they swear. They

fucked three times, There’s bird shit on my car, He got kicked in the
bollocks, and It’s bad manners to wank in an open-​plan office are all
examples of sentences in which swear words behave like ordinary
words and are used to describe what is going on in the world. The
late linguist James D. McCawley, writing under the sweary (and ra-
cially insensitive) pseudonym Quang Phuc Dong, distinguished
between the fuck of Fuck you! and the linguistically better-​behaved
fuck that appears in sentences like They fucked three times, calling
them fuck2 and fuck1 respectively (Dong 1971).
We’ll return to fuck2 in a moment. First, you might wonder
whether fuck1 and other non-​cathartic uses of swear words really
count as swearing at all. Sentences like They fucked three times are
ordinary, business-​as-​usual sentences in which the swear word
functions like any other verb or noun. We’re doing something very
different when we use fuck1 than we are when we use fuck2. If we are
keen to flag this distinction, we might distinguish between swearing
and using swear words. We could then stipulate that when someone
utters any of the example sentences just considered, they use swear
words but they do not swear. Conversely, we might also observe
that it’s possible to swear without using swear words. To see this,
consider the emotion-​venting role of swearing described above—​
the role that is typical of fuck2 utterances. Despite this role being
characteristic of swearing, it’s possible to use non-​swear words to
perform this role. If someone frustrates us we might respond with a
sweary outburst like, ‘You wanker!’ But we might be able to realise
the emotion-​venting function if we dropped the swear word and
instead used the right sort of non-​sweary insult, like, You absolute,
indescribable, inexpressible fool!. We could, alternatively, replace
fool with a slur word; indeed, some people use slurs for this pur-
pose, though not if they are concerned to avoid the additional layer
of offensiveness that using a slur conveys. It’s also possible to ex-
ploit the loophole of swearing without using swear words in order
to vent emotion without offending anyone, as when people exclaim
26 For F*ck’s Sake

‘Shoot!’ instead of ‘Shit!’—​although, of course, the self-​restraint

required to choose an inoffensive word over a swear word risks
diminishing the cathartic potential of the expression. And it’s pos-
sible to swear without using any words at all: we’ll see in Chapter 9
that using offensive gestures like the middle finger can constitute
swearing. Since slur words, non-​sweary insults, inoffensive substi-
tute swear words, and offensive gestures are not swear words, we
could view venting emotion in this characteristically sweary way
to constitute swearing without using swear words. This distinction
between swearing and using swear words leaves us with a mind-​
boggling choice of different ways in which swearing can feature
in our communication. We can swear using a swear word, we can
swear without using a swear word, and we can use a swear word
without swearing. But to keep things simple, I’m going to gloss
over these distinctions and use the terms swearing and using swear
words interchangeably, relying on the context to make clear what
I mean and referring to these distinctions only when the discussion
demands it.

Swearing =​offensiveness +​emotion +​

linguistic anarchy

The fact that understanding swearing does not always involve con-
sidering the literal meanings of swear words helps explain why
many swear words are impressively versatile. In his book on the
English language, A Mouthful of Air, Anthony Burgess reports
hearing an army mechanic say of a broken-​down truck, ‘Fuck it.
The fucking fucker’s fucking fucked’. Burgess remarks that, here,
a single swear word is used as (respectively) an imperative, adjec-
tive, noun, adverb, and verb (Burgess 1992, 263). The unusual flex-
ibility of the word fuck explains the astonishing fact that we’re able
to make any sense of the mechanic’s pronouncement at all.
 What is swearing? 27

Is fuck a special case? Fuck can, after all, do things that not even
other swear words can do. It is, as the philosopher Steve Gimbel has
blogged, ‘the Swiss army knife of language. There’s nothing it can’t
express’ (Gimbel 2006). One powerful illustration of this is pro-
vided by a scene from the American crime drama series The Wire,
in which two detectives spend almost five minutes assessing a crime
scene, all the while communicating only through variations of the
word fuck. So legendary is the word that there is even a Hollywood
documentary film about it: Fuck, by director Steve Anderson.
So, perhaps fuck is not representative of swear words in general.
It lends itself easily to the task to which Burgess’s army mechanic
applies it in a way that other swear words would not. It would have
been rather more avant-​garde for the mechanic to have said, in-
stead, ‘Shit it. The shitting shitter’s shitting shitted’. Or even, ‘Cunt
it. The cunting cunt’s cunting cunted’. (This latter formulation is
admittedly less bizarre now than it would have been even a few
decades ago, when Burgess was writing—​cunting and cunted were
added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2014.)
What is it that prevents other swear words from being put to all
the uses to which we can put fuck? Several linguists have reflected
on the rules governing swear words. They consider what you can
and can’t do with swear words in an effort to work out what sorts of
words they are. Steven Pinker argues that fucking is not an adjective
because, if it were, Drown the fucking cat would be interchangeable
with Drown the cat which is fucking, just as Drown the lazy cat is
interchangeable with Drown the cat which is lazy. But, clearly, they
are not interchangeable—​at least, not in cases where fucking is used
in McCawley’s fuck2 sense (i.e. when it is not used to tell us that
the cat in question is having sex). McCawley argues at length that
Fuck you is not an imperative (i.e. a command) like Wash the dishes.
One reason is that, unlike other imperatives, Fuck you cannot be
conjoined with other imperatives in a single sentence. We can say,
Wash the dishes and sweep the floor but not Wash the dishes and
28 For F*ck’s Sake

fuck you. Nunberg suggests that fucking is not an adverb like very
or extraordinarily, because while you can say, ‘How brilliant was
it? Very’, and, ‘How brilliant was it? Extraordinarily’, you can’t say,
‘How brilliant was it? Fucking’.
There is reason to doubt some of these claims. Anecdotally, when
discussing this with others, a couple of friends have claimed that
in their part of the world, people do say things like, ‘How brilliant
was it? Fucking’. Ignoring this, what does it mean to say that you
can or can’t say things like this? The can and can’t here resemble
those of, You can’t say ‘Me am hungry’, but you can say ‘I am hungry’.
Claims like this appear to identify rules about language use that
speakers can either follow or break. What sort of rules these are,
and what breaking them involves, are tricky issues on which there
is no firm agreement in linguistics or philosophy of language. We
don’t need to get into that debate here, but we can note that the rules
about using swear words differ from the rules about using other
sorts of words in an important way. We receive much less feedback
and guidance about how to use swear words than we receive about
how to use other sorts of words. A child who says to a parent or a
teacher, ‘Me am hungry’, is likely to be corrected and told to say,
instead, ‘I am hungry’. By contrast, a child who says to a parent or
a teacher, ‘How brilliant was it? Fucking’, is likely to be scolded for
swearing, but very unlikely to be scolded for doing it incorrectly.
When children start to swear, the first and only rule of swearing
that they learn is that they shouldn’t swear. And if an otherwise ar-
ticulate and fluent adult says, ‘How brilliant was it? Fucking’, we
are more likely to think they are being creative with their swearing
than that they are an incompetent speaker. It’s rare that we receive
guidance on how to swear correctly.1 Indeed, we often celebrate

1 There is a recent exception to this. In June 2019, the Académie Française published

guidance on the correct use of certain French sweary insults. The guidance—​entitled
Salop ou Salaud? (‘Male Slut or Bastard?’)—​explained that, etymologically, a slut (une
salope) is not simply a female bastard (un salaud); and that although a male equivalent
of ‘slut’ (un salop) and a female version of ‘bastard’ (une salaude) do exist, these terms
are rarely used today. On balance, then, it behooves the conscientious swearer to insult
 What is swearing? 29

creative, hitherto unexplored uses of swear words. Consider the

hundreds of Buzzfeed articles, blog posts, and YouTube clips de-
voted to the unusual sweary outbursts of Malcolm Tucker, the no-
toriously acerbic character from the British political satire show,
The Thick of It—​insults that ranged from the concise ‘Shit off ’ to
the more complicated ‘You are a real boring fuck. Sorry, I know
you disapprove of swearing, so I’ll sort that: you are a boring
F-​star-​star cunt!’ Or the similar online celebration following then-​
US president Donald Trump’s mistaken insinuation on Twitter that
Scotland voted to leave the European Union in the UK’s 2016 ref-
erendum. Scottish citizens accompanied their tweeted corrections
with imaginative sweary terms that included knuckle-​brained fart
lozenge, cock juggling thundercunt, and witless fucking cocksplat.
To my knowledge, no concerns were publicly expressed about the
sweary competence of Malcolm Tucker or Scottish users of Twitter.
On the contrary, Strong Language—​a long-​running, successful blog
about swearing by linguists James Harbeck and Stan Carey along
with various contributors—​celebrates creative swearing each year
in a blog post entitled ‘The Annual Tucker Awards for Excellence
in Swearing’. Among the recent recipients was Wendy Molyneux,
for her McSweeney’s article entitled ‘Oh my fucking God, get the
fucking vaccine already, you fucking fucks’, which included lines
like, ‘You think vaccines don’t fucking work? Oh, fuck off into the
trash, you attention-​seeking fuckworm-​faced shitbutt. This isn’t
even a point worth discussing, you fuck-​o-​rama fuck-​stival of igno-
rance’ (Molyneux 2021).
My hunch is that our judgements about whether a person is a
competent swearer piggy-​back on our judgements about whether
they are competent users of the language in general. When someone
whom we judge to be generally fluent and articulate swears in an
unusual way, we are much more likely to view them as swearing

women using salope and men using salaud. Such explicit, authoritative guidance about
how to swear is rare, however (Académie Française (2019)).
30 For F*ck’s Sake

creatively than as incompetent at swearing. On the other hand, if

someone who is not fluent swears in an unusual way, we are quicker
to view them as not knowing how to swear.
Philosopher Joel Feinberg has said, of swearing, ‘The words ac-
quire their strong expressive power in virtue of an almost paradox-
ical tension between powerful taboo and universal readiness to
disobey’ (Feinberg 1983, 140). We might add to this that swearing
also derives its power from the fact that swearing is a realm of lan-
guage where, once we’ve flouted the rule not to swear, anything goes.
We often think that we shouldn’t swear, but if we do, it bothers us
little if we swear wrong. It is little wonder that swearing can be so
cathartic and satisfying.

Swearing and the brain

Don’t get excited, this won’t be a long and detailed section on the
neuroscience of swearing. But before moving on, let’s note that
as well as its being characterised by taboo language, by its role in
expressing emotion, and by the fact that it is less rule governed than
other forms of language, swearing seems to be processed in a spe-
cial way by the brain. For one thing, it is a part of so-​called auto-
matic speech. Automatic speech activities are those that we carry
out without conscious reflection. Besides swearing, they include
counting, naming the days of the week, and conversational fillers
like um and ah. People suffering from aphasia—​problems using
language correctly due to brain damage resulting from stroke, head
injury, tumors, or certain diseases—​often find that their automatic
speech functions are unaffected. In other words, some people are
able to swear even after they have lost the ability to hold a conver-
sation or to read a book. In addition, excessive swearing can result
from brain or spinal cord injury and from various neurological and
psychiatric conditions, including—​famously—​Tourette syndrome.
This has led researchers to conclude that swearing and regular
 What is swearing? 31

speech are produced by different systems in the brain (Van Lancker

and Cummings 1999).
Swearing’s unique role in expressing emotion, and the unique
way in which our brains process swearing, make it unsurprising
that sometimes only a swear word will do. A common objection to
swearing is that it is unnecessary: that we always have the alterna-
tive of finding a more decorous way of expressing ourselves. Aside
from being an odd reason to object to swearing—​how much of an-
ything we say is necessary, really?—​it is also mistaken. When we
swear, we are not choosing one of many available, equally satisfac-
tory expressions, as we do when we choose to say, ‘Lovely weather,
isn’t it’? rather than ‘Nice day, isn’t it’? Swearing enables us to ex-
press what cannot be expressed using inoffensive words. As such,
far from being unnecessary in such cases, swearing is absolutely
necessary. As Mark Twain reportedly commented, ‘The difference
between the right word and the almost right word is the difference
between lightning and a lightning bug’.
 2
Swearing’s secret offensive
ingredient

People often wonder what it is that gives swear words their power
to shock and offend. The capacity of swear words to affect us in the
way they do can seem almost occult. This issue has cropped up in
almost every one of the many media interviews I’ve done about
swearing. What, people want to know, does fuck have that funk
doesn’t have? Why are people horrified at cunt but not at country?
How can making certain noises, or writing certain symbols, reli-
ably and predictably produce such dramatic emotional reactions in
others? I’m going to turn to these questions now.
We already have one answer to the puzzle of where swear words
get their power. We considered it briefly in the previous chapter,
where I remarked that when, as children, we first start to experi-
ment with swearing, we are met with disapproval from adults. This
quickly teaches us that swearing is something to be avoided in po-
lite society; at the same time, marking swearing as taboo in this way
opens the door to the excitement of taboo-​breaking. We each get
the idea that swearing is offensive, then, because we are taught that
it is offensive from an early age. And we learn that it has the power
to shock because we see that people are shocked when we swear,
and because we are taught that we should avoid it.
But this is not a full and satisfying answer to the question of how
we came to view swearing as offensive. We also want to know how
this all started. Why is swearing’s offensiveness a thing? And why is
it words like cunt, cock, fuck, shit, and piss that society has decided
to find offensive? Why not—​as is sometimes suggested—​decide to
 Swearing’s secret offensive ingredient 33

be offended instead by words that denote truly horrible things, like

torture, rape, and genocide? The answer, as we will see in this chapter,
is elusive. None of the most obvious candidates for swearing’s being
offensive is quite satisfactory.

What we say . . .

An obvious first step in considering swearing’s offensiveness is to

look at what swear words denote; that is, what they refer to, or what
they mean—​literally, as it were. At least in English, many swear
words denote sexual or lavatorial things. Talk of sexual and lava-
torial things is frowned upon in many social contexts, so perhaps
this helps explain why swear words are offensive. But a moment’s
reflection is enough to tell us that it is not swear words’ denotations
that make them offensive—​or at least, their denotations will give
us only part of the answer. Cunt, cock, fuck, shit, and piss are of-
fensive, yet other words and expressions denoting exactly the same
things—​vagina, penis, sexual congress, faeces, urine—​are inoffen-
sive in many contexts where the sweary equivalents are offensive.
We even have euphemistic words that enable us to refer to ex-
actly the same things in polite contexts while giving minimal of-
fence: foo-​foo, pee-​pee, sleep together, bowel movement, and water.
We can distinguish between taboo things or topics and taboo words
or expressions: often the words or expressions that denote taboo
things or topics are themselves taboo—​as in the case with fucking
and the word fucking—​but some (like sleep together) are not; and
some taboo things or topics don’t have any taboo word or expres-
sion that denotes them (cannibalism is taboo, but at least in English,
there is no taboo word for it) (Andersson and Trudgill 1992). That
swear words tend to focus on taboo topics like sex and defecation
is something that demands explanation—​we’ll return to this in the
next chapter—​but the fact that shit and bowel movement denote the
same thing yet differ in offensiveness shows that the offensiveness
34 For F*ck’s Sake

of swear words cannot be fully explained by what they denote.

Swearing’s offensiveness is not just a matter of what swear words
refer to, then, but also of how they refer to it.
It’s not just with swear words that the offensiveness of what we
refer to can come apart from the offensiveness of how we refer to
something. Even without swearing, some things are offensive re-
gardless of how we say them; for example, there is no inoffensive
way to assert that some people are inferior to others on account
of their belonging to a certain race or gender. In such cases, the
offensiveness can be explained by denotation; that is, by the con-
tent of what is asserted, the claim that is being made regardless
of what words are used to make it. Other things can be offensive
when expressed in one way but not when expressed in another. It
would be offensive for a surgeon, while chuckling, to inform anx-
ious relatives that their seriously ill loved one croaked on the op-
erating table but not offensive to use an expression like I’m afraid
we lost him, or I’m so sorry but he didn’t make it, delivered with ap-
propriate gravity.1 When something that we say is offensive, then,
this is either because of what we said or how we said it, or both.
We can keep this distinction in mind as we reflect on swearing
throughout this book. The fact that swear words denote things that
can be less offensively denoted with other words—​fucking versus
making love—​tells us that their capacity to offend is not exhausted
by their denotation. We must look elsewhere to explain their offen-
siveness. We might, then, look to their connotation. If denotation is
the literal meaning of a word or expression, its connotation is the
‘feel’ of it (i.e. the emotions and associations it evokes). A word or
expression’s connotations can be pleasant or unpleasant, positive or
negative. Two words or expressions can have identical denotations
but differ in their connotations. This is why, in the example above,
He croaked is likely to offend, but I’m afraid we lost him is not. And
as one internet meme puts it, Have a nice day is a pleasant thing to

1 Example adapted from Allen and Burridge (2006, 39–​40).

 Swearing’s secret offensive ingredient 35

say, but Enjoy the next 24 hours sounds rather threatening. When
we learn a new language, we master the denotations of its words
much more easily than we master their connotations. This helps ex-
plain why swearing in a foreign language can be tricky. It is pretty
easy for an English learner to grasp that shit and poo denote the
same thing, but it takes longer to grasp their connotations, which
involves being able to predict the sort of response that each is likely
to elicit in the listener in a given context.

. . . and how we say it

Steven Pinker believes that the connotations of swear words re-

sult in their causing an involuntary emotional response in the lis-
tener, and that this explains the offensiveness of swear words. By
swearing, he tells us, we ‘kidnap’ the listener’s attention and force
them to consider something unpleasant (Pinker 2007b). It is un-
doubtedly true that swearing can be an effective way of getting
people’s attention. But there are several reasons to be dissatisfied
with Pinker’s explanation. To begin, there is nothing unique about
swearing’s ability to ‘kidnap’ the listener’s attention. Pinker himself
notes this, with reference to the Stroop effect: a phenomenon fa-
mously illustrated by presenting people with a multicoloured list
of words naming various colors and asking them to say aloud the
colour of the ink in which each word is written, which does not
match the colour it names. This task is difficult for literate adults,
Pinker explains, because it is so hard to turn off our ability to read
the word and instead attend only to its colour. We also have an au-
tomatic response to hearing our own name: hearing it ‘kidnaps’ our
attention. So, given that it’s possible to ‘kidnap’ a listener’s attention
inoffensively, how can it explain swearing’s capacity to offend?
Pinker argues that, unlike these other attention-​kidnapping phe-
nomena, swearing makes us think of something unpleasant. He
sees this combination of attention-​kidnapping and unpleasantness
36 For F*ck’s Sake

as the key to swearing’s offensiveness. But this is not convincing. It’s

true that swear words often denote unpleasant things such as def-
ecation, but the fact that we very often process (and are offended
by) swear words without considering their denotation makes it
implausible that in general they offend us by virtue of making us
think of unpleasant things. If we’re dining in an upmarket restau-
rant and we hear a waiter exclaim ‘Shit!’ after dropping a fork, we
might frown on his impoliteness and lack of professionalism, but
his outburst is unlikely to make us think of defecation. The word’s
denotation wouldn’t even occur to most of us in this context. On
the other hand, were the waiter to approach our table while we’re
eating and say ‘How is your meal? I’m just going for a shit!’, then we
might well find our appetites dampened. In this second example,
the waiter uses shit in such a way as to make us consider its denota-
tion. But he can make us think of that without swearing at all. The
non-​sweary ‘How is your meal? I’m just going to defecate!’ is more
likely to spoil our appetites—​because it is more likely to make us
think of defecation—​than his sweary exclamation of ‘Shit!’
Further, many of the most offensive swear words do not denote
anything unpleasant at all. Some focus on sex, the genitals, or reli-
gion. And some sweary expressions offend us even though it is un-
clear what their denotation is. Fuck you! can be shocking, but it is not
shocking because it makes us think of something unpleasant (un-
less what is unpleasant is the expression itself, which would leave us
without an explanation of why it is unpleasant). Making someone
think of something unpleasant, then, is not necessary for causing
offence. Neither is it sufficient. I can inoffensively make you think
of something unpleasant by saying, ‘Your daughter should learn to
swim in case she ever falls into a river’. Psychotherapists routinely
but inoffensively make their clients think of unpleasant things
when they encourage them to confront long-​buried and traumatic
memories. News broadcasts frequently contain unpleasant content
without thereby being offensive. Even using attention-​kidnapping
means to evoke these unpleasant thoughts is not enough to render
 Swearing’s secret offensive ingredient 37

unpleasant the communication described in these examples: the

listener’s attention is kidnapped if the speaker uses her name, if the
news broadcast is preceded by a catchy jingle, or simply if the com-
munication uses language that the listener understands and there-
fore cannot help but automatically process.
Finally, while Pinker refers interchangeably to swearing’s offen-
siveness and to its power to evoke certain emotional responses,
the offensiveness of swearing—​or, indeed, of anything—​cannot be
explained wholly by the emotional response it arouses in the lis-
tener. People respond emotionally to different things in different
ways, often in ways that the speaker cannot predict. Even inno-
cently chatting to a friend about your new garden shed could
traumatise your friend if it turns out that, unbeknown to you, he
once had a distressing experience in a shed that he cannot bear to
relive. Despite upsetting your friend, you have not done anything
offensive by mentioning your shed.
If swearing’s capacity to elicit certain emotions in the listener
does not explain its offensiveness, what about its capacity to express
the speaker’s emotions? As we saw in the previous chapter, when we
hear somebody exclaim ‘Fuck you!’, we do not understand them via
a literal interpretation of what they have said. Instead, we take them
to be using the expression to communicate their anger, hurt, or an-
noyance. Swearing is particularly good at enabling us to commu-
nicate certain emotions. Can this explain swearing’s offensiveness?
We do, after all, find certain expressions of emotion offensive, as
when someone laughs at a funeral or expresses annoyance when we
announce that we have recovered from a deadly illness. However,
in cases where people swear to express emotion, it cannot be the
mere expression of emotion that causes offence. Saying ‘Fuck you!’
might well be an effective way to express anger, hurt, or annoyance,
but there are plenty of ways to communicate the same emotions in-
offensively: we can stamp our feet, say ‘I’m angry/​hurt/​annoyed!’,
or (especially if we’re British) make an understatement like ‘I’m
not best pleased about this’. While some expressions of emotion
38 For F*ck’s Sake

are offensive, and while many instances of swearing are offensive,

swearing’s offensiveness cannot be adequately explained with refer-
ence to the emotion that it expresses. Even so, the fact that swearing
is a particularly satisfying way to express strong emotions—​as is
evidenced from the fact that it is more satisfying to yell ‘Fuck!’ than
‘Fiddlesticks!’ when we miss our train—​demands explanation.
We’ll return to this later.

The taboo of taboo-​breaking

An important aspect of swearing is its relationship to taboos. All

swear words, when used to denote, denote something taboo. In
addition to denoting what is taboo, swearing itself is taboo: we are
not supposed to swear. Let’s consider whether the taboo aspect of
swearing explains its offensiveness.
A taboo is a behaviour (including speech) or object that is
forbidden in society or in a particular social circle or context.
Behaviour that is illegal or otherwise officially proscribed counts
as taboo according to this definition; but when we talk about
taboos, we typically mean behaviour that is informally disallowed
or frowned upon. In other words, we mean behaviour that may
shock, offend, or outrage one’s community, and which may get the
offender ostracised, but which does not normally result in a formal
retaliation from the law. Taboos commonly centre on concerns
about contamination, sex, death, and physical or spiritual harm
(the latter includes things like bad luck or suffering in the afterlife).
Some taboos, such as swearing, blasphemy, and slurs, are linguistic.
Being naked in public, having sex with close relatives, defecating
in public, and having a punch-​up at the graveside at a funeral are
all examples of non-​linguistic taboos. What is taboo varies across
societies, cultures, and contexts: it is taboo for a Sikh man to go
without a turban in public but not for women or non-​Sikhs to do
so; for Muslims, but not for non-​Muslims, it is taboo to depict
people, and especially to depict God or the prophet Muhammed; in
 Swearing’s secret offensive ingredient 39

Japan but not in other cultures, it is taboo to wear outdoor shoes in

some buildings; in India but not elsewhere it is taboo to use the left
hand for certain purposes, including eating and accepting a gift; in
churches it is taboo to wear a hat, but in mosques and synagogues
it is taboo to leave the head uncovered. There are even fictional
taboos: in the Harry Potter series it is taboo to mention Voldemort
by name; and in the film Fight Club, ‘The first rule of Fight Club
is: You do not talk about Fight Club’.
How does a type of behaviour become taboo? Typically, this
arises from a wish to avoid contamination, death, or physical or
spiritual harm. It will perhaps be clear how some of the behaviours
just mentioned became taboo. Defecating in public poses a risk of
contamination. Interbreeding with close relatives risks physical
harm like offspring with genetic disorders. The religious-​themed
taboos all introduce the threat of spiritual harm via a failure to
respect what is sacred. Behaviours can become taboo even in the
absence of a satisfactory explanation for their harmfulness; for ex-
ample, the taboo against incest predates any understanding of the
genetic factors that explain its potential effects, and so must have
arisen for other reasons, perhaps due to the so-​called Westermarck
effect (the hypothesis that raising young children together
inhibits their being sexually attracted to each other later in life).
And behaviours can remain taboo even after the explanation for
their harmfulness has been forgotten. Consider the taboo against
spilling salt. Salt was once an expensive and precious commodity
that also had spiritual significance. As a result, in times gone by,
spilling salt was a far more serious matter than it is today, and the
ritual of throwing a pinch of the spilt salt over the left shoulder with
the right hand had a clear explanation as an attempt to ward off evil
forces. Many people continue this ritual today, but usually without
any understanding of why spilling salt is something that requires
such a response.2 This reveals how taboos and the rituals around

2 I’ve taken this example from Allen and Burridge (2006, 9).
40 For F*ck’s Sake

them can easily take on an aura of magic—​and some writers have

commented on swearing’s relationship to magic. Feinberg wrote
that the ‘shock value of profane words in the past has essentially
depended on implicit beliefs in word magic’ (1985, 204); and
Nunberg (2008) remarked that ‘dirty words are magic spells that
conjure up their references’.
Understanding swearing’s relationship to taboo can help us un-
derstand how it developed, and how it assumed the form it has
today. Sociologist Edward Sagarin saw swearing as historically
rooted in religious language (Sagarin 1962). Using religious lan-
guage to swear is a form of blasphemy, and blasphemy is taboo.
Religious terminology and references play a role in swearing in
almost all cultures. In English, religious-​themed swearing—​using
terms like ‘Christ’, ‘damn’, and ‘hell’, often in the form of cursing—​is
a milder form of swearing than it once was. However, in some other
languages, the religious theme features far more centrally and dra-
matically. Perhaps the most vivid example is Quebecois French, in
which the strongest swear words are terms relating to Catholicism.
These include tabernak (tabernacle), crisse (Christ), baptême (bap-
tism), calisse (chalice), ciboire (ciborium), and osti (host). Je m’en
calisse is equivalent to the English ‘I don’t give a fuck’. These words
are considered stronger than the standard French swear words like
merde (shit), and they can be amplified by combining them with
each other and with standard swear words and other expressions.
This gives rise to powerful and difficult-​to-​translate expressions like
Crisse de marde, Mon crisse de tabernak, J’m va te décalliser la yuele,
and Crisse de calisse de tabernak d’osti de sacrament.3 Religion is a
dominant theme in other languages including Italian, Romanian,
Hungarian, and Spanish. There are regional differences between

3 Some of these examples are taken from [Link]

h_​pr​ofan​ity, developed and enhanced with help from Philippe Jacquet. Extra friend-​
points to Philippe for doing a last-​minute WhatsApp survey of his Montreal friends
while I was correcting the proofs for this book and needed to know whether criss or
crisse is the correct spelling of this rude word.
 Swearing’s secret offensive ingredient 41

practices, but examples include the Italian Porco Dio and Porco
Madonna (respectively, ‘God/​Madonna is a pig’), the Romanian
Dumnezu să te fută and the Hungarian Bassza meg az Isten (both of
which mean ‘May God fuck you’), and the Spanish Me cago en Dios
(I shit on God). These examples are from largely religious cultures,
but some highly secular cultures also find religious swearing of-
fensive. Godverdomme (Goddamn) remains one of the strongest
expressions in Dutch. Perkele (the name of a pagan deity, now
equivalent in meaning to ‘devil’), saatana (Satan), jumalauta (liter-
ally ‘God help’, but used in a similar way to the English ‘Goddamn’),
and helvetti (hell) are all common and powerful ways of swearing
in Finnish. There are pagan influences, too, in Estonian: Pagan
võtaks means, approximately, ‘Let the devil take it’. For fanden, For
helvede, and For Satan (For the devil’s/​hell’s/​Satan’s sake) are widely
used Danish expressions; similarly, fan (Satan), helvete (hell), and
jävla (derived from djävul, meaning ‘devil’) are common Swedish
expressions.
For Sagarin, the religious roots of swearing are key to under-
standing the particular form that many (but not all) of our familiar
swears take, and their power to offend. We have already seen that we
do not come to understand swears like Fuck you! by understanding
their literal meanings. This is fortunate given that, in many cases, it
can be difficult to make any sense of their literal meanings. There
seems no obvious answer to the question of what Fuck you!, For
fuck’s sake!, and I don’t give a shit! mean, leaving aside their capacity
to communicate anger, frustration, contempt, or disengagement
with one’s interlocutor. Sagarin suggests that expressions like these
probably developed from religious curses—​ respectively, Damn
you!, For God’s sake!, and I don’t give a damn!—​whose meanings are
more straightforwardly comprehensible. As the influence of reli-
gion has waned, religious references in these expressions have been
replaced by more powerful sexual and scatological words. It does
not matter much that the modified expressions make little sense,
since what is lost in denotation is amply repaid in connotation.
42 For F*ck’s Sake

Pinker takes the capacity of religious curses to evoke strong

emotional responses, thanks to their violation of the taboo against
blasphemy, to explain why the expletives into which they evolved
remain powerful despite the religious terms having been replaced
by sexual and scatological ones. Just as many people today worry
about breaking the taboo against spilling salt even though the
historical reasons for this taboo have long ceased to be relevant,
people continue to be offended by swearing even though the reli-
gious sentiments that underpin it are much less influential today
than they once were. However, this leaves unexplained the fact that
not just any expression that evolves out of a religious curse is of-
fensive. If that were the case, then Darn you! and Fuck you!, both
of which have evolved out of Damn you!, would be equally offen-
sive; as would For goodness’ sake! and For fuck’s sake!, having both
evolved from For God’s sake! Clearly this is not the case: Darn you!
and For goodness’ sake! arose as replacements to the religious curses
precisely to reduce their offensiveness. Given that replacing words
like God and damn in religious curses with words like fuck and shit
did not diminish the emotional force of the original expressions,
this must be due to the replacement expressions somehow being
sufficiently forceful.
What, then, makes fuck and shit sufficiently forceful? Well,
like religious curses, they relate to taboos. Specifically, they re-
late to taboos about sex and contamination. Along with religious
expressions, sexual and lavatorial ones play a starring role in
swearing. This is true not only of British swearing but of swearing
in almost all cultures. Wherever you go in the world, the chances
are that you’ll come up against the equivalent of fucks, cocks, and
shits at some point. Swearing in some cultures also makes use of
taboos in ways that diverge from the sex/​toilet theme. French
swearing contains insults relating to menstruation, such as Viens
boire mes règles (Come drink my menstrual blood). And references
to sodomy and homosexuality feature in swearing in many lan-
guages, including French.
 Swearing’s secret offensive ingredient 43

Sex and defecation are not the only common non-​religious

themes in swearing, however. Many swears make reference to phys-
ical harm; specifically, to disease. In English, insults that accuse
the listener of being diseased have a childish, playground feel, but
they are more widely used elsewhere. Dutch swearing has many
expressions relating to disease: kankerlijer, teringlijer, tyfuslijer, and
aidslijer (cancer/​tuberculosis/​typhus/​AIDS sufferer) are common
insults, and the disease terms can be combined with other insults
to amplify them, as in the strong but somewhat out-​of-​fashion
kankerhoer (cancer-​whore). Mental disability features in swearing,
too. Korean swearing includes the insults 바보 (babo) and 병
신 (byeongsin), both of which mean ‘idiot’; 미친놈 (michinom),
meaning ‘crazy’; and the less common 염병할 (yeombyeonghal), an
insult that refers to typhoid fever, or to infectious disease in general.
Calling someone ‘idiot’ in English is a way of insulting them without
actually swearing—​but strictly speaking, insulting someone by
suggesting they are mentally or physically disabled is a way of slur-
ring people with disabilities, which is not only rude but also mor-
ally problematic. We’ll return to this issue in Chapter 11 when we
take a closer look at slurs. There are some insults that relate to phys-
ical harm but not to disease or disability, and which do not have the
character of slurs; although they’re pretty rare. Examples include
the Korean 육시랄 (yuksiral) and 오사랄 (osaral), which refer to
methods of execution in which one is torn into six and five pieces,
respectively, along with 오라질 (orajil), a term that translates to
‘fit to be tied up like a criminal’, 주리를 틀 (jurireul teul), meaning
‘fit to have one’s legs twisted with sticks inserted between them’, and
난장맞을 (nanjangmajeul), meaning ‘fit to be flogged’—​but the
first two expressions are not commonly used and the rest are now
rather old-​fashioned.4
In addition to swears born of religious, sexual, and
contamination-​ related taboos, there are swears characterized
by taboos relating to hierarchy. These involve expressing

4 I’m grateful to Brian Jongseong Park for these insights about Korean swearing.
44 For F*ck’s Sake

inappropriate disrespect—​ often through sexual references—​ for

certain individuals, commonly the mother of the person insulted.5
Examples in English are limited to ‘motherfucker’ and ‘son of a
bitch’, but they are more common in other languages. There are
the Croatian expressions Pička ti materina (Your mother’s cunt)
and Jebo ti pas mater (May a dog fuck your mother); the Filipino
Putang-​ina (Whore-​mother); the Romanian Futu-​ți dumnezeii mă-​
tii (Fuck your mother’s gods) and Morții mă-​tii (Fuck your mother’s
dead relatives);6 the Spanish Me cago en la leche de tu madre (I shit
in your mother’s milk), Me cago en tu tia (I shit on your aunt), and
Putamadre (Whore-​mother); the Turkish Ananı sikeyim (I fuck
your mother); the Korean 네미 붙을 (nemi buteul), 제미 붙을
(jemi buteul), 네미랄 (nemiral), and 제미랄 (jemiral), all of which
are contractions of expressions that correspond to ‘motherfucking’;
and the Mandarin 肏你祖宗十八代 (Fuck your ancestors to the
eighteenth generation). ‘Son of a bitch’ has equivalents in many
languages including French (Fils de pute), German (Hurensohn),
Italian (Figlio di troia), Turkish (Orospu çocuğu), and Korean (개새
끼 (gaesaekki)); and German has absorbed and translated the term
‘motherfucker’ (Mutterficker).
Insulting the listener’s mother has a lofty historical pedigree. The
following ‘ur mum’ joke appears in William Shakespeare’s Titus
Andronicus:

Demetrius Villain, what hast thou done?

Aaron That which thou canst not undo.
Chiron Thou hast undone our mother.
Aaron Villain, I have done thy mother.

5 Should we view religious taboo as a special case of taboos relating to hierarchy?

I think there is a case for keeping the two separate, since breaking religious taboos is as-
sociated with a fear of spiritual harm (such as going to hell), which is not associated with
breaking other hierarchy-​related taboos.
6 For an enlightening discussion about Romanian swearing, I’m grateful to Emilian

Mihailov, who shared various insults in a pub in Oxford the first time I met him, in what
remains one of the funniest scholarly discussions of my career.
 Swearing’s secret offensive ingredient 45

Japanese offers a striking example of a hierarchy-​themed insult.

There are fewer swear words in Japanese than in many other lan-
guages, and Japanese swearing is generally viewed as yakuza (gang-
ster) language, to be avoided by ordinary people. Instead, one of the
most effective ways to offend somebody in Japanese is to address
them as てめ (teme), which is a very derogatory form of ‘you’. To
understand why this is so insulting, note that Japan is a highly hi-
erarchical society, and this is reflected in the existence of a great
many pronouns and word endings that imply a difference in status
between speaker and listener. Addressing someone using てめ tells
them that you view them as worthless. Korean, too, contains dif-
ferent speech levels to reflect the relationship between speaker and
listener, and it is possible to insult one’s listener by addressing them
in an overfamiliar way.
To a less dramatic extent, it’s possible to insult one’s listener with
overfamiliarity even in languages that don’t have such pervasive
ways of reflecting the relationship between speaker and listener.
Many languages, including Welsh, French, and German, have dif-
ferent forms of you to reflect (among other things) the formality of
the relationship between speaker and listener, which introduces the
possibility of insulting one’s listener by addressing them with inap-
propriate familiarity. While we don’t have this pronominal distinc-
tion in English, it’s nevertheless possible to insult someone by being
inappropriately informal. Saying ‘Cheers, Chuck!’ in the course of
being knighted by King Charles III is likely to result in offence, as is
using terms like Bud, Darling, or Sugar tits to address the judge who
is presiding over one’s murder trial. Even addressing one’s parent or
grandparent using their first name, when precedent requires using
words like Mum and Grandma, can cause offence.
It’s also possible, although rarer, to insult someone by addressing
them with inappropriate formality. Imagine a group of work
colleagues who are in the habit of addressing each other formally
while at work—​as ‘Ms X’, ‘Mr Y’, ‘Dr Z’, and so on. Imagine that
they occasionally socialise outside work and that, in this less formal
46 For F*ck’s Sake

context, they fall to addressing each other by their first names. If

there were one colleague in the group whom the others continued
to address formally even in this less formal context, despite his
efforts to make friends with his colleagues, he could reasonably
conclude that he is being excluded and snubbed by his colleagues.
Does swearing’s focus on taboo explain why swearing is offen-
sive? Not quite. Swear words refer to taboo topics when used to
denote, but—​as we have seen—​swear words have many inoffen-
sive synonyms. This means that merely referring to, relating to, or
evoking a taboo topic is not enough to make a term offensive. So,
what is it about the way in which swearing relates to these topics
that makes it offensive? We have already noted that swearing is
taboo in two separate senses: swearing is itself a taboo activity,
and swear words have taboo denotations. That it’s possible—​using
terms like number two—​to refer inoffensively to what is taboo
shows that a word or expression’s being taboo in the second sense
does not explain why it is taboo in the first sense. We must, then,
look elsewhere to find out why swearing is offensive.
Where shall we look? We could continue to scrutinise swear
words in the hope of finding the secret of their offensiveness—​
but perhaps we should pay heed to the pattern that is beginning
to emerge. We’ve already seen that swearing’s offensiveness cannot
arise solely from what swears denote or connote, nor from the
emotions that the speaker expresses by swearing, nor from the fact
that swear words relate to taboo topics. This is because there are in-
offensive ways of communicating all these things. Moreover, with
the exception of connotation (to which we’ll return), these factors
do not vary with context, whereas the offensiveness of swearing
does vary with context, and so considering these factors can tell
us nothing about why swearing is more offensive in some contexts
than in others.
We’re likely to end up with similar results if we look to other
context-​insensitive aspects of swear words for the key to their of-
fensiveness. Some writers have pointed to the sound that swear
 Swearing’s secret offensive ingredient 47

words make. Pinker remarks that ‘imprecations tend to use sounds

that are perceived as quick and harsh’ (Pinker 2007a, 339), and
Kate Warwick hypothesises that the peculiar offensiveness of cunt
results from a combination of its meaning and ‘the sound of the
word and the physical satisfaction of lobbing this verbal hand gre-
nade’ (Warwick 2015). There is, to be sure, something plausible
about this. Trying to express anger using a swear word full of gentle,
soft sounds—​like the words whiffy and slush—​would be decidedly
unsatisfactory; the verbal equivalent of angrily trying to slam a
door fitted with a compressed air hinge. Even so, the sound of swear
words cannot fully account for their offensiveness, for reasons that
have become familiar. Many inoffensive words also sound ‘quick
and harsh’, and some swear words have benign alternative meanings
(consider prick and cock), or sound identical to parts of inoffensive
words (cunt sounds identical to the first syllable of country—​a fact
not lost on John Donne, who ‘sucked on country pleasures’; nor
on the anonymous author of the rugby song A Soldier I Will Be,
whose sweary lines include ‘Asshole, asshole, a soldier I will be’ and
‘To fight for the old cunt, fight for the old cunt, fight for the old
country’).
That swear words tend to centre on taboo topics, and that they
tend to sound a certain way, are things that demand explanation,
and we’ll be considering that explanation in Chapter 5. But to find
a satisfactory account of what makes swearing offensive, we need to
cast our net wider and look to the relationship between swearer and
listener. Let’s turn to this now.
 3
There is no secret ingredient

We’ve explored a few features characteristic of swear words: their

focus on certain taboo topics like sex and defecation, the way they
sound, and the fact that swearing is itself a taboo. Why these features
are associated with swearing is something that needs explaining,
and we’ll come to that eventually. But let’s not get ahead of our-
selves. We started out, at the opening of Chapter 2, wanting to know
how swear words get their power to shock and offend. And none of
the features that swear words always and everywhere have—​their
sound, their link to taboo—​can explain their power to shock and
offend, precisely because they are features that swear words always
and everywhere have. As we saw in the introduction, swear words’
power to shock and offend is not a quality that they always and eve-
rywhere have. An f-​bomb dropped by the monarch during an of-
ficial television broadcast is more shocking and offensive than the
very same word bandied about between a couple of geezers sitting
in the pub venting about the disruption caused by local roadworks.
Swearing’s power to shock and offend, in other words, is context de-
pendent. That means that, if we want to understand this power, it’s
a mistake to look to those features of swearing that don’t vary with
context.
You might be wondering whether, setting aside the way swear
words sound, what they refer to, and their being taboo, there is an-
ything left to explain how swearing manages to shock and offend.
What else is there? In this chapter, we’re going to find out.
 There is no secret ingredient 49

Context is (almost) everything

Swearing’s offensiveness depends on its context. What do I mean by

‘context’ here? Well, a few different things.
Context can relate to the particular sort of social environment
in which we are speaking: swearing on a building site is less likely
to offend than swearing during a church service, and there is a
long history of swearing being frowned upon in the company of
women and children. Context can also relate to what sort of person
the speaker is. The middle class tends to be held to greater account
for bad language than the working or upper classes; indeed, in
their work on taboos, Keith Allan and Kate Burridge coin the term
middle-​class politeness criterion to describe the standard by which
certain expressions are typically judged polite or the reverse. The
criterion, they explain, is meant to apply to people who fall between
‘those so rich and/​or so powerful that they can disregard social
conventions observed by the mass of the community’ and ‘those so
uneducated, poor and deprived that they are unaware of, or cannot
afford to observe, the niceties of such social conventions’ (Allen
and Burridge 2006, 35).
Context can also relate to the wider cultural environment, which
can vary with time and place. Similar swear words have different
connotations at different times and in different cultures and places.
In the UK, religious swearing has come to be seen as less offensive
over the past few decades. By contrast, as we saw in the previous
chapter, religious terms remain highly offensive in some countries
and in some languages. Cunt, while highly offensive throughout
much of the English-​speaking world, can be used inoffensively and
affectionately in many communities in Scotland—​a point stressed
by film director Ken Loach in his wrangling with the British Board
of Film Classification over the classification of his 2012 film, The
Angel’s Share, which focuses on the Glasgow working class—​and
its Welsh equivalent, cont, can also be used inoffensively in many
contexts where the English equivalent would be highly offensive.
50 For F*ck’s Sake

Wanker is a moderately offensive English insult, but the Greek

equivalent—​μαλάκας (malakas)—​while also an insult, is com-
monly used affectionately.
Context can relate to what the speaker is responding to: we are
more tolerant of the sort of involuntary swearing that occurs as a
response to the speaker’s trapping her hand in a door than we are
to swearing in calmer situations. And context can relate to the ex-
pectations that the audience has of the speaker; for example, we
sometimes forgive offensive language in polite company in cases
where the speaker is a young child or a non-​native speaker, because
we recognise that children and non-​native speakers may not fully
grasp informal rules about when certain expressions are inappro-
priate. (Other times, of course, these sorts of speakers are judged
extra harshly for swearing.) These rules, along with other contex-
tual factors, can interact in complex ways that affect the extent to
which a given instance of swearing is offensive. For example, while
we would not normally reprimand someone who swears involun-
tarily in response to suffering a painful injury, there are contexts
in which we would view this as unacceptable. Loudly exclaiming
‘Fucking hell!’ after stubbing one’s toe during a wedding service is
likely to raise eyebrows, even if it would be overlooked in less aus-
tere contexts.
To understand swearing’s offensiveness, then, we have to take
context into account. But how can we begin to do this, given the
diverse and complex ways in which context can influence the offen-
siveness of swearing?

Offence escalation

It would be a mistake to expect some deep and profound insight

about swearing’s offensiveness to emerge from reflecting on pre-
cisely how this offensiveness can be determined by uttering those
particular words in those particular contexts. After all, there is
 There is no secret ingredient 51

often no good reason for why we find offensive the particular things
we find offensive. To see this, let’s go back to one of the examples
of taboo behaviour described in the previous chapter. We saw that
taboo behaviour can vary across cultures, and that while it is taboo
for men to wear a hat in a church, in a mosque it is taboo to leave
the head uncovered. Despite the contrast between the behaviours
proscribed by these taboos, they arise from the same source: the
desire to express respect for what is sacred. There is undoubtedly a
(causal, religious, cultural) story to be told in each case about how
the particular way of respecting what is sacred was settled upon—​
but if we want to understand why it is offensive to keep one’s hat on
in church, it would be misguided of us to look for the key to the of-
fensiveness in the particular phenomenon of hat-​wearing in church.
When people are offended by men who wear hats in church, this of-
fence is caused by those men’s failure to respect what is sacred via
the established cultural norms. When people are offended by men
who enter mosques with uncovered heads, this offence is caused by
the failure to respect what is sacred according to a different set of
established cultural norms. Setting aside these norms and the cul-
ture in which they operate, there is nothing that is either respectful
or disrespectful about the act of (not) removing one’s headwear in a
religious building. The ability of that act to convey respect or disre-
spect derives from the cultural context in which it occurs—​as is il-
lustrated by the fact that Christians associate removing one’s hat in
church with conveying respect while Muslims associate uncovering
one’s head in a mosque with disrespect.
How do these reflections apply to our exploration of why
swearing is offensive? Well, we might view them as a caution
against focusing too narrowly on context-​insensitive features of
swear words. To discover what makes swearing offensive, we must
instead look more widely at the sort of speech behaviour that
involves and surrounds swearing, and the way in which it arises
in social situations. Swearing’s offensiveness arises from the in-
teraction between two features of the language we use. The first
52 For F*ck’s Sake

is that, as we have seen, when we use language, we communicate

much more than is conveyed by the denotations of the words we
use. The second is that we have preferences about which words
and expressions people use. Many of these preferences are taboo
related in that we generally prefer that people avoid referring to
taboo topics especially in certain formal or sacred settings. Once
preferences for certain forms of speech are established, it is easy to
see how forms that are merely dispreferred should grow to be offen-
sive while preferred forms become expected. This will happen as
our choice of which form of words to use comes to be influenced by
our knowledge about what preferences our listeners have for cer-
tain expressions over others.
We can illustrate this by means of an analogy with an expression
that nobody would be tempted to deem offensive. Imagine the fol-
lowing scenario, which is based on an actual and recurring series of
events. Suppose that you make a new friend named Rebecca, and
you fall into the habit of addressing her as ‘Rachel’. After you have
done this a couple of times, she politely points out that her name is
Rebecca, not Rachel. If, after she has drawn your attention to this,
you persist in calling her ‘Rachel’, she is likely to begin to feel an-
noyed, and she might repeat the request to call her Rebecca. If you
ignore her request a second time, and perhaps also a third time,
then—​provided that she has no reason to believe you have failed
to understand her requests, nor that you are incapable of easily
complying with them—​she will come to view your behaviour as of-
fensive. What started out as merely a dispreferred (by Rebecca) way
of speaking, then, becomes offensive.
How does this happen? Well, the first time you call Rebecca
‘Rachel’, Rebecca takes you to have made an innocent and regret-
tably common mistake, and she assumes you meant no harm.
When you continue to address her by the wrong name even after
she has corrected you, she concludes with mild annoyance that you
are being unacceptably inattentive to her wishes. But when you
persist in using ‘Rachel’ even after Rebecca has pointed out several
 There is no secret ingredient 53

times that this is not her name, it is difficult for her to avoid the
conclusion that either you are deliberately calling her by the wrong
name in order to upset her or you respect her so little that you re-
gard getting her name right as pretty unimportant. Having started
out assuming that you meant no harm, she comes to view your at-
titude towards her as hostile. And, indeed, leaving aside outlandish
possibilities like your being blackmailed into calling her ‘Rachel’, it
is hard to see how she could be mistaken.
In this example, the offensiveness of your calling Rebecca
‘Rachel’ is not due to ‘Rachel’ being an offensive word. ‘Rachel’
is about as inoffensive a word as it is possible to get. Rather, your
behaviour of calling Rebecca ‘Rachel’ grows to be offensive after it
has filtered through a series of inferences that the speaker and the
listener make about each other and about each other’s inferences.
In essence, you know that Rebecca’s name is not ‘Rachel’, and you
know that she prefers not to be called ‘Rachel’, yet you nevertheless
continue to call her ‘Rachel’; Rebecca knows that you know all this
and concludes from your behaviour in light of this knowledge that
you are hostile towards her; you, in turn, know all this yet persist in
calling her ‘Rachel’; Rebecca notices that you do this and so takes
offence.
Let’s call the way in which your calling Rebecca ‘Rachel’ becomes
offensive in this situation offence escalation. Offence escalation
is the process by which a behaviour that is merely dispreferred
grows to be offensive as a result of the audience’s (1) taking the
person exhibiting the behaviour to realise that the behaviour is
dispreferred, and (2) taking this person’s decision to behave in this
way in spite of this realisation as indicative of this person’s lack of
consideration of, or even hostility towards, her audience.
It’s helpful, having considered this example, to reflect on what
Joel Feinberg has to say about the experience of getting offended.
Feinberg was an American political and legal philosopher who,
in the mid-​1980s, became well known for arguing for an offence
principle to supplement the harm principle associated with the
54 For F*ck’s Sake

nineteenth-​century English philosopher, John Stuart Mill. Mill’s

harm principle stated that the only legitimate reason for the state to
exercise power over citizens against their will is to prevent harm to
others. Feinberg’s view was that the harm principle was not enough,
and that under certain circumstances a state may legitimately exer-
cise power over citizens to prevent offence. At this point, though,
we’re not interested in whether or how the state should respond
to what’s offensive; our focus is simply on what offensiveness is.
Feinberg noted that there are two different senses of offence. In
one sense, something is offensive simply if someone feels offended
by it. In the other sense—​which Feinberg calls wrongful offence—​
something is offensive when (among other things) it is a conse-
quence of someone doing something that they ought not to do. He
explained:

I am offended (or ‘take offence’) when (a) I suffer a disliked state,

and (b) I attribute that state to the wrongful conduct of another,
and (c) I resent the other for his role in causing me to be in the
state. The sense of grievance against the other or resentment of
him for wronging me in this way is a phenomenological compo-
nent of the unpleasant experience itself, an element that actually
reenforces and magnifies its unpleasantness. (1985, 2)

In what follows I’m going to use the term offence to mean wrongful
offence, rather than to refer to the feeling of offence, and when
I want to discuss feeling offended, I’ll say so. We’re going to con-
sider how we should interpret Feinberg’s ‘wrongful’ in the next
chapter. For now, note that Feinberg’s focus here is on one person’s
act of wronging another, and on that other’s response. He does
not, at least at this stage in his account, focus on what specific
sort of behaviour the first person engages in. It’s all about people
responding to each other.
Back to your calling Rebecca ‘Rachel’. What Feinberg says here
neatly describes the stages of the process by which your use of
 There is no secret ingredient 55

‘Rachel’ comes to offend Rebecca. Being called by the wrong name

starts out merely as a disliked state for her, but it grows into some-
thing that offends her when your behaviour produces in her a ‘sense
of grievance’.
Armed with this understanding of offence escalation, we can say
something more about the example from the previous chapter, in
which you unknowingly upset your friend by chatting about your
new garden shed. I mentioned there that despite upsetting your
friend, you do nothing offensive. You do nothing offensive because
shed is not generally viewed as an offensive (or even dispreferred)
term, and because you could not be expected to know that your
friend finds the term upsetting. In Feinberg’s terms, you’re respon-
sible for (a) (causing your friend to suffer a disliked mental state)
but you haven’t done anything wrong, so you haven’t pushed your
friend into (b) or (c). However, you would end up doing something
offensive if you were to continue to talk about sheds even after
learning that your friend prefers you not to talk to him about sheds,
and if your friend ends up resenting you as a result. The lesson from
these examples is that we don’t need to use offensive words to cause
offence with the language we use. We can, instead, use language in a
way that indicates our disrespect for the person we’re talking to. In
other words, it’s not about the words, it’s about what we convey by
the way we use the words.
These two examples differ in an important way from swearing.
Swear words are recognised by all users of the language as offen-
sive words, which we can—​given the right context—​use to cause
offence. By contrast, in the Rebecca/​Rachel example, the name
‘Rachel’ becomes offensive only when it is used by you to ad-
dress Rebecca. If, later on, Rebecca meets a new person who also
addresses her as ‘Rachel’, then this new person’s behaviour will not
be offensive to her unless it, too, goes through an offence escala-
tion process involving Rebecca and this new person. Analogous
remarks apply to the shed example. It is difficult to think of a story
about how the word Rachel (or talk about sheds) might become
56 For F*ck’s Sake

universally offensive; that is, offensive not just when used by you to
address Rebecca (or when talking to your shed-​phobic friend) but
when used by anyone when addressing anyone else.
On the other hand, unlike in the examples just discussed, swear
words’ capacity to offend does not require the audience first to ex-
plain to the speaker that she prefers him not to use swear words.
Even so, the same process of offence escalation explains why
swearing is offensive.

The recipe for offensiveness

We have seen that, to work out why swearing is offensive, we must

look beyond the words themselves. Swearing is offensive not be-
cause of some magic ingredient possessed by swear words and
lacked by other words but because when we swear, our audience
knows that we do so in the knowledge that they will find it offen-
sive. You are offended by my saying fuck in a polite context be-
cause fuck is a dispreferred word, you know that I know that it is
a dispreferred word, and you take my choosing to utter it anyway
as indicative of my lack of consideration, or even hostility, towards
you. This is why context is important: there are some contexts in
which we judge that swear words are not strongly dispreferred and
can be used without causing offence—​or even used to produce pos-
itive effects like amusement or intimacy; something we’ll explore
in Chapter 15. When we swear in contexts like this, our listeners’
knowledge that we did so in the belief that we will not cause of-
fence helps ensure that we do not cause offence. This also explains
why we are (sometimes) more forgiving of swearing by children,
by people with certain disabilities, and non-​native speakers of our
language: we realise that people in these groups may lack insight
into what their listeners will make of their swearing, and so we are
less likely to suspect them of being inconsiderate of their listeners
when they swear inappropriately. Offence escalation also explains
 There is no secret ingredient 57

how the offensiveness of swear words can change over time. In the
UK, religious terms have declined in offensiveness over the past few
decades, and the offensiveness of sexual swear words surged during
the Victorian period. These fluctuations in offensiveness reflect
changing attitudes towards various terms—​specifically, changes in
the extent to which certain words are dispreferred—​resulting from
various cultural forces. In turn, this affects how serious a matter it is
to use these terms, which determines their offensiveness.
While offence escalation forms the core explanation of swearing’s
offensiveness, it is not the whole story. We will see in Chapter 5 that
there are some features of swear words that have helped them along
their path to offensiveness. A word’s being linked to a taboo topic
helps ensure that it can undergo offence escalation on the culture-​
wide scale necessary to become a swear word, rather than simply
a word that causes offence when used by a particular speaker, as
was the case with the examples we considered in this chapter.
And a word’s sounding a certain way makes it more satisfying to
use as a swear word, which makes taboo-​related words that sound
‘quick and harsh’ more likely than other words to develop into
swear words.
Before we get to that, though, let’s take a closer look about what’s
offensive about swearing, and what—​if anything—​we do wrong
when we swear.
 4
Different kinds of wrong

Context, I’ve claimed, is (almost) everything when it comes to

swearing’s power to shock and offend. Most of us can recognise in-
appropriate swearing when we encounter it. Often, it’s a matter of
feeling it: inappropriate swearing is surprising, often even shocking,
and it gets our attention. As we saw in the introduction, witnessing
the monarch swear during a formal, televised address to the na-
tion is arresting in a way that witnessing Geraint swearing down
the local pub is not. Most of us, too, are able to recognise at least
some cases when inappropriate swearing is so inappropriate as to
be morally wrong. If you arrive home from a night out to find your
babysitter yelling at your toddler to ‘Shut the fuck up and go back to
sleep!’, you’re likely to feel—​even without taking the time to reflect
on it—​that you’ve caught them doing something immoral.
These everyday intuitions about when swearing is inappropriate
or immoral versus unremarkable or a-​bit-​naughty-​but-​basically-​
okay form the starting point from which to dig into normative
issues—​that is, the oughts and ought nots—​around swearing. But,
given the scrutiny to which we’re going to subject swearing, we
need something more substantial than these intuitions. We need
an understanding of what underlies them: of what makes swearing
inappropriate in cases when it’s inappropriate, and of the link be-
tween causing offence with swearing and doing something wrong.
This will be our focus in the current chapter.
 Different kinds of wrong 59

When is swearing inappropriate?

Let’s start off by looking at what we’re saying when we call an in-
stance of swearing inappropriate. The category of inappropriate
swearing is pretty large: swearing is inappropriate in cases where it
is rude or bad mannered, and also in cases where it’s morally wrong.
We’re going to start off by focusing on instances of swearing that are
rude or bad mannered—​that is, contrary to etiquette. This will lead
us naturally to the topic of moral wrongness, since etiquette and
morality are closely linked.
Deeming an instance of swearing to be inappropriate is usu-
ally a matter of etiquette. We can approach the question What is
the difference between appropriate and inappropriate swearing? in
a similar way to other questions relating to etiquette, like What
is the difference between appropriate and inappropriate use of a
person’s first name to address them? Swearing inappropriately—​like
addressing someone in an overfamiliar way—​is contrary to eti-
quette. Often, though, swearing is not inappropriate. Situations in
which swearing is not inappropriate tend to be informal settings—​
socialising in a pub in the evening, chatting with close friends, and
so on—​where it’s understood that it’s okay to be relaxed with the
language one is using. It’s not all about formality, though: if you’re
spending the evening in a pub with your new boss, you might want
to watch your language despite the informal setting. Conversely, the
seminars, talks, and interviews I’ve given on swearing have not ex-
actly been informal, but they have been contexts in which swearing
is not inappropriate—​although generally some caution is required
to ensure that any swearing falls clearly into the category of neces-
sary in order to make points relevant to the topic under discussion
and outside the category of exploiting the opportunity of a discussion
about swearing to say rude words for fun.
I’ll tighten up exactly what I mean by inappropriate and not-​
inappropriate swearing in a moment. First, though, note that so far
I’ve been contrasting inappropriate swearing with swearing that is
60 For F*ck’s Sake

not inappropriate. What about appropriate swearing? Can we use-

fully distinguish between swearing that is appropriate and swearing
that is merely not inappropriate? Yes, I think we can. We can call
swearing appropriate in cases where it is somehow required; I’ll
call it not inappropriate when it’s permitted without being re-
quired. By required, I mainly mean demanded by the norms of et-
iquette, or perhaps by other relevant norms, such as professional
norms or the norms that develop around a particular friendship
or other relationship. Not swearing in a case where swearing is ap-
propriate would itself be inappropriate; whereas not swearing in a
case where swearing is merely not inappropriate would not be in-
appropriate. (Of course, simply as a matter of logic, the category
of not-​inappropriate swearing includes all cases of appropriate
swearing in addition to the permitted-​but-​not-​required cases I’ve
just described. But I’ll reserve the term not inappropriate swearing
for swearing that is neither inappropriate nor appropriate, which
I think is how most people would intuitively understand it.)
Is swearing ever appropriate in the sense I’ve described? There
are indeed cases in which, as a matter of etiquette or other norms,
swearing is appropriate. An undercover police officer who is trying
to infiltrate a gang of sweary criminals in order to gather evi-
dence against them for a prosecution needs to adopt the criminals’
behaviours (the legal ones, at least) in order to be accepted by
them. Swearing in the way that the criminals do is, in such a case,
not merely not inappropriate but appropriate. It is, after all, neces-
sary if the police officer is serious about getting the job done. We
could expect such an officer who, on receiving details of their mis-
sion from their superior officer, responds by saying, ‘I’m happy to
do this, but I’m not going to swear, because that would be rude’, to
be met with exasperation and perhaps even a stern reprimand. In
this case, refusing to swear would be contrary to the officer’s profes-
sional obligations.
Less dramatically, and as a matter of etiquette, we might think
of swearing as being appropriate in cases where abstaining from
 Different kinds of wrong 61

swearing would make the people around us uncomfortable.

Perhaps you’ve had the experience of hanging out with a group of
friends with whom it’s normal to swear in the course of chatting,
and a member of the group brings along a person whom none of
the others have met before, and who stiffly avoids swearing. We
understand that, in cases like this, it takes a while for a new group
member to feel their way into the culture of the group, and so
some reservation about relaxing into the group’s sweary ways is to
be expected. But if this new group member continues to hang out
with the group, and conspicuously continues to avoid swearing—​
perhaps substituting words like heck and darn in place of the terms
that the other group members freely use—​even after becoming
familiar with how the group behaves, then it’s likely that other
group members will feel that they are not able to be their usual re-
laxed selves when this person is around. In a case like this, the new
group member behaves inappropriately by not swearing. After all,
while it’s true that swearing is often contrary to etiquette, so too is
behaving in a way that sours the camaraderie and enjoyment of a
group of friends who have welcomed you into their midst.1 As phi-
losopher Karen Stohr puts it in her book, On Manners, ‘[t]‌he polite-
ness of a given action is tied to the underlying moral aim, not to the
behaviour itself ’ (Stohr 2012, 35).
Note that, in thinking about the ‘underlying moral aim’ of polite
behaviour, we encounter a bridge between etiquette and morality.
As Stohr also tells us, ‘the principles of manners are moral princi-
ples, and specific rules of etiquette get their authority from their re-
lationship to those moral principles’ (Stohr 2021, 23). The moral aim
underlying the norms of etiquette is to respect others; complying

1 This example—​like many thought experiments in philosophy—​is somewhat artifi-

cial. It’s likely that, in reality, someone who joins a group of friends and fails to take on
their patterns of swearing will also be failing to fit in with the group in other ways too.
Some of these ways may not be obvious: the original group members may simply expe-
rience the newcomer’s manner as a bit ‘off ’. Swearing, in the wild, does not happen in
isolation from other social interactions.
62 For F*ck’s Sake

with etiquette—​the demands of which vary between cultures, and

between different social contexts even within a culture—​is how we
express our commitment to the underlying moral aim. Generally in
cases where we think we should avoid swearing, we avoid it in order
to convey respect to others. But in the case we’ve just considered, the
new group member can most effectively convey respect to the other
group members by adopting the established culture of the group,
which includes swearing. Respecting others, in this context, means
treating people as beings who have value in themselves (as opposed
to their merely being useful as a means to someone else’s end), and
as beings to whom we have moral obligations. This echoes the view
of the eighteenth-​century German philosopher Immanuel Kant,
who argued that humans should be treated as ends in themselves
and not merely as means.
Let’s link this back to swearing and its inappropriateness or oth-
erwise. Weighing the question of whether swearing is appropriate,
inappropriate, or not inappropriate involves reflecting on the un-
derlying principles of etiquette. Often, especially in formal settings,
swearing is inappropriate because it would express disrespect to
others. This is a point that emerged in the previous chapter: when
we swear in a context where we know that the person to whom
we’re talking will dislike it, and where that person knows that
we know this, that person can justifiably conclude that we don’t
care very much about their comfort, and that by swearing we’re
expressing that we don’t care very much about them, which is a way
of disrespecting them. The importance of respecting others is why
we have expressions like please and thank you; it is why we dress
in a smart, sober manner for formal occasions like job interviews;
and it is what guides emerging etiquette norms surrounding recent
technologies, such as the view that it is impolite to stare at one’s
phone while engaged in conversation with someone who is right
next to us. Acting in accordance with norms like these generally
enables us to express respect. But that’s not always the case, because
sometimes the best way of communicating respect involves doing
 Different kinds of wrong 63

something that runs contrary to the usual expectations of etiquette.

For example, sometimes, prior to a funeral, attendees are informed
that the deceased explicitly requested that those attending their
funeral should dress in a vibrant and cheerful manner. In a case
like this, turning up in a severe black suit would fail to communi-
cate respect for the deceased, despite being in accordance with the
usual rules of etiquette. And in our earlier example, although the
new member of the sweary group of friends, by avoiding swearing,
is following etiquette norms that usually enable one to express re-
spect to others, their refusing to swear in this particular case results
in their failing to express respect for the group members who have
welcomed them.
The link between swearing and expressing respect provides
a useful framework to help us think about what makes swearing
appropriate, inappropriate, or not inappropriate. Swearing is in-
appropriate in cases where it is likely to be taken by others to ex-
press disrespect to them. This is a pretty rough guide: likely is doing
some heavy lifting here, and there are questions around how much
the speaker can know (or be expected to know) about how other
people will react to what they say. But it’s supposed to be rough. The
rules of etiquette need to be simple enough to be grasped by busy
people and implemented with confidence most of the time, and
that wouldn’t happen if mastering etiquette required memorising
and becoming proficient in the application of the rules along with a
precise and meticulous explanation of how and when they apply. In
any case, the rules of etiquette aren’t mastered in a vacuum, as a the-
oretical exercise. We learn them as part of our upbringing. By the
time we reach adulthood, we’ve developed a feel for when the rules
apply. It’s often our gut, rather than our head, that tells us not to
swear in a certain situation. (There are exceptions, of course: some
of us are better than others at reading the room; and some people,
like many on the autism spectrum, find it especially tricky.) Very
often, the explicit guidance we receive about matters of etiquette
doesn’t amount to much more than Don’t call your olders and
64 For F*ck’s Sake

betters by their first names and Say thank you to someone who does
you a favour. If we want more specific guidance, or information
about when exceptions apply, we can ask those who are doling
out the advice, discuss it with others, or—​in relatively rare cases
for most of us—​consult etiquette books and etiquette columnists.
The etiquette around swearing is especially difficult to master, be-
cause the guidance children receive in this area often amounts to
nothing more than Don’t swear. Children who press for informa-
tion about exceptions typically receive a less cooperative response
than those who press for information about exceptions to other
rules of etiquette.
So, Swearing is inappropriate in cases where it is likely to be taken
by others to express disrespect to them is about as much as you’re
going to get by way of explicit guidance about what inappropriate
swearing involves, although we’re certainly going to be taking
a closer look at some of the factors that exacerbate or contribute
to swearing’s inappropriateness (and, in some cases, to its immo-
rality). By contrast, swearing is not inappropriate in cases where
it is unlikely to be taken by others to express disrespect to them.
Chatting with friends who are secure in their knowledge that you
respect them, shooting the breeze in the pub, reacting to a tense
sports match that you’re watching alongside fellow spectators,
sounding off in response to driving over yourself after eating too
many jacket potatoes—​these are all cases in which you are probably
able to swear without those around you taking you to express disre-
spect to them. Which is not to say that it’s impossible to swear inap-
propriately in these contexts, and the same process of enculturation
that equips us with a feel for whether swearing is innocuous in a
given context also helps us detect when someone’s benign swearing
crosses the line into inappropriateness.
Finally, swearing is appropriate in cases where not swearing is
likely to be taken by others to express disrespect to them. We’ve
seen an example of this with the person who joins a sweary group
 Different kinds of wrong 65

of friends and refuses to swear. But our other example—​that of

the undercover police officer who jeopardises their infiltration
into a group of sweary criminals by refusing to swear—​highlights
that the appropriateness (or otherwise) of swearing can be due to
norms other than etiquette. The police officer in our example is
bound by professional norms, as well as by the usual norms of et-
iquette. By refusing to swear in the course of their undercover in-
vestigation, the officer jeopardises the investigation that they are
being paid to undertake. If you’re inclined to think that the officer
ought to swear in the course of their investigation, then you’ve
probably reasoned as follows: you’ve noted that the officer faces a
conflict between different sets of norms and has made the wrong
call. Specifically, the officer deems that etiquette demands that
they refrain from swearing while on the job, but they also cannot
help but recognise that their obligation to catch the criminals
they have been assigned to catch requires them to swear. Faced
with conflicting sets of norms, the officer must make a decision
about which set of norms is more important. If we conclude
that swearing is appropriate in this case, we do so not because
refraining from swearing is likely to convey disrespect to others
but because we think that etiquette is not the most important con-
sideration in this case. For an undercover police officer charged
with an important investigation, their professional obligations are
more important than being polite.
There’s another sense, too, in which we sometimes talk of
swearing being appropriate. This sense has to do with a recog-
nition that swearing is sometimes the best way to express some-
thing. Someone who, with dawning horror, exclaims ‘Oh, fuck!’
on arriving home to find their house ablaze might be thought to
be swearing appropriately—​because isn’t this speaker likely to be
experiencing exactly the sort of intense emotion that swearing is
uniquely placed to express? Judging this sort of swearing to be ap-
propriate has nothing to do with etiquette or other norms; rather,
66 For F*ck’s Sake

the thought is that the swearing is psychologically or linguistically

appropriate.2
There are, then, various ways in which swearing can be appro-
priate, not all of which involve its being demanded by etiquette.
This is a pretty intuitive, commonsensical point, and doesn’t need
much explanation. Things are more complex (and interesting)
when we try to account for what makes the difference between in-
appropriate and not inappropriate swearing.

Speaker intentions

The intentions of the speaker are another factor to consider in

trying to understand swearing’s inappropriateness or otherwise.
I’ve defined inappropriate swearing as swearing in cases where it
is likely to be taken by others to express disrespect to them. Does
it matter whether or not the swearer intends to express disrespect
to others? It depends. Certainly, the disrespect we read into an-
other person’s inappropriate swearing is likely to be felt more
acutely in cases where we recognise that the speaker is intentionally
expressing disrespect to us. It’s never pleasant, after all, to realise
that another person has deliberately set out to let us know how
little they think of us. Even so, it’s often appropriate to read disre-
spect into someone’s swearing in cases where they don’t intend to
express disrespect. As Stohr notes, ‘many forms of rude behaviour
are really forms of inattentiveness: texting while walking down a
busy sidewalk, letting a door slam in someone’s face, failing to no-
tice that someone in need of a seat has entered the waiting room or
gotten on the subway’ (2012, 64–​65) Similarly, a speaker can ex-
press disrespect to others by swearing inappropriately even if they

2 I’ve argued that swearing can be appropriate according to norms other than et-

iquette. Is something similarly true of inappropriate and not inappropriate swearing?

Undoubtedly. But probably those cases are rarer.
 Different kinds of wrong 67

don’t intend to convey any such thing. They manage this by failing
to attend to how their words might affect others around them.
Sometimes this is easily forgivable, as when the swearer is not fluent
in the language they are speaking and did not realise that what they
said is rude. And sometimes it’s a more serious matter, as when the
swearer seems not to care very much about how their words impact
other people.
Conversely, it’s possible for a speaker to swear with the inten-
tion of expressing disrespect yet fail to swear inappropriately. One
example of how this might happen is if a speaker tries to offend
people by swearing in a context in which swearing is not inappro-
priate, and those around them fail to pick up on the disrespect that
the speaker was trying to convey. This example brings out a subtle
distinction between expressing and communicating. When we ex-
press disrespect (or some other psychological state), we often also
communicate it, but not always. Typically, when we tell someone
to fuck off, we express our disrespect for them, and we also com-
municate it; that is, by telling someone to fuck off we let them know
that we disrespect them. By contrast, I can express disrespect for
my neighbour by poking out my tongue when their back is turned,
but I don’t communicate disrespect by doing this if my neighbour
never finds out about it. We’ve seen that complying with etiquette
is an important way in which we express respect for others, but this
expression of respect is almost always communicative too; in other
words, by following etiquette we express and also communicate our
respect to others. Etiquette governs our interactions with others,
after all; and there’s little scope for interaction in private expressions
of (dis)respect that communicate nothing to other people.3

3 Are there any examples of cases in which we follow etiquette in order to express,

without communicating, respect to others? We find some in our customs around death.
Complying with funeral etiquette and carrying out the wishes expressed by people
who have since died are ways that we express respect to the dead but without also
communicating that respect to the dead. (By complying with etiquette in this area we
also, of course, communicate to others—​such as our fellow mourners at a funeral—​our
respect for the dead person.)
68 For F*ck’s Sake

Having said that, there’s a sense in which trying but failing

to communicate our disrespect to other people isn’t exactly in-
nocuous in relation to etiquette, even if it falls short of rudeness.
There’s something icky, etiquette-​wise, about trying to communi-
cate our disrespect to others, even if the communication fails. This
intuition has to do with a link between etiquette and moral char-
acter. As Stohr puts it, ‘[m]‌anners . . . are the outward expression of
moral character’ (2012, 13) It is important to us that other people,
through their good manners, express respect because it is impor-
tant to us that the people we interact with have good moral char-
acter (roughly: are good people), and we take their good manners
to constitute evidence of their good moral character. We’d rather
not be interacting with nasty people. Because of this, trying but
failing to communicate disrespect to others strikes us as icky be-
cause it’s the sort of thing that only a nasty person (i.e. a person
of poor moral character) would do, even if their nastiness never
shows up in their manners.

Inappropriate swearing, wrongness,

and offence

What’s the link between swearing inappropriately and causing of-

fence? Let’s remind ourselves of what Feinberg has to say about
offence:

I am offended (or ‘take offence’) when (a) I suffer a disliked state,

and (b) I attribute that state to the wrongful conduct of another,
and (c) I resent the other for his role in causing me to be in the
state. The sense of grievance against the other or resentment of
him for wronging me in this way is a phenomenological compo-
nent of the unpleasant experience itself, an element that actually
reenforces and magnifies its unpleasantness. (1985, 2)
 Different kinds of wrong 69

Taking offence, if we think about it like Feinberg, involves

judging that the person causing offence has done something wrong.
Being offended by someone’s swearing, then, involves judging that
the speaker has done something wrong. Let’s unpack this a bit.
What sense of wrong are we dealing with here?
We’re apt to cause offence by swearing if we swear inappropri-
ately; in other words, if we swear in a context where it is likely to be
taken by others to express disrespect to them. Swearing inappro-
priately is contrary to etiquette—​meaning that, in this case, wrong
equates to rude—​but disrespecting others is contrary to the moral
aim that underlies etiquette, making wrong equivalent to mor-
ally wrong.
Wow. That escalated quickly. So, whenever we swear inappropri-
ately, not only do we act rudely but we also do something morally
wrong? Well, not quite. There’s quite a gap between swearing inap-
propriately and failing to respect people, which means that there is
plenty of scope to swear inappropriately without failing to respect
people. Let’s take a look at how this might happen.
Failing to respect people is morally wrong. In general, we disre-
spect others when, for no good reason, we behave in a way that we
know they dislike. Let’s add that, sometimes, even if we don’t know
for sure that others will dislike our behaviour choices, we disrespect
them when we make those choices. This is because ignorance is not
always an excuse: we expect each other to make some effort to find
out how to behave in unfamiliar situations. If you attend a wedding
or a swingers’ club or a football match for the first time, you’ll prob-
ably be forgiven for the odd faux pas. But if you clearly have no idea
what’s expected of you, it’s likely that others will read disrespect into
your behaviour. They’re likely to think that you ought to have made
some effort to find out beforehand how you should behave. By con-
trast, when you distress your friend from the previous chapter by
talking about garden sheds, not realising how upsetting they find
this topic, your ignorance is understandable. The difference is that
70 For F*ck’s Sake

weddings, swingers’ clubs, and football matches are all contexts in

which people interact with each other in ways that they do not usu-
ally do in their everyday lives, which means that there are norms
governing interactions in these contexts that do not apply outside
those contexts. Anyone entering one of these contexts for the first
time having not made an effort to familiarise themselves with the
norms in question risks annoying other people, partly because their
repeated slip-​ups are likely to be disruptive, and partly because
their inattentiveness to what’s expected of them itself conveys a lack
of respect to those around them. On the other hand, your friend’s
dislike of the topic of garden sheds is completely unexpected. There
were no signs, prior to your broaching the topic, that you were en-
tering conversational territory where unusual rules might apply.
Your broaching this topic does not betray a lack of respect for your
friend.
Back to swearing. One way in which a person can swear inappro-
priately without failing to respect others involves the speaker not
realising that they are swearing in an inappropriate context, and
their failure to realise that their swearing is inappropriate is under-
standable. By understandable I mean that, applying commonsense
standards of how attentive we expect people to be to what’s required
of them in a particular situation, we would excuse the speaker’s
failure to realise what norms apply in the situation they’re in. Here’s
an example to illustrate this sort of situation. Imagine that a come-
dian, famous both for swearing and for playing pranks on audience
members, is booked to perform at a particular venue at a partic-
ular time, but due to an advertising mix-​up, the published event
for that venue and that time is a talk by a local gardener entitled
‘Japanese knotweed: tips from the trade’. The comedian, unaware
of the mix-​up, delivers their routine, understandably assuming
that the members of the audience have knowingly chosen to at-
tend a sweary performance. Meanwhile, the horticultural audi-
ence, assuming that the comedian deliberately misadvertised the
performance as part of a prank, take the comedian’s swearing to
 Different kinds of wrong 71

express disrespect to them. In this case, we have an example of in-

appropriate swearing in which the speaker does not fail to respect
others. Despite swearing inappropriately, then, the speaker has not
done anything morally wrong. More specifically—​to use Stohr’s
framework—​by (unwittingly) swearing inappropriately, the come-
dian has (unwittingly) acted contrary to the norms of etiquette gov-
erning the situation in question but has not acted contrary to the
underlying moral aim of respecting others.
There are also some cases in which a speaker can knowingly swear
inappropriately without doing anything wrong. An obvious way in
which this can happen involves recognising that while it is impor-
tant to express respect for others via adhering to etiquette norms,
this is not our only obligation, and in some circumstances a speaker
may be justified in prioritising some other concern over refraining
from swearing inappropriately, such that it would be inappropriate
to conclude from the fact that the speaker knowingly swore inap-
propriately that they do not respect others. This claim is pretty dif-
ficult to grasp in the abstract, so here’s an example: the building is
on fire, and you need to interrupt a meeting in order to alert the
participants so they can escape to safety. But the participants are
immersed in heated discussion and it’s likely to be difficult for you
to get their attention, even if you raise your voice. Since the meeting
is a context in which swearing is inappropriate, you decide that the
best course of action is to enter the meeting room and start yelling
obscenities in order to shock the participants into silence. The dis-
cussion stops, and you are able to convey your urgent message and
ensure everyone hurries out of the burning building. In this ex-
ample, it’s likely that, initially, the participants of the meeting will
take your yelling swear words at them as an expression of disrespect.
You’ve intentionally shocked them into silence, after all. But as soon
as they realise that you swore inappropriately in order to save their
lives, their sense of being disrespected by you is going to vanish.
Instead—​if they’re sensible people, at least—​their realisation that
you are working hard to help them will result in their feeling valued
72 For F*ck’s Sake

and respected by you. (And, frankly, if they grumble about your

language during the time in which—​if you hadn’t rescued them—​
they would otherwise be burning to death, fuck them!)
Another way of knowingly swearing inappropriately without
doing anything wrong involves what has been termed conscien-
tious offence: causing offence as a way to invite people to reflect on
and revise their feeling of offence. Non-​linguistic examples of this
include mass breastfeeding protests in response to controversial
restrictions on where mothers can nurse their babies, and mass gay
kissing protests in response to homophobia. The thought here is
that despite knowingly acting in a way that others find offensive, it’s
not the protesters—​the nursing mothers or the kissing gays—​who
are doing wrong; the wrong is committed by the people who feel
offended, since being offended by breastfeeding or homosexuality
helps perpetuate harmful attitudes. We’re going to consider consci-
entious offence in relation to swearing in Chapter 12.
As a final example of how it might be possible that someone
can knowingly swear inappropriately without failing to respect
others, sometimes we can find ourselves confronted with con-
flicting norms, so that we end up doing something wrong what-
ever action we take. Suppose that you’ve recently been introduced
to the group of sweary friends whom we met earlier in the chapter,
and that you’re trying to fit in and adopt their culture. You’re all
in a pub, enjoying a typically sweary conversation. You are a kin-
dergarten teacher, and you notice the parent of one of the young
children you care for taking a seat at a nearby table. The two of you
nod your acknowledgement to one another. The pub is not a con-
text where swearing is inappropriate, but your relationship with
this parent certainly is, and you feel uncomfortable about these two
worlds colliding. You fear that joining in with the swearing would
risk offending the parent, who will certainly overhear; but you also
fear that failing to participate in the group’s swearing will lead the
other members to think that you are aloof and unfriendly. You very
much want to act respectfully towards everyone present, but you
 Different kinds of wrong 73

don’t see how that’s possible. Whatever you do, someone is going to
read disrespect into your behaviour. Yet, you do not actually fail to
respect anyone.
There is, then, plenty of scope for situations to arise in which
people are offended by someone’s swearing—​that is, in Feinberg’s
terms, people suffer a disliked state which they resentfully at-
tribute to the wrongdoing of the swearer—​without the swearer
doing something morally wrong, as they would if they were to fail
to respect others. This scope exists because of the gap that exists
between what people view as expressions of disrespect and what
actually constitute expressions of disrespect.

Swearing and moral character

Before moving on, there’s something else worth saying about

swearing and its capacity to cause offence, and this goes back to
what Stohr had to say about moral character. We dislike people
being rude partly because we take their rudeness to reflect their
moral character, and we don’t like to find that we’re dealing with
someone with poor moral character. This applies to inappropriate
swearing: we take someone’s inappropriate swearing to be evi-
dence for their having a poor moral character. But inappropriate
swearing, like other etiquette breaches, doesn’t happen in isolation.
When someone offends us by swearing inappropriately (or, for that
matter, committing some other breach of etiquette), our taking of-
fence often isn’t the end of the matter. We’re also waiting to see what
this person will do next. Will they continue to behave in a way that
betrays their lack of respect for others, or will they apologise or re-
deem themselves in some other way that prompts us to write off
their earlier inappropriate behaviour as a momentary lapse by a
generally respectful person? In other words, we’re getting a sense of
their moral character. A single instance of inappropriate swearing
provides us with some evidence about what sort of moral character
74 For F*ck’s Sake

the speaker has, but it’s not alone enough to form firm, reliable
conclusions. Sometimes good people slip up and their behaviour
fails to meet their usual standards; in particular, people who are
generally respectful of others can occasionally behave in way that
does not express that respect. This is why our codes of etiquette in-
clude ways to apologise.
This observation reveals another gap between inappropriate
swearing and acting in a way that is morally wrong. We’ve looked
at why failing to respect people is morally wrong. Let’s be a bit more
specific here: a person whose lack of respect for others is a stable
character trait is morally flawed. When such a person swears in-
appropriately, what they express is a fundamental and enduring
lack of respect for others; a mark of their flawed moral character.
When a generally respectful person has a lapse and swears inap-
propriately, they don’t express a fundamental and enduring lack of
respect. They don’t have any such thing to express. Their behaviour
is rude, but not morally wrong. Even so, it might be difficult for
onlookers to tell the difference here: taken in isolation, the inappro-
priate swearing of a respectful person having a momentary lapse
might look just as disrespectful as that of the generally disrespectful
person. It’s not always easy to spot moral wrongs.
I suspect that the thought that inappropriate swearing is a
window into the speaker’s moral character lies behind some of the
vehemently anti-​swearing views we sometimes encounter. The
beliefs that swearing is always morally wrong, that people who
swear are not nice people, that increased tolerance of swearing
heralds the downfall of civilisation, and so on, can seem puzzling
and overdramatic. But if inappropriate swearing—​and there are
some who view all swearing as inappropriate—​betrays a flawed
moral character, then perhaps we should take it more seriously. By
tolerating swearing, we communicate to swearers that their flawed
moral characters are acceptable, and we perhaps encourage them
to relax and indulge in other ways of expressing their nasty natures.
Who knows what horrors might follow next? Better that we take
 Different kinds of wrong 75

a zero-​tolerance approach to swearing. That way, we send a clear

message that nasty people are not welcome in society, and that
they should go away and work on some self-​improvement before
interacting with the rest of us.
Thankfully, this view is muddled. Inappropriate swearing does
not always betray a flawed moral character. It’s not always mor-
ally wrong, since it doesn’t always express a fundamental and en-
during lack of respect on the part of the speaker. Sometimes, it’s
just rude: upsetting to others, since it looks to them like an ex-
pression of disrespect, but ultimately a false alarm. Tolerating
swearing—​even welcoming it—​in certain contexts is compatible
with acknowledging the importance of respect for others.

Is swearing wrong?

What’s the takeaway from this chapter? Is there anything wrong

with swearing, and if so, what? The answer I’ve argued for is
this: we don’t necessarily do anything wrong when we swear, even
when we swear inappropriately. That’s because inappropriate
swearing is swearing that those around us are likely to view as
expressing disrespect to them, and sometimes those around us are
wrong. Sometimes, when we swear, those around us take us to be
expressing disrespect to them even when we’re not. But when the
people around us aren’t wrong, and our swearing does express our
disrespect for them, then we do something wrong. What sort of
wrong depends on the circumstances. Sometimes—​as when we’re
generally respectful of others but, owing to a momentary lapse, we
swear because we’re not being as attentive as we should be towards
what’s expected of us in the situation we’re in—​we do something
wrong in the sense of doing something contrary to etiquette. We’re
rude, in this situation, but we don’t do anything morally wrong. At
other times, our swearing is a more serious matter. When our inap-
propriate swearing expresses our fundamental lack of respect for
76 For F*ck’s Sake

others, we do something morally wrong, because failing to respect

others is a moral flaw. It’s this lack of respect for others that lies at
the heart of swearing’s moral wrongness, in cases where it is morally
wrong—​although we’ll see in Chapters 6 and 7 that there are other
factors that can push swearing into the realm of moral wrongness.
An upshot of this focus on respect is that while not swearing is usu-
ally the most reliable way to behave respectfully towards others, in
certain circumstances—​as when we’re invited to spend an evening
in the pub with the sweary friends we met earlier—​being respectful
involves being willing to swear.
 5
Taboo, aggression, and harsh
sweary sounds

The offence escalation process, which I described in

Chapter 3, explains how a word can acquire a power to shock and
offend. It’s at the heart of why cunt and fuck are, despite some su-
perficial similarities, worlds apart from country and fork. Even so,
offence escalation doesn’t give us the whole story about what sets
swear words apart from other words. It doesn’t tell us, for example,
why it is that swear words tend to have sexual, lavatorial, religious,
or other taboo themes. Nor does it tell us why swear words tend
to sound—​to use Steven Pinker’s expression—​‘quick and harsh’.
And we might want to know, too, how the shockingness and inap-
propriateness of swearing fits in with shocking and inappropriate
behaviour more generally. We’re going to zoom out from offence
escalation in this chapter and take a look at these other aspects of
swearing.

Swearing and taboo, again

How are swear words born? The process begins with certain words
being widely dispreferred within a given community. This sets the
scene for the offence escalation process to occur on a community-​
wide level, resulting in words that offend the entire community.
The process cannot, as in the Rebecca/​Rachel and shed examples
78 For F*ck’s Sake

we looked at in the previous two chapters, be restricted to the re-

sponse of a particular listener or the use of the word by a particular
speaker.
We all have different preferences about the words we use, but
words that are widely dispreferred within a community are linked
to recognised taboo topics like sex, defecation, religion, and so on.
As we’ve seen, it’s not impossible to use taboo-​related words inof-
fensively in polite company: a new parent might manage inoffen-
sively to refer to defecation by remarking that their baby has ‘soiled
herself ’, or someone might politely refer to sex by sharing that a mu-
tual friend has ended their relationship after catching their partner
‘in bed with’ someone else. Remarks like these can pass off without
so much as raising an eyebrow even in cases where the listener is
someone who would be horrified by other ways of introducing the
same topics—​but this takes some skill on the part of the speaker.
Part of that skill involves knowing which euphemisms to use: soiled
herself and in bed with instead of defecated and having sex with—​or,
worse, words like shit and fucking. Choosing one’s words carefully
in this way helps to signal to our audience that we recognise that the
topic is not a pleasant one and that we do not wish to cause offence
by discussing it. But it’s not all about the words we use. Even euphe-
mistic references to defecation and sex can end up causing offence
if the speaker keeps returning to the topic, discusses it too gleefully,
introduces it at the wrong moment, or in other ways fails to convey
that she finds the topic as uncomfortable as her audience does. One
wrong move—​an indelicate word here, a second too long spent on
the topic there—​and the speaker risks embarrassing, disturbing, or
offending their audience.
An important lesson that arises from the fact that it’s possible
(albeit risky) for a skilled speaker to introduce a taboo topic into
a polite conversation without causing offence is this: when we
cause offence by talking about taboo topics in polite company, it’s
not the taboo topic itself that offends our listeners, it’s what we
signal to our listeners about our attitudes to them. Specifically, by
 Taboo, aggression, and harsh sweary sounds 79

talking about taboo topics we risk signalling to our listeners that

we don’t care about their feelings. After all, we’re choosing to talk
about a topic that we know people in our community—​including
those we’re addressing—​dislike. The strategies speakers employ
to avoid causing offence in these circumstances—​strategies like
using euphemisms and moving on from the taboo topic as soon
as possible—​work by conveying to their listeners that they (the
speakers) are being solicitous of the feelings of their listeners.
Dealing sensitively with a taboo topic in a polite conversation is pos-
sible when the speaker manages to strike the right balance between
signalling I care about having a conversation with you and I care
about ensuring that you are comfortable during this conversation.
The ease with which one can cause offence by discussing taboo
topics makes taboo words ripe for offence escalation. When we
talk about recognised taboo topics with a fellow member of our
community—​or with multiple members of our community, in-
cluding ones we’ve never met or spoken to before—​our listener
knows that we know that the topic is dispreferred. Offence esca-
lation of taboo words can, as a result, occur on a much larger scale
than in the Rebecca/​Rachel and shed examples described above.
Further, offence escalation of taboo words can skip the stage—​
required in the Rebecca/​Rachel and shed cases—​where the audi-
ence points out to the speaker that the expression used is disliked,
since everyone will take the speaker to understand this already. This
means that offence escalation can get started even when the speaker
knows nothing about the personal likes, dislikes, and sensitivities
of their listeners.
All this means that words referring to taboo topics are much
better suited than neutral words like book to develop via offence
escalation into swear words. We saw, when we discussed the
Rebecca/​Rachel and shed cases, that in some cases it may be pos-
sible to offend someone with a neutral expression when offence es-
calation occurs on a one-​to-​one basis and one comes to learn that
one’s listener has an unusual dislike for a neutral expression. But
80 For F*ck’s Sake

offence escalation of a neutral expression cannot get started when

addressing a larger audience, precisely because the expression is
neutral (i.e. not widely dispreferred).1
There is an additional reason why taboo-​related expressions have
a head start over neutral ones when it comes to developing into
swear words: breaking widely recognised taboos can be thrilling.
This idea is already familiar, since it is one of the reasons why
swearing—​itself a taboo behaviour, of course—​can be thrilling. The
thrill of taboo-​breaking helps explain why children delight in toilet
jokes, why it can sometimes feel liberating to let rip and be rude,
and why we are often entertained (even if also horrified) to wit-
ness somebody put their foot in it by unwittingly doing something
inappropriate, like complaining about a colleague’s ineptitude to
the colleague’s spouse. That breaking taboos can be fun gives us a

1 Here’s a question for the philosophers, which I’m relegating to a footnote because it

is likely too pedantic to engage the general reader. Could a neutral word—​like book—​
become a swear word in a scenario where, despite not being widely dispreferred by the
community, the community nevertheless knows that the speaker falsely believes that it
is widely dispreferred? In this situation, the listeners could reasonably take the speaker’s
utterance of what they take to be a dispreferred word to indicate the speaker’s lack of
consideration of (or even hostility towards) the listeners, which could result in the
listeners being offended by the speaker’s utterance of the word despite the fact that the
speaker is mistaken about the word being dispreferred. If, as I am arguing, what matters
for offensiveness is the attitude that the speaker conveys by their use of the word, and
what the listener takes the speaker to convey by their use of the word, rather than any
context-​insensitive property of the word such as its sound or its denotation, then per-
haps it does not matter whether the word really is dispreferred. Perhaps all that matters is
that the listeners know that the speaker believes it to be dispreferred. There is some plau-
sibility in this; however, if the speaker’s utterance of book in these circumstances were an
isolated incident, I doubt that the speaker could succeed in causing much offence. This is
because, although the listeners are able dispassionately to conclude that they have reason
to object to the speaker’s utterance of book in these circumstances, they would lack the
sort of negative emotional response to the word that would develop through the offence
escalation process of a word that is genuinely dispreferred. A neutral word can acquire
negative associations, but only after repeated use. Were the speaker in our example to
persist in uttering book, and also to persist in the belief that the listeners dislike it, we
could expect the word to develop negative associations for the listeners when uttered by
this particular speaker. Since this effect is unique to a particular speaker and a particular
set of listeners, it is comparable to the Rebecca/​Rachel and shed examples rather than to
the offence escalation of swear words. It is probably worth conceding, too, that a scenario
in which a speaker repeatedly utters book in these circumstances, without anyone ever
disabusing them of the mistaken belief that it is disliked, is the sort of unlikely thought
experiment that gives philosophers a bad name.
 Taboo, aggression, and harsh sweary sounds 81

motivation to do it; an observation made no less accurate by the

fact that our motivation to break taboos is generally outweighed by
our motivation not to break them. By contrast, there is no compa-
rable, community-​wide motivation to use neutral words like book
for thrills, which makes those words less likely to be used in a way
that would give rise to offence escalation.
But there’s more. Not only is breaking taboos fun, it is also widely
recognised that breaking taboos is fun. This observation adds an
extra layer to the offence escalation of taboo words. To see this, let’s
begin by considering that sometimes, when we have a good enough
reason, it’s acceptable to break taboos. Yelling at work colleagues
is generally unacceptable, but if the purpose is to warn them that
the building is on fire, then it is acceptable. Asking a stranger
when they last defecated is usually frowned upon, but not if one is
a doctor trying to diagnose a digestive disorder. Curtly telling an-
other person to shut up is usually bad mannered, but not if spoken
to someone who is verbally abusing another person. And so on. In
cases like these, no sensible person who recognises that the speaker
has a good reason for breaking the taboo is likely to disapprove of
the taboo-​breaking. Even so, breaking taboos is risky. Given that
we all recognise that breaking taboos can be fun, when we break
them we run the risk that those around us will suspect that we are
doing it merely (or mainly) because it’s fun, and we do not gener-
ally regard having fun as a good enough reason to cause distress
to others. Etiquette, as well as morality, demands that we take into
account other people’s feelings when deciding how to act. This is
part of what’s involved in respecting others. If we anticipate that a
certain course of action will be fun for us but unpleasant for others,
we are expected to avoid it, unless we have a good reason not to
avoid it. What might such a good reason look like? Well, it could
involve having permission from the affected others, as when we
go ahead and throw a noisy party after getting the go-​ahead from
our neighbours. Alternatively, it could involve an action being very
fun for us but only mildly unpleasant for others, as when we take
82 For F*ck’s Sake

a relaxing vacation that will make our colleagues feel even more
downhearted about their dreary lifestyle. Or, the affected others
might deserve the unpleasantness that our action will cause them,
as when I humiliate you (and enjoy doing so) after suffering months
of harassment from you. And so on.
In cases where we break a taboo without good reason, we not
only give our own fun greater weight than other people’s distress,
we also demonstrate that we have done so. There’s an element of
performance to breaking taboos in this way; a flavour of Look at me
being all naughty—​I know you don’t like this but I’m having fun! Our
audience can reasonably conclude from this that we do not respect
them very much. When we break taboos, then, we had better hope
that it is clear to our audience that we are doing so with good reason
if we want to avoid causing offence.
Here’s the upshot of this for swearing. Taboo-​breaking in gen-
eral can be fun, but it’s more common—​and satisfying—​to break
some taboos rather than others for fun. Few of us get our kicks by
asking strangers about their defecation habits, which loses much
of its sparkle once we’re over the age of eight. While bad manners
are rather more common, being bad mannered is not something we
think of as fun or thrilling. By contrast, we all recognise that uttering
taboo words can be fun, and even funny—​even those who don’t
enjoy this form of taboo-​breaking themselves typically acknowl-
edge (while shaking their head regretfully) that there are others
who do. This enjoyment is reflected by the large role that swearing
plays in comedy.2 It means that when we swear, there’s a risk that
those around us will suspect that we’re doing so for fun, a risk that
doesn’t really arise when we break other sorts of taboos. Since taboo-​
breaking for fun sends our audience a strong and clear message that
we place little value on their feelings—​their feelings are, after all, less

2 Taboo-​breaking in general plays an important role in comedy, but few other taboo

breaches are capable of delivering the effortless and immediate laughs often provoked
by the utterance of swear words. A good (and entertaining) illustration of this is George
Carlin’s famous ‘seven words’ routine, which can easily be found and watched online.
 Taboo, aggression, and harsh sweary sounds 83

important than our own fun—​swearing can be more shocking than

the breaking of many other sorts of taboo. And our recognition that
swearing’s capacity to shock is greater than that of some other taboo-​
breaches makes taboo-​breaking by swearing even more fun, which
in turn emphasises to the audience the disregard in which they are
held by the inappropriate swearer—​and so on.
I have explained swearing’s focus on taboo topics by arguing
that taboo-​referring words get a head start over other words in
the community-​wide offence escalation process that is required
in order for a word to become a swear word. As such, I have pro-
vided a causal explanation for the role that taboo-​referring words
play in swearing; in other words, I’ve explained how swearing grew
out of words relating to taboo. But it also seems likely that, over
time, the association between taboo topics and swearing has grown
stronger, to the extent that now we might not recognise as a swear
word a word that doesn’t have a taboo denotation. If that’s the case,
then there’s another kind of explanation of why swear words tend to
focus on taboo topics. According to this explanation, swear words
by definition, or necessarily, have a taboo denotation. This amounts
to claiming that the link between taboo topics and swearing is not
merely causal but also conceptual, which would make the idea of
swear words that do not denote taboo topics incoherent, in much
the same way that there is something incoherent about the idea of
a square circle or an invisible colour. This is a much stronger claim
than I’m going to argue for here. I will, instead, content myself with
the causal claim, along with the observation that the conceptual
claim might be true.

The sound that swear words make

Besides their focus on taboo topics, other features of swear words

demand explanation. One is the way they sound. Pinker, as we have
seen, notes that ‘imprecations tend to use sounds that are perceived
84 For F*ck’s Sake

as quick and harsh’ (Pinker 2007, 339). We saw that the sound of
swear words cannot alone explain their offensiveness, since many
inoffensive words also sound quick and harsh, and some swear
words have benign alternative meanings (consider prick and cock),
or—​like cunt—​sound identical to parts of inoffensive words. Even
so, the fact that swear words sound a particular way is something
that demands explanation, and this explanation is not provided by
offence escalation.
While the quick and harsh sound of swear words doesn’t alone
explain their offensiveness, it is certainly a factor in determining
which words catch on and go through the offence escalation
process to end up as swear words. This has to do with the way swear
words are used. We’ve already noted that, often but not always, we
use swear words to vent emotion, and that some sounds are more
suited to this purpose than others. This point is not unique to the
language we use: just as some sounds are more suited than others
to enabling us to vent our anger, some general behaviours are more
suited than others to this purpose. It is easier to vent anger, frus-
tration, and other strong emotions if we can shout, frown, stand
up, throw our arms about, and point an accusing finger than if we
must whisper, smile, lie down, and gently cradle a sleeping kitten.
We tend towards making quick, harsh sounds when expressing
our anger for the same reasons that we tend to shout and point.
Our swear words need to sound like little explosions—​a point to
which Kate Warwick alludes when she compares uttering cunt to
‘lobbing [a]‌verbal hand grenade’ (Warwick 2015). As a result, a
word whose sounds are not well-​suited to venting emotion would
make a second-​rate swear word. Words that sound quick and harsh
are, then, better placed to make it through the offence escalation
process and attain the status of swear words, simply because they
are satisfying for people to use to vent emotion. This helps explain
why cunt, cock, and arse are more sweary than their less quick and
harsh but also taboo synonyms, muff, willy, and bum.
 Taboo, aggression, and harsh sweary sounds 85

What explains the fact that some swear words are more offensive
than others even when they refer to the same taboo topic and sound
similarly quick and harsh? For example, cunt is more offensive than
the synonymous and equally quick and harsh twat, shit is more of-
fensive than crap, and cock is more offensive than dick. To some ex-
tent, we can explain this in terms of offence escalation, which has
bestowed cunt with greater power to offend than twat. But if we
want to know why offence escalation has worked more powerfully
on cunt than it has on twat, there may be no really satisfying ex-
planation. The best explanation may be that there is no explana-
tion. Our conventions about swearing, like our other conventions,
contain an element of arbitrariness. Recall the example of covering
one’s head in religious buildings: in mosques and synagogues it is
customary for men to cover their heads to express respect, whereas
in churches it is customary for men to remove their hats for the
same reason. There is no ‘deep’ reason to explain this difference.
The convention in each case has developed out of the preference of
the community in question for one type of behaviour over another;
a preference which, in the early days before the convention evolved,
may be arbitrary. Similarly, there is no deep reason to explain why
in the Caribbean, India, Japan, Australia, the UK, and Ireland, it is
conventional (and legally required) to drive on the left, whereas in
the US and most other countries people drive on the right. In the
early days of driving, it didn’t matter which side people chose to
use, as long as they all agreed on the same side. This sort of arbitrar-
iness tends to be a feature of all conventions: we have settled on one
form of behaviour where another would have done just as well. We
eat with our fork in our left hand, but our right would have done
just as well. We use certain expressions and gestures when greeting
each other, but others would have done just as well. And so on. So,
it should not be surprising to find that although offence escalation
has ensured that shit is the most offensive way to refer to shit, crap
would have done just as well.
86 For F*ck’s Sake

Offence and expressing emotion

Swearing’s important role in expressing strong emotion adds an-

other layer to understanding why hearing it can be shocking.
Expressing strong emotion in the wrong context can be alarming
even when it doesn’t involve swearing. A person who is clearly in-
candescent with rage while travelling in an otherwise peaceful
train carriage, or weeping with despair in a restaurant, or doubled
over with laughter at the cinema during a gruelling film about the
Holocaust is likely to attract the attention and anxiety of people
nearby, who will be uncertain about how to respond or what
to expect next. How free one should feel to express emotion ob-
viously varies with context, and we are more sympathetic to the
public expression of some emotions than others. In particular, we
are more disapproving of public displays of anger than we are of
public displays of grief or pain, perhaps because we feel threatened
by the former and sympathetic towards the latter, and perhaps also
because—​reasonably or otherwise—​we feel that people ought to
control their anger but not that they ought to control their grief
or pain.3 It should not, then, be surprising that we are less tolerant
of angry swearing than we are of swearing linked to grief or pain.
This observation is borne out both by a tendency to associate of-
fensive swearing with displays of anger—​recall that the dictionary
definition that we considered in Chapter 2 linked swearing to the
expression of anger—​and by the fact that the public is more tolerant
of swearing on TV when it results from the swearer having hurt
herself than when it arises from other considerations (Millwood-​
Hargrave 2000). In the case of swearing that expresses anger, then,
it is not merely the inappropriate use of swear words that explains

3 It could be that anger is more valuable than we typically realise, and that it can be a

force for good in the world. Myisha Cherry argues that not only is anger an appropriate
response to racism, it is also essential to countering it (Cherry 2021).
 Taboo, aggression, and harsh sweary sounds 87

our feeling offended by it but also the expression of the underlying

emotion of anger.
One reason why we are particularly uncomfortable with angry
swearing—​and perhaps also why the law sometimes gets involved
in swearing—​is that we fear that it might escalate into violence. This
could happen if the swearer himself turns violent; alternatively (or
additionally), it could provoke others to become violent. People
have different views about this. Some doubt that swearing, even
aggressively, makes violence more likely: Kristen Jay (previously
known as Kristen Janschewitz) and Timothy Jay, two psychologists
who have written extensively about swearing, claim never to have
witnessed swearing escalate into physical violence. Others—​
including me and my fellow patrons of certain remote, rural Welsh
nightclubs in the 1990s—​have had different experiences. What lies
behind this fear?
One important factor is that inappropriate swearing and in-
appropriate displays of anger are both contrary to etiquette and
other social norms, and so someone who engages in either of these
things—​and especially those who engage in both—​reveals themself
to be at least temporarily unconstrained by some important norms
that apply in the current context. Being confronted with someone
who disregards social norms in this way can make us feel uneasy.
Perhaps the offender is consciously and deliberately disregarding
important norms of politeness, which introduces the possibility
that they might also take themself to be excused from other norms,
including the norm that forbids us from physically attacking
other people. Or perhaps the offender has deviated from normal
standards of politeness because they have lost control, which might
lead us to fear that they lack the self-​restraint necessary to abstain
from violence. Whatever the explanation, we are left anxiously
wondering, in the words of Feinberg, ‘Who knows . . . what this
gross vulgarian will do next?’ (1985, 280). The worry here is not
that inappropriate angry swearing causes the angry swearer to be-
come violent; rather, it is that inappropriate angry swearing can
88 For F*ck’s Sake

be a warning sign that the angry swearer is the sort of person who
might become violent.
Inappropriate swearing along with an inappropriate expression
of anger can, then, lead us to fear that the offender themself might
turn violent. But, equally, we might fear that their behaviour might
cause others to turn violent. One reason is that their disregard of the
relevant norms of politeness might encourage those around them
to disregard those norms, too: we often take ourselves to be justified
in being rude (or worse) to people who were rude (or worse) to us
first. As above, we might also worry that disregarding some rele-
vant norms will lead others to being disregarded, including those
who keep our conflicts with others non-​violent. Another reason—​
and here I’m touching on issues that will be explored in more de-
tail in later chapters—​is that while disregarding etiquette in general
can be viewed as a sign of disrespect, swearing inappropriately is
a particularly overt and direct way of signalling disrespect. This is
especially true of swearing that is directed at an individual: Fuck
you!, addressed to another person, is more offensive than an un-
directed Fuck it!. The more overt and direct a show of disrespect
towards another person, the more likely it is to provoke a violent re-
sponse from that person—​especially if it is also aggressive, as angry
swearing generally is when directed at others. Let’s take a moment
to explore this idea.
Thankfully, people are not generally inclined to respond vio-
lently to expressions of disrespect towards them. Often we don’t re-
spond to our abuser at all, even if we feel annoyed—​as when we (or
perhaps just we British) sarcastically but inaudibly mutter ‘You’re
welcome’ when we hold the door for a stranger who fails to thank
us. Other shows of disrespect are harder to ignore. A key factor here
is the concept of face, which is familiar from our everyday ideas of
saving face and losing face, and which has been explored and ex-
panded upon by the sociologist Erving Goffman and discussed at
length by theorists of politeness. Face, in this context, is the image
of ourselves that we present to the world. We lose face when we are
 Taboo, aggression, and harsh sweary sounds 89

humiliated, when another person demands something of us, and

when we apologise; we gain face when we are publicly praised,
when someone concedes to us, and when others express grati-
tude to us. When other people show disrespect to us, they threaten
our face, and an appropriate response can make the difference be-
tween losing and saving (or even gaining) face. We can afford to
ignore covert expressions of disrespect not witnessed by others—​
as in the case of the stranger who fails to thank us for holding the
door—​because while such insults can smart, they don’t affect other
people’s opinions of us. Other expressions of disrespect do demand
a response in order to avoid loss of face. If a senior work colleague
marches over to us and loudly accuses us of incompetence while
everyone else in the workplace looks on, even the most placid
among us would feel compelled to respond in order to save face.
Some ways of responding will be ineffective; for example, ‘Actually,
I’m the best person in the entire building at turning on the lights,
it’s just the rest of my job I struggle with’ is unlikely to save face.
Other responses—​such as challenging the accuser to a pistol duel
or smashing up their car—​are overreactions, and risk loss of face
by making us appear ridiculous or deranged. The success of some
responses depends on the context and one’s relationship with the
abuser and any onlookers. ‘I only accept accusations of incompe-
tence in writing’ is unlikely to save face if onlookers view it as an
endorsement of the accusation, but it may well save face if taken
to be a comedic attempt to brush off the accusation, because—​
depending on the social dynamics of the workplace—​it may suc-
cessfully emphasise that the target of the attack is strong enough to
withstand the accuser’s harsh words.
In some contexts, for some shows of disrespect, and for some
people, any non-​violent response may be viewed as inadequate
as a way of saving face. Responding to an insult by challenging
the insulter to a duel was not, after all, always and everywhere
regarded as an overreaction, and it is not unheard of today for
verbal disagreements in bars to escalate into violence following the
90 For F*ck’s Sake

invitation of one of the participants to step outside to resolve the

issue. Indeed, the capacity of certain expressions of disrespect to
lead predictably to face-​saving violent reactions has, in extreme
cases, led to legal sanctions against those expressions of disrespect.
An example is the category of speech known in US law as fighting
words. Fighting words are words intended to provoke violence, and
they are not protected under the First Amendment; that part of
the US Constitution that, among other things, protects freedom of
speech. While not all swearing constitutes fighting words, the law
states that ‘argument is unnecessary’ to demonstrate that certain
sweary insults ‘are likely to provoke the average person to retalia-
tion, and thereby cause a breach of the peace’.4 Further, the manner
of delivery matters: the 1940 judgement in Cantwell v. Connecticut
included the remark, ‘The English language has a number of words
and expressions which, by general consent, are “fighting words”
when said without a disarming smile’. Just as a smile can neutralise
an insult, an aggressive manner can emphasise it and increase the
chance of violent retaliation. There will be more to say in Chapters 6
and 7 about how the offensiveness of inappropriate swearing can be
aggravated by various factors, including whether and to whom it is
directed, and the manner in which it is delivered.
Before moving on, let’s pause to note that there is a positive side
of angry swearing, even when it is inappropriate. Even if aggressive
swearing can be a precursor to physical violence, a precursor to vio-
lence is not itself violence, and we have already seen that swearing is
an effective way of expressing emotion. There is reason to welcome
behaviour that enables us to express emotion—​especially venting
anger—​yet stops short of violence. We recognise this when we ad-
vise angry friends to vent their anger by punching a cushion, going

4 From the judgement in Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire (315 U.S. 568 [1942]), which

claims this of the epithets damned racketeer and damned fascist. Note that in 1942, when
the judgement was made, damned was far more offensive in the US than it is today.
 Taboo, aggression, and harsh sweary sounds 91

for a run, hitting a squash ball, and so on. That we advise our angry
friends to do things like this reveals a few important things about
our attitude to anger. First, given that we offer this advice in the
hope that it will make our friend feel better, we must believe that
expressing anger is a way to feel calmer and less angry. Second, we
encourage our friends to vent their anger by punching cushions but
not by punching people or smashing up cars because we believe
that activities like punching cushions are healthy ways to express
anger, in that they don’t involve causing harm. Third, we encourage
people to vent their anger because we think it preferable to do that
(in healthy ways) than not to vent it at all; indeed, not expressing
emotion—​‘bottling it up’—​is widely recognised as a bad idea, and
Sigmund Freud himself viewed anger as itself the consequence of
suppressing other emotions. We can, then, plausibly view angry
swearing as a way to avert violence rather than as something that
makes violence more likely. This could happen in two ways. First,
given the cathartic function of swearing, it may enable us to re-
lease some of the emotional pressure that might otherwise esca-
late into violence. Second, while swearing can be aggressive and
intimidating, it is a low-​cost form of aggression and intimidation
compared to physical violence. Fighting words don’t always result in
fighting, and sometimes both parties feel better afterwards. Doing
battle with strong words may be something that we would prefer to
avoid, but it is preferable to fighting with fists and weapons. Mere
swearing, even when aggressive and inappropriate, never put an-
yone in hospital.

Offensiveness beyond words

As well as helping us understand the offensiveness of inappropriate

swearing, offence escalation helps us understand the offensiveness
of breaching etiquette more generally. Comparing and contrasting
inappropriate swearing with etiquette breaches in general will be
92 For F*ck’s Sake

helpful in understanding our attitudes to swearing and its power to

affect us in the way it does.
Let’s begin by observing that offence escalation can ex-
plain the offensiveness of things other than swear words. While
I have characterised offence escalation as a process by which
some varieties of verbal communication (i.e. the utterance of cer-
tain expressions) become offensive, we can generalise it to explain
how certain sorts of non-​verbal communication become offensive.
In Chapter 1, I introduced the idea that gestures like the middle
finger should be viewed as varieties of swearing. Like the utterance
of swear words, these non-​verbal gestures can be offensive and ca-
thartic, and some even argue that—​like swear words—​they are
based on taboo topics.5 We can explain their capacity to offend in
the same way that we can explain the capacity of swear words to of-
fend: these gestures, dispreferred on account of taboo associations,
grew to be offensive when people used them despite knowing that
their use was disliked by their community, and when community
members became aware that those using the gestures knew that
their use was disliked.
Offence escalation can explain the offensiveness of behaviours
that are even further removed from language, and from commu-
nication in general. Some conventions of etiquette (like the cus-
toms around please and thank you) are linguistic, but others (like
the rules about which cutlery to use and how to hold it) are not.
Breaching these conventions can be rude, impolite, or bad man-
nered, but it is not normally harmful or otherwise morally wrong.
In an article co-​authored with Gunther S. Stent, Judith Martin—​
who, under the name Miss Manners, pens a regular etiquette advice
column that is published in hundreds of newspapers worldwide—​
characterises etiquette as a set of rules with which we comply

5 Anthropologist Desmond Morris explains that the middle-​finger gesture represents

a penis, although the taboo origin of some offensive hand gestures (including the V-​sign
and the bras d’honneur) is not always clear, and very often produced without conscious
thought (Morris 2005; Nasaw 2012).
 Taboo, aggression, and harsh sweary sounds 93

voluntarily (i.e. without the threat of ‘fierce sanctions’ for non-​

compliance). The rules of etiquette regulate our social behaviour to
ensure harmony, make our relations with others predictable, and to
facilitate rituals, such as the behaviour characteristic of weddings
and funerals. Martin and Stent see a large overlap between etiquette
and morality:

If a distinction is to be made between them, then it could be said

that the moral point of view tends to be concerned with aspects
of the human condition that involve matters of potentially grave
consequence for life, limb, and property, whereas aspects of con-
cern to manners tend to involve matters of potentially less grave
consequences, such as offences against personal dignity, sacred
and profane ritual, and the aesthetic sense. (1990, 253)

This view of etiquette as related to morality, concerned with eve-

ryday matters of less grave consequences, and having an important
role in conveying respect for the dignity of others, is echoed by var-
ious philosophers. Sarah Buss argues that, in many cases, to be bad
mannered is to be immoral, and that an important function of man-
ners is to express respect and to acknowledge the moral status of
others. Indeed, she argues that saying ‘please’ is equivalent to saying
‘you are worthy of respect’ (Buss 1999, 802). Karen Stohr, whose
work we encountered in the previous chapter and who discusses
Martin throughout her 2012 book, On Manners. Stohr remarks that
‘polite behaviour is an extension of morality into small corners of
our lives’ (Stohr 2012, 4). This echoes ancient views about man-
ners: philosophers such as Aristotle and Confucius wrote about
manners alongside morality as they considered the more general
question of how to live well.
The conventions of etiquette are many and diverse, and they vary
by culture. They include removing a hat on entering a church, cov-
ering the head when entering a mosque, saying ‘please’ when we
make a request, addressing people with a level of formality fitting
94 For F*ck’s Sake

to the occasion, standing an appropriate distance from someone

with whom one is conversing, and refraining from ‘liking’ all the
Facebook photos that one’s ex has posted with their new partner.
The ways in which these conventions developed, too, are many
and diverse: some are set out in explicit rules, including those in
religious texts, while others—​like many of those governing ap-
propriate behaviour on social media—​arise organically, in the
wild, as we navigate the rewards and awkwardness of our everyday
interactions. In some cases, it is difficult to say exactly what the con-
vention is, even when we have no trouble complying with it and
recognising when it is breached. (Are you confident, for example,
that you could specify exactly how close you could stand to a pro-
fessional colleague without them feeling that you are uncomfort-
ably close, without trying out various distances to see how they feel?
I don’t think I am.) However they arise, established conventions of
etiquette become expected in the contexts in which they apply, and
failure to abide by them risks causing offence. And while we are all
more committed to some of these conventions than to others, we
are all capable of being offended by those who refuse to comply: as
Martin and Stent observe, even the most lawless drivers can be-
come violently enraged by their fellow motorists’ failure to abide by
the simple conventions of traffic etiquette, as one victim of a road-
side assault demonstrated by ‘pulling in front of the assailant’s car
so that he was forced to slow down’ (Martin and Stent 1990, 246).
In short, once a convention of etiquette has become established,
failure to abide by it becomes dispreferred by the community, and
anyone who fails to abide by a convention we care about is likely to
offend us, especially in cases where we know that they know that we
dislike their failure to abide by it.
We can use offence escalation to explain how breaches of et-
iquette manage to be offensive. Conventions of etiquette develop
when certain behaviours become expected in certain situations.
This leads the community to disprefer failure to abide by these
conventions. When people in a community fall into the habit of, say,
 Taboo, aggression, and harsh sweary sounds 95

bringing a small gift—​a bottle of wine, chocolates, flowers—​for the

host of a dinner party to which they have been invited, a commu-
nity member risks causing offence by failing to offer a gift in these
circumstances. Often, community members will view a failure to
follow convention on a single occasion as an excusable oversight,
but repeated failures are unlikely to be viewed as benign. In such a
scenario, if the host is confident that the guest knows that it is cus-
tomary to bring a gift, that doing so would not unduly burden the
guest, and that circumstances did not make it difficult for the guest
to comply on this occasion, then the host can reasonably assume
that the guest who arrives at the dinner party without a gift is insuf-
ficiently respectful of the host. The host can justifiably feel offended
as a result. Breaches of etiquette, then, are liable to offend in much
the same way that swearing inappropriately is liable to offend.
We saw, in the previous chapter, that in cases where swearing in-
appropriately is objectionable, it is objectionable because it is rude
(i.e. because it is contrary to etiquette). As a result, inappropriate
swearing lies at the ‘less grave’ end of Martin and Stent’s spectrum.
But sometimes, as we’ve seen, swearing can be a more serious
matter. This can happen when it expresses the speaker’s funda-
mental disrespect of others. There are other things to consider here
too. Sometimes, the way we swear can turn it from something that
is merely rude into something that is morally wrong. We’re going to
look at how this can happen in the next two chapters.
 6
How to be a really offensive
swearer

The extent to which swearing is objectionable depends on con-

text, which words we use, and whether or not we express disre-
spect to others. It also depends on how we swear, who we are, who
we’re swearing at or in the presence of, who else is around, and—​
in a sense that will become clear in Chapter 9—​what we’re doing
when we swear. How all these factors combine can affect whether
swearing is innocuous, inappropriate but easily overlooked, objec-
tionable, or even harmful. Between this chapter and Chapter 10,
we’re going to work out how we can make sensible, proportionate,
and fair judgements about how objectionable particular instances
of swearing are; how we can spot judgments that aren’t sensible,
proportionate, and fair; and how these insights can be used to im-
prove formal regulations that target swearing.

Some background: nuisances

We can start with some general points about what can make of-
fensive behaviour more or less of a problem. Feinberg drew on
nuisance law to gauge how concerned we should be about offen-
sive behaviour. In US law, he wrote, ‘We demand protection from
nuisances when we think of ourselves as trapped by them, and we
think it unfair that we should pay the cost in inconvenience that
is required to escape them’ (Feinberg 1985, 5). He argued that the
 How to be a really offensive swearer 97

seriousness of offensiveness depends on three things: how intense

and long-​lasting is the offended person’s offence (assuming that
they’re not abnormally sensitive to offence), how easy it is to avoid
the offensive behaviour, and whether or not the witnesses willingly
took the risk of being offended. On the other side of the scales, we
should pay attention to the importance of the behaviour to the
person behaving offensively and the wider social value of freedom
of expression, whether the behaviour could be moved to a place and
time where it would cause less offence, and whether the behaviour
is motivated by spite (Feinberg 1985, 26).
If we apply all this to swearing, we end up with various sensible-​
sounding results: it’s worse to swear at a captive audience than at
people who can simply walk away, it’s worse to swear in a primary
school than a pub, people who attend a show by a famously sweary
comedian aren’t justified in complaining about hearing swearing
during the show, and so on. These points aren’t specific to swearing,
though—​they apply to other sorts of offensive behaviour too, like
making loud noise and bad smells. These general considerations
don’t tell us everything we need to know about the offensiveness
of swearing, though—​there are some swearing-​specific factors too.
Here are some important examples.

Tone and body language

One thing that affects the offensiveness of our swearing is the tone
we use when we swear. Suppose that, while commuting on a busy
but quiet train, the stranger in the seat next to you opens a can of
drink, accidentally spills it in their lap, and responds with a loud
‘Fuck it!’. Even if you’re pretty tolerant of swearing, how comfort-
able you feel about this will depend on what tone the speaker has
used. If your seatmate is clearly in good humour, then you might be
amused and sympathetic. But if the tone is clearly very angry, you
98 For F*ck’s Sake

are more likely to be alarmed. Loudly swearing on a busy but quiet

train breaks social norms regardless of how it is done, but doing
so angrily also breaks the norm against expressing strong negative
emotion in public. If your seatmate is willing to express anger in
this way, you might worry, then perhaps they might express it in
more destructive ways too. This is why swearing angrily is more
offensive than swearing good-​humouredly. Other negative tones
have a similar effect: a survey commissioned by the UK’s communi-
cations regulator Ofcom found that, in broadcasting, an aggressive,
malicious, or mocking tone makes swearing more offensive to the
audience (Ipsos MORI 2016).
Body language, too, makes a difference to the offensiveness
of swearing. Pairing swearing with aggressive body language—​
jabbing a finger at the person we’re speaking to, standing very close
to them, shaking a fist, and so on—​makes swearing a more serious
matter. Our body language can reduce the offensiveness of what we
say, too. This is something that’s explicitly recognised in US law: the
judgement in Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire includes the remark
that, to count as ‘fighting words’, our provocative speech needs to be
delivered ‘without a disarming smile’.
Of course, tone and body language are important in communica-
tion generally; they don’t suddenly become important when people
start swearing. Which tone we use can convey whether we’re asking
a question, making a suggestion, asserting something, and so on.
Tone is even more important in certain languages: the Chinese lan-
guages, Hausa, and Mohawk (among others) are tonal languages,
meaning that the tone one uses can make a difference to which
word one is uttering. Body language, too, can convey our mood
and our intentions towards the person we’re speaking to—​are we
friendly, aggressive, joking, flirtatious?—​and which body language
is appropriate varies with culture and context.
With swearing, though, the stakes are higher: the tone and body
language we use when we swear can determine whether or not we’re
 How to be a really offensive swearer 99

doing something wrong, as the reference to the disarming smile in

the Chaplinsky judgment illustrates. Swearing—​and doing wrong
with swearing—​is a whole-​body, surround-​sound experience. It’s
difficult to make an accurate judgement about how offensive an in-
cident of swearing is without taking into account the speaker’s tone
and body language.

Direct and indirect swearing

Next, we’ve seen that inappropriate swearing risks causing offence

by conveying disrespect. But not all ways of conveying disrespect
are equal. We’re more likely to offend by expressing these attitudes
directly than if we express them indirectly. Here’s an example. If you
and I are having a polite conversation, I might offend you if I cas-
ually use a swear word—​by saying something like, ‘Lovely fucking
weather we’re having’. But you will be much more offended if, in-
stead, I say ‘Fuck you!’. Offence escalation takes us part of the way
to understanding why you are offended here: people dislike fuck in
this sort of context, we both know this, we both know that the other
knows it, which means that you take my fuck to express disrespect.
This doesn’t tell us the whole story, though. If my saying ‘Lovely
fucking weather we’re having’ and ‘Fuck you!’ both offend you be-
cause they express my disrespect towards you, why is the latter
more offensive than the former? We need to look beyond offence
escalation for the answer, which I think is this: both expressions ex-
press disrespect, but one does so more directly than the other. Fuck
you! shows another person, in a way that leaves no room for doubt,
that the speaker disrespects them or even holds them in contempt;
in fact, I hold you in contempt is a reasonable (if clumsy and less ex-
pressive) non-​sweary translation of Fuck you!. By contrast, saying
‘Lovely fucking weather we’re having’ does not directly express any
negative attitude to the listener. If you end up being offended, it’s
100 For F*ck’s Sake

because you take my choice of words to be inconsiderate of you,

and you infer from this that I disrespect you.1
All of this fits with a general point about politeness. Typically, it’s
more offensive and less polite to express negative attitudes explic-
itly and directly rather than indirectly and ambiguously. That’s why
it’s more polite to end a conversation by saying, ‘Well, I’d better let
you go now’ than by saying, ‘I don’t want to talk to you any more’.
Both expressions convey that the speaker wants the conversation to
end, but only the former does so indirectly. How direct and explicit
a speaker can be while still being polite is, again, something that
varies with culture and context. Germans, for example, commu-
nicate with a directness that would border on rudeness in Britain.
We can return, here, to the concept of face. According to Penelope
Brown and Stephen C. Levinson—​ the socio-​linguists who set
out politeness theory in the late 1970s—​expressing our negative
attitudes indirectly prevents the listener’s loss of face. Saying ‘I don’t
think that dress does anything for you’ is more polite than ‘You
look awful in that dress’ because while both convey to the listener
our negative opinion of how they look, the directness of the latter
makes a public show of the negativity, which diminishes the listener
in the eyes of any bystanders—​and even if there are no bystanders,
we might care about what they would think if there were. For sim-
ilar reasons, saying ‘Lovely fucking weather we’re having’ is less
face-​threatening to the listener (because less direct) than saying
‘Fuck you!’, even though both are ways of conveying disrespect or
contempt.

1 This view that direct swearing is worse than indirect swearing is reflected in the 1971

judgment of Cohen v. California, in which Paul Robert Cohen’s conviction for disturbing
the peace by wearing a jacket emblazoned with the words Fuck the Draft inside a public
courthouse was overturned. The judgement mentioned, as a factor that reduced the of-
fensiveness of Cohen’s behaviour, that ‘[n]‌o individual actually or likely to be present
could reasonably have regarded the words on appellant’s jacket as a direct personal in-
sult’ (403 US 15 (1971)).
 How to be a really offensive swearer 101

How about witnessing swearing directed at someone else? Saying

‘Fuck you!’ is direct, but if it’s not addressed to me, I don’t lose face.
Even so, we are more likely be offended by witnessing someone
say ‘Fuck you!’ to a third person than we are by witnessing ‘Lovely
fucking weather we’re having’ addressed to a third person. Empathy
is part of the explanation for this. We’re not purely selfish, so it’s not
just our own face that we care about—​we don’t like to see others
insulted or humiliated either. But how offended we’re likely to be
by witnessing someone say ‘Fuck you!’ to a third person depends
on a few other factors too, including who the addressee is and the
relationship between the swearer and the swearee. We’re going to
return to this in the next chapter.

Accidental or deliberate

Another factor relevant to the offensiveness of swearing is whether

or not it is accidental. We tend to be more tolerant of the sort of
swearing that slips out accidentally than of the more deliberate sort.
This view is reflected in the findings of an Ofcom survey on public
attitudes towards swearing in broadcasting, which found that
participants ‘found offensive language much less acceptable when
they felt that professional broadcasters . . . had intentionally used
strong language’ (Ipsos MORI 2016, 4), and recommended that
broadcasters ‘should, in general, be held to higher standards for
pre-​recorded programmes than for live broadcasts’ (8). This reflects
a more general attitude: we tend to be more forgiving of objection-
able things that people say in the heat of the moment, without ad-
equate forethought, than we are of objectionable things said after
careful consideration. Everyone makes mistakes sometimes, after
all, and we take what people say after careful consideration to be
more likely to represent their true thoughts and feelings. Swearing
aggressively at another person following careful consideration,
we think, is likely to reflect the swearer’s true attitude towards the
102 For F*ck’s Sake

swearee; by contrast, swearing aggressively in haste may merely re-

flect the speaker’s momentary annoyance, tiredness, grief, or some
other negative but temporary state.

Repetition

Finally—​at least, the final aggravating factor that we will consider

in this incomplete list—​repetition can increase the offensiveness
of swearing. Perhaps this is because repeated swearing strikes us
as more likely to be deliberate, and more likely to indicate that the
swearer is working really hard to offend. This is borne out by the
participants of Ofcom’s survey, who view repeated swearing to indi-
cate the swearer’s desire to draw attention to the swear word. Where
repeated swearing does not reflect the speaker’s intention to offend,
it doesn’t lead us to view swearing as more offensive. This happens
in coprolalia, the tendency to utter swear words and other inap-
propriate language frequently and involuntarily. Coprolalia is as-
sociated with Tourette syndrome, although relatively few Tourette
patients have it, and it can arise in other conditions too. Nobody
who understands coprolalia is likely to be offended by it—​although
they may prefer not to hear the language that the speaker utters.
This shows us it’s not due to the repetition itself that swearing is
more offensive when it’s repetitive; it’s because of the inferences that
repetition usually leads us to make about the speaker’s intentions.
The factors we’ve just considered interact, of course. Swearing is
a more serious matter when it is done both angrily and repeatedly;
repetitive swearing at nothing in particular is less objectionable
than repetitive swearing at a person, and so on. In the next chapter,
we’re going to add something else to the mix, when we see how the
relationship between the speaker and their listener can affect how
objectionable swearing is.
 7
You talkin’ to me?

How objectionable is it to say ‘Fuck you!’ to another person? The

previous chapter enables us, I hope, to give a somewhat sensible an-
swer to this question. But it’s not the whole story, because it says
nothing about the relationship between the person swearing and
the person being sworn at—​and this makes a huge difference. If
you’re a liberal sort who likes to think of themself as open-​minded
about swearing, you might happily tolerate a good-​humoured Fuck
you! between friends in a relaxed and informal setting. But you
might wince if you heard the same thing said by a teenager to one of
their schoolteachers, or—​even worse—​vice versa. And if you were
to hear an adult say the same thing to a toddler or to a very elderly
person, you’d probably judge them to be acting not merely rudely
but immorally.
Now, there’s a long tradition of viewing swearing as worse when
it’s directed at (or in the presence of) certain people. The ears of
women and children have historically been considered especially
delicate in this regard. Let’s take a look at how swearing’s offensive-
ness intersects with who is swearing and who is around to witness it.

Swear power

Generally speaking, witnessing an adult saying ‘Fuck you!’ to an-

other adult whom we do not know, and who is roughly equivalent
to the speaker in size, age, and social and professional status is less
likely to offend us than being sworn at ourselves. In other cases,
though, we are more offended by swearing addressed to another
104 For F*ck’s Sake

person than by swearing addressed to ourselves. This can happen

if the addressee is someone we care about, or someone who is pow-
erless or vulnerable compared to the swearer, or someone to whom
the swearer has particular duties. It is worse for an adult to swear at
a child than at another adult, it is worse for an employer to swear at
one of their employees than at a professional equal, it is worse for
a physically fit and strong person to swear at someone smaller and
weaker than at someone of their own size, it is worse for a doctor to
swear at one of their patients than at someone they’re not treating,
and so on. In all these cases, the swearer is in some sense more pow-
erful than the swearee. Our sense that swearing is worse in these
circumstances reflects our more general disapproval of people
who attack those who are smaller and weaker than themselves; a
disapproval that is expressed in expressions like Pick on someone
your own size! and in the norm against ‘punching down’ in comedy.
Things are even worse when the swearer is not only stronger than
the swearee but also has a duty to protect, nurture, or care for them.
Doctors who swear at their patients and teachers who swear at their
pupils behave especially badly by attacking those whom they ought
to be protecting, nurturing, and supporting.
What about when the swearer is less powerful than the swearee?
Things are trickier here. On the one hand, we are less likely to be
intimidated by someone less powerful swearing at us than by
someone more powerful. But on the other hand, such cases can
strike us as especially outrageous. People are particularly shocked
when a member of the public swears at a police officer, a priest, or a
member of medical staff, or when a student swears at their teacher.
I think that it is not the power relations that explain our shock in
cases like these. Instead, they’re shocking because of the wide-
spread belief that people like the swearee are especially deserving
of respect from people like the swearer. Widespread views about
what sort of people are especially deserving of respect are not al-
ways well founded and can reflect prejudice, but since these views
are entrenched in our norms and our moral intuitions, they help
 You talkin’ to me? 105

explain our reactions to what we find offensive nevertheless. In

Chapter 10, we will consider how to respond to offence that is based
on prejudice.
In some cases of swearing-​at, there is room for disagreement
about whether or not it is especially objectionable. In the past, and
even in some contemporary circles, it was thought especially objec-
tionable for men to swear in the company of women (and, for that
matter, for women to fucking swear at all). For those who hold such
a view, it is more objectionable for a man to swear at a woman than
it is for him to swear at another man. This view has its roots in the
sexist view that women are delicate creatures who can be corrupted
by swearing and who need to be protected from it. Sensible people
reject this sexist view—​but it is not obvious what attitude we should
take towards the view that swearing at women (by men) is especially
objectionable. On the one hand, we might think that since it is not
the case that women are delicate creatures who must be protected
from swearing, it is no worse for a man to swear at a woman than it
is for him to swear at another man. On the other hand, continuing
sexism, misogyny, and violence against women mean that there is
still work to do to reduce disrespectful treatment of women, which
might lead us to object more strongly to swearing at women by men
than to swearing at men by men. Analogous problems arise when
we consider swearing at members of other oppressed groups—​
people with disabilities, LGBTQ +​people, members of ethnic and
religious minorities, and so on—​especially by people who are not
members of those groups. Should we view such swearing as espe-
cially objectionable given that it adds to the burden of mistreatment
that these people bear, or is it in some way disrespectful to treat op-
pressed people differently to others when it comes to swearing?
There will be more to say in Chapter 10 about how concerns
about oppression interact with offensiveness, but let me come
down on one side of this fence. Swearing at a member of an op-
pressed group by someone who is not a member of an oppressed
group is more objectionable than swearing at someone who is not a
106 For F*ck’s Sake

member of an oppressed group. Taking this view need not be based

on patronising, paternalistic, or otherwise disrespectful attitudes
towards members of oppressed groups, such as the view that the
latter are delicate creatures who need protection from strong lan-
guage. It can instead be motivated by a recognition that members of
disadvantaged groups experience more than their fair share of dis-
respect and abuse compared to people who are not members of dis-
advantaged groups, and that the offensiveness of swearing at them
is likely to be magnified by its fitting into an oppressive pattern of
disrespect and abuse.1 By contrast, although swearing at a person
who is not a member of an oppressed group can be offensive, and
is typically more offensive than swearing at nobody in partic-
ular, it is less offensive than swearing at a member of an oppressed
group, since it does not fit into an oppressive pattern of disrespect
and abuse.

Setting an example

Who is doing the swearing can make a difference to its offensive-

ness. If you’re the sort of person who is (expected to be) a model
of politeness and decorum, you have greater capacity to shock and
offend by swearing. This is an instance of a more general, familiar
phenomenon: the concept of noblesse oblige embodies the thought
that the privileged should be held to a higher standard of behaviour
than everyone else. We saw an illustration of this in the opening
example of this book: it would have been especially shocking to
hear the Queen swearing during her Christmas address, in part be-
cause the Queen was not the sort of person one expected to hear
swearing. We expected her to be a model of decorum. The same

1 That swearing at is more objectionable when it is directed at a member of a disadvan-

taged group because of its place in an oppressive pattern of disrespect and abuse makes it
comparable to microaggression, as characterised by Regina Rini (2021).
 You talkin’ to me? 107

applies to other people to whom we look for guidance on behaving

well: priests, police officers, teachers, judges. It often happens that
those people we uphold as models of decorum are also people of
high social or professional status, which often means that they hold
positions of privilege and power; as a result, the offensiveness of
their swearing, if it is directed at an individual, can be aggravated
by the fact that they hold a position of power relative to the swearee.
Sometimes a person’s swearing is made especially objectionable by
the fact that we view them as models of decorum and by the fact that
they are swearing at a relatively powerless person. These combined
aggravating factors apply when a teacher swears at a pupil, or when
a police officer swears at a member of the public.
Simply being middle class can also make one’s swearing more
objectionable. As we saw in Chapter 3, due to the middle-​class po-
liteness criterion, we are often less shocked by swearing from very
underprivileged people and by swearing from very highly priv-
ileged people. This develops the sorts of double standards that
have resulted in Conservative politicians escaping unpunished for
swearing (even aggressively) at the public, while ordinary people
have been arrested and fined for the same thing.

Won’t somebody think of the children?

Swearing by adults in the company of children is frowned upon,

although not simply because children tend to be more vulnerable
compared to adults (even though they are) or because children are
an oppressed group (even though, perhaps, they are). Let’s take care
to separate swearing in the company of children from the idea of
treating children aggressively. Swearing at children—​by shouting
things like Fuck you! at them or by swearily calling them names—​
or allowing them to witness one behaving in this way towards
others is certainly objectionable, for reasons we discussed above.
But what about simply allowing children to witness the sort of
108 For F*ck’s Sake

swearing that doesn’t come with any aggravating factors? Many

people believe there’s something wrong with even this. The pres-
ence of children has been used in law and broadcasting to justify
punishing swearing: the presence of children can turn relatively
innocuous swearing into swearing that warrants punishment (see
Fairman 2006, 60ff). Swearing in the presence of children is gen-
erally thought to be far more objectionable than swearing in solely
adult company. This view has its roots in the idea that it is possible
somehow to corrupt children by exposing them to swearing; some-
thing that Supreme Court Justice Stevens, who in 1978 condemned
Pacifica for broadcasting George Carlin’s ‘filthy words’ skit on a
New York radio station, apparently took to be self-​evident when he
gravely remarked that ‘Pacifica’s broadcast could have enlarged a
child’s vocabulary in an instant’ (FCC v. Pacifica Found. 1978).
This idea that a child can be corrupted by a mere word is in-
coherent, as Feinberg observes: either children who overhear a
swear word do not recognise it as such, in which case they are not
corrupted by it; or they do recognise the word to be a swear word,
in which case they are already ‘corrupt’. But perhaps enlarging their
vocabulary by teaching them swear words that they did not pre-
viously know could be viewed as corrupting, as Justice Stevens
believed? This, too, is implausible. Learning swear words (and
how to use them) is a normal part of language development; some-
thing that everyone reading this book has gone through at some
point. If it’s corrupting, then it’s a form of corruption that happens
to us all. Would it be better if we could avoid being corrupted in
this particular way? Unlikely. To avoid being corrupted by learning
swear words, we’d need to be protected from sources of sweary vo-
cabulary enlargement. Those sources include not only edgy radio
broadcasts but also wholesome things like books and normal social
interactions with peers. It is difficult to imagine how it might be
possible to meet children’s needs while also shielding them from
swearing. Much as many people dislike the idea of children being
exposed to swearing, then, taking decisive steps to ensure that
 You talkin’ to me? 109

they aren’t exposed to swearing looks to be at odds with healthy

ways of raising children. And what’s more, children who are thor-
oughly protected from swearing would grow into adults who have
not mastered a particular part of their language—​a part that those
who would protect them from it get to enjoy themselves. Such
adults would, in some small (or perhaps not-​so-​small) way, be less
equipped for life and social interaction than other people. With
all this in mind, the claim that it is harmful to expose children to
swearing looks hopelessly implausible.
Even so, many of us who would not want to claim that swearing
harms children nevertheless avoid swearing in their presence.
Why? Does our distaste for swearing in front of children make
sense? I think so. We can make sense of the thought that it’s better
to avoid swearing in front of children with reference to etiquette.
Let’s consider, first, the case of swearing in front of one’s own chil-
dren. Is it objectionable to allow one’s own children to overhear one
swearing in a non-​aggressive way that is not directed at anyone? If
this is objectionable at all, it is objectionable in a ‘setting a bad ex-
ample’ sort of way. Part of good parenting is instilling in one’s chil-
dren a knowledge of etiquette and (more generally) the standards
of behaviour that will be expected of them throughout their lives,
and an ability to conform to those standards. To neglect this part of
a child’s education places them at a significant disadvantage when
it comes to interacting with others, since it will impede their ability
to cooperate with others. We naturally teach our children how to
act in accordance with etiquette by acting that way ourselves, and
by correcting them when they fail to follow our example. By failing
to act in accordance with etiquette while we are parenting, we fail
to set a good example for our children to follow, and as a result we
risk failing to socialise them effectively. Even so, this is only a risk if
we consistently set a bad example. Allowing children to witness the
occasional, infrequent lapse in etiquette—​by swearing, by treating
someone rudely, by being inappropriately informal, and so on—​
hardly risks undermining their general command of etiquette, and
110 For F*ck’s Sake

may even enhance it by exposing them to the sorts of reactions that

one is likely to provoke by breaching etiquette. Swearing in front of
one’s own children is, then, objectionable only when it happens reg-
ularly enough to threaten their grasp of etiquette. If we are the sorts
of people to disapprove when we witness a parent swearing in the
presence of their child, it seems plausible that the reason we disap-
prove is not that we believe this particular instance of swearing to
be harmful to their child but because we suspect that the parent in
question routinely swears in front of their child, in which case they
are not taking steps to socialise their child properly. We disapprove
of this behaviour because it disadvantages the child, and because
it contributes to a wider problem: it is bad for everyone if people
reach adulthood without learning to treat people with respect. We
view parents as responsible for ensuring that their children reach
adulthood knowing how to treat people with respect via their grasp
of etiquette.
What about swearing in front of other people’s children? This,
too, is viewed as objectionable, yet we are not responsible for
parenting other people’s children. Even so, what is objection-
able about swearing in front of other people’s children is, in part,
roughly similar to what is objectionable about swearing in front of
one’s own children. Parents bear the main responsibility for setting
a good example to their children, but the wider community bears
a responsibility to do the same. This is apparent from the fact that
we generally expect adults to modify their behaviour in front of
children—​to behave politely and to refrain from doing things that
it would be undesirable for the children to emulate. So, we disap-
prove of people who set a bad example to other people’s children
by swearing in front of them. In addition, we view swearing in
front of someone else’s children as disrespectful to those children’s
parents.
The considerations that lead us to avoid swearing in the presence
of other people’s children guide our behaviour in other ways too.
There are many things that we can do to someone else’s children
 You talkin’ to me? 111

that are not remotely harmful, and which may even be beneficial,
but which we refrain from because we would view it as encroaching
on the remit of the parents. The sorts of activities in question vary
with culture but might include giving a child a radical new haircut,
buying them an expensive toy, or enrolling them in an after-​school
music class. Without gaining the permission of the child’s parents,
these things could all be viewed as rude and disrespectful, even if
done in response to a request by the child themself. The reason is
that we view decisions about cutting a child’s hair, whether they are
allowed to have an expensive toy, and what they will be doing after
school to be up to the child’s parents. It is customary to defer to
parents’ judgments about how to raise their children, and—​except
in extreme cases where the child is placed in danger—​this involves
not interfering in decisions parents make about their children even
when we think those decisions are not justified. These reflections
highlight another reason why we think there is something wrong
with swearing in front of other people’s children. Given that we
view setting standards of behaviour for a child as largely the re-
sponsibility of the child’s parents, and that it is normal for parents
to raise their children to think that it is wrong to swear, swearing in
front of other people’s children is disrespectful of those children’s
parents’ efforts to teach them that swearing is unacceptable. This
holds regardless of one’s own views about how it is best to raise chil-
dren: a parent who deems it acceptable to swear in the company of
her own children is expected to refrain from swearing in the com-
pany of other children out of deference to the efforts of those other
children’s parents to raise them according to different standards. It
also holds regardless of whether the reasons that the child’s parents
wish to avoid exposing the child to swearing are coherent or not. If
a child’s parents want to avoid their child encountering swearing
because they believe, say, that swearing is capable of causing brain
damage to the child and we know them to be mistaken, this does
not justify our swearing in front of the child. To do so would be in-
sufficiently respectful of the child’s parents’ freedom to raise their
112 For F*ck’s Sake

child as they see fit—​a freedom that, except when it involves actu-
ally harming the child, we take to be part of parenting.
When deciding how objectionable an instance of swearing is,
then, it matters who is doing the swearing, who (if anyone) is being
sworn at, who else is around, and what the relationship is between
these people. This broad focus on the act of uttering swear words
in our interactions with others, rather than on the much narrower
topic of the words themselves and what they refer to and sound
like, is perhaps unsurprising given the offence escalation account,
which explains swearing’s capacity to shock and offend in terms of
the unspoken sentiments that the speaker conveys to the listener
and to those around them when they swear. Next, we’re going to
look at some of the rules that are used to deal with swearing in the
wild, and how they could be improved.
 8
A regulatory fucking mess

Around the world, rules designed to prohibit, censor, or punish

swearing are enshrined in broadcasting codes, professional and
sporting practices, and even the law. How can we work out whether
our rules about swearing are fair and consistent? How can we
spot and correct overreactions and wrong calls before people are
silenced and punished inappropriately? We’ve made some progress
towards understanding our responses to swearing by identifying
some of the factors that make swearing more or less offensive.
Let’s continue in that vein now, by zooming in on the problem of
how to make and apply sensible rules about swearing. In doing so,
we’re going to be led by a need to find a sensible answer to the ques-
tion: what are we doing when we swear?

Who cares what we do with swearing?

The answer to this question matters. Usually, when we object to

something that someone says, we’re objecting not to the words
they use but to what they are doing with those words. former US
president Bill Clinton’s notorious pronouncement, ‘I did not have
sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky’, is notorious not
because of the particular words he uttered but because by uttering
those words in the context he uttered them, he lied about a polit-
ically important matter (and also, of course, because the lie was
about the salacious topic of the president’s inappropriate sexual re-
lationship with his intern). His words would not have been at all
114 For F*ck’s Sake

objectionable if they had been true. And if he’d lied by using a dif-
ferent arrangement of words—​like, ‘It’s false that Monica Lewinsky
and I had any sexual interaction’—​his utterance would have been
just as objectionable as the one he in fact made.
Judgements about exactly what someone is doing with their
words can have life-​or-​death consequences. The tragic case of
Derek Bentley is a vivid illustration of this. Bentley was a mentally
disabled British man who was hanged for the murder of a police
officer in 1953, when he was nineteen years old. Bentley and his
sixteen-​year-​old friend, Christopher Craig, were caught by po-
lice attempting to burgle a warehouse. When a police officer asked
Craig to hand over his gun, Bentley reportedly shouted, ‘Let him
have it, Chris!’. Craig began to fire, injuring one police officer and
killing another. In court, Bentley’s fate hinged on the question of
whether by shouting ‘Let him have it, Chris!’, he had been ordering
Craig to fire at the police—​in which case, given what happened
afterwards, it makes sense to view Bentley as a murderer—​or
whether he had simply been urging Craig to hand over the gun, in
which case he didn’t murder anyone. It was under the former in-
terpretation that Bentley’s exclamation was introduced in court by
the prosecution. Both Bentley and Craig were convicted of murder,
but since Craig was a minor, only Bentley faced the death penalty.
The case was controversial from the outset. It was the focus of the
1991 film, Let Him Have It, in which Christopher Ecclestone played
Bentley. Bentley was granted a posthumous royal pardon in 1993,
and his conviction was overturned in 1998.
Even in less dramatic situations, it can be difficult to work out
what people are doing with their words. Was your colleague who
suggested continuing your discussion over dinner asking you on
a date or simply letting you know that he was hungry? Was that
neighbour who described your outfit as ‘bold’ insulting you or
complimenting you? Was that stern stranger who just advised you
not to park your car outside her house threatening you or merely
cautioning you?
 A regulatory fucking mess 115

Grappling with ambiguities like these is a common feature of

our communication with others. Things can be even more con-
fusing when swearing is involved. Our strong emotional reactions
to swearing can get in the way of thinking clearly about what the
speaker was doing. We might get the impression that someone was
threatening us simply because they swore, but perhaps we were
wrong. We might feel that the swearer was being aggressive, but
perhaps it’s just our shock at their unexpected swearing that led us
to think that. To make sensible judgements about when swearing
is objectionable, we need a way to cut through our emotional
responses to swearing—​but we also need a way to judge when our
emotional responses to swearing are relevant.

A lack of clear fucking guidelines

Analysing the offensiveness of swearing by looking at what the

speaker is doing when they swear does sometimes happen in the
wild. We’ve seen, from the US concept of fighting words, that in
certain circumstances a person who swears is viewed as provoking
violence. Over the years, various court cases have explored the
difference between swearing that constitutes fighting words and
swearing that does not. Swearing looks ideally suited to fighting
words: it’s a good way of expressing disrespect, and expressing dis-
respect can be highly provocative. But not all ways of swearing are
provocative in the right way: we’ve seen that some ways of swearing
are more powerful and dramatic expressions of disrespect than
others, and some aren’t expressions of disrespect at all. Not all ways
of swearing can plausibly be viewed as acts likely to breach the
peace. This is something that the courts have learned the hard way,
as when Paul Robert Cohen was arrested in 1968 for ‘maliciously
and willfully disturb[ing] the peace . . . by . . . offensive conduct’ and
imprisoned for thirty days after wearing a jacket emblazoned with
the words Fuck the Draft (a reference to the draft of US men into the
116 For F*ck’s Sake

army to fight in the Vietnam War) inside the Los Angeles County
courthouse, but successfully appealed his conviction in 1971. The
resulting decision—​ Cohen v. California—​ remains a landmark
in the debate about what sort of swearing can get you arrested. In
reaching the decision, the court considered what Cohen had been
doing by wearing the jacket. After noting that he didn’t act vio-
lently, threaten violence, or even speak before his arrest, the Court
reflected: ‘The conviction quite clearly rests upon the asserted of-
fensiveness of the words Cohen used to convey his message to the
public. The only “conduct” which the State sought to punish is the
fact of communication’. In other words, apart from using a swear
word to communicate his opinion about—​as the Court put it—​
‘the inutility or immorality of the draft’, Cohen didn’t do anything
that could have got him arrested. The Court ruled out the possi-
bility that Cohen’s wearing of the jacket could constitute fighting
words, and in doing so, it made reference to one of the factors we
considered in the previous chapter: it noted that Cohen’s swearing
was not direct. ‘No individual actually or likely to be present could
reasonably have regarded the words on appellant’s jacket as a direct
personal insult’, said the Court.
The Cohen v. California judgement was a satisfyingly clear anal-
ysis of what Cohen was doing by wearing his sweary jacket in the
context where he wore it—​but anyone hoping that this was the first
step on a path to clear and systematic thinking about swearing in
US law is going to be disappointed. A confusing series of decisions
followed. In 1973, a US radio station played George Carlin’s ‘filthy
words’ comedy skit about the seven words you can’t say on the air-
waves. The broadcast included the seven words in question, which
are shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, and tits. A father
who claimed to have been listening with his fifteen-​year-​old son
complained to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).
The broadcaster, Pacifica, responded by noting that it had aired
a warning about the ‘sensitive language’ in the monologue, and
defended its value as a commentary on attitudes towards language.
 A regulatory fucking mess 117

The FCC upheld the complaint and the Supreme Court agreed,
taking the view that listeners should be able to expect not to have
‘indecent’ material broadcast into their homes and the ears of their
children (FCC v. Pacifica Found. 1978).
From this point, things get really confusing. When the Irish
singer Bono accepted an award at the Golden Globes in 2003 with
the words ‘This is really, really fucking brilliant’, the FCC initially
took no action in response to the 234 complaints it received. The
rationale for this inaction was that, in saying what he did, Bono
did not describe sex or excretion, which he would have needed
to do in order to bring his utterance under the remit of inde-
cency regulation—​and anyway, he only swore once. Less than a
year later, however, following lobbying by pro-​censorship groups,
the FCC changed its mind. This time, it reasoned that ‘given the
core meaning of the “F-​Word”, any use of that word or a varia-
tion, in any context, inherently has a sexual connotation’ (Federal
Communications Commission 2004). According to this line of
thinking, every time you say ‘fucking’, you’re talking about sex.
This means that Bono’s remark translates as something like—​and
I’m just guessing here—​My erect penis is especially honoured by this
recognition of my work. The view of fucking taken by the FCC here
contradicted previous legal rulings (including Cohen) as well as
the opinion of linguists writing about fuck and made it difficult for
broadcasters to guess what sort of language might attract unwanted
attention from the FCC. Caution was the result. The chilling effect
on free speech was dramatically illustrated eight months later in
November 2004, when the American ABC Television Network de-
cided to air the fuck-​filled World War II movie Saving Private Ryan
in honour of Veterans Day. Sixty-​six ABC affiliates decided against
broadcasting the movie and mentioned confusing FCC decision-​
making as the reason for their caution (Fairman 2006). But its
broadcast by the remaining affiliates led to yet another confusing
result. The broadcast attracted fuck-​based complaints to the FCC,
yet despite the FCC’s every-​fuck-​is-​indecent ruling in response to
118 For F*ck’s Sake

complaints about Bono a decade earlier, it decided that the use of

fuck in Saving Private Ryan was acceptable. Anyone studying these
rulings in the hope of drawing conclusions about what makes
swearing acceptable in some cases and unacceptable in others is
going to be left scratching their head.
A large part of the problem here is the way that the FCC
operates: rather than proactively creating polices around what
words it is acceptable to broadcast and under what circumstances,
it relies upon complaints from the public to bring problematic
cases to its attention. This system is open to influence by pro-​
censorship lobbying groups, like the Parents Television Council
and the American Family Association, whose campaigns have led
the FCC to rule as unacceptable instances of swearing that most
people do not regard as problematic.1 Other groups, like the UK’s
BBFC and Ofcom, do periodically undertake and publish audi-
ence research to develop specific guidelines around acceptable lan-
guage. But even so, the helpfulness of such guidelines is limited,
since they reflect audience views but do not analyse, question, or
challenge those views. As a result, although those guidelines are
a useful reference point for most cases of everyday, common-​or-​
garden swearing, they are less useful—​even harmful—​in unusual
cases. Unusual cases include those where a film realistically depicts
a community in which certain words that are widely viewed as of-
fensive are used inoffensively or even affectionately—​as cunt can
be in certain Scottish communities; a point made by the team be-
hind the Glasgow-​based 2012 film, The Angel’s Share, in response to
the BBFC’s decision to rate it 18 rather than 15 due to the film’s co-
pious cunts. While organizations like the BBFC aim to reflect public
opinions rather than create them, the effect of their enforcing their
guidelines is to reinforce the prevailing view—​in the case of The

1 Fairman reports: ‘Of the 234 total complaints received [by the FCC with regard to

Bono’s appearance in the Golden Globe Awards show], 217 were part of an organized
campaign launched by the Parents Television Council’ (2006, 38).
 A regulatory fucking mess 119

Angel’s Share, the view that cunt is always a highly offensive word.
This makes it more difficult to challenge public opinions about the
offensiveness of certain words.

A way forward: the nudity analogy

We need to avoid confusion and promote fairness in regulations

around swearing. Were rule makers to provide specific guidance
about what sorts of factors make an instance of swearing partic-
ularly objectionable, this could clear up confusion and promote
free expression, since people could more confidently anticipate the
likely reaction to their swearing and avoid swearing in a way that
is likely to attract more retaliation than they are prepared to deal
with. To see approximately what such guidance might look like,
we can look to the legal guidance around public nudity. Exposing
one’s body in public is, like swearing, an activity that can be benign
or morally concerning, depending on the circumstances. Laws
around public nudity vary by state in the US, with some states
simply prohibiting nudity. In the case of other states, however,
the intent of the person who goes nude matters. For example, in
Colorado, nudity ‘done with intent to arouse or to satisfy the sexual
desire of any person’ is an offence. In many cases, it also matters
whether the person could be expected to anticipate the reaction of
any onlookers: in Arkansas, indecent exposure must happen either
in a public place or ‘[u]‌nder circumstances in which [the person
who exposes themself] knows [their] conduct is likely to cause
affront or alarm’ ([Link] 2022). In the UK, the guidance is rela-
tively clear. The CPS explains what naturism is and states that, in
regulating it, ‘a balance needs to be struck between the naturist’s
right to freedom of expression and the right of the wider public to
be protected from harassment, alarm and distress’ (CPS 2022). Like
swearing, public nudity can, in the UK, amount to an offence under
section 5 of the Public Order Act provided that certain conditions
120 For F*ck’s Sake

are met: to qualify, the nudity must be accompanied by threatening,

abusive, or disorderly behaviour, and it must take place within
hearing or sight of someone likely to be caused harassment, alarm,
or distress. Where the nudity has a sexual content—​such as where
the nude person intends to cause alarm or distress as a result of
someone seeing the genitals specifically—​it may amount to a sexual
offence. Other countries, of course, have stricter laws about public
nudity, and even liberal France takes a dim view of it: in July 2015,
Swiss performance artist Milo Moiré was arrested and spent a night
in jail after posing naked for selfies with tourists in Paris. She had
previously done something similar in Switzerland and Germany
without getting arrested (Hall 2015).
How do we get clear about the ways in which the offensiveness of
swearing interacts with the intentions of the swearer and the effects
(or likely effects) on other people? We’ll zoom in on this in the next
chapter.
 9
How to do things with swearing

We’ve arrived at quite a mind-​boggling list of factors that can af-

fect how offensive swearing is. Confronted with another person’s
Fuck you! our calculations about how offensive they’re being need
to take into account who they are, who they’re speaking to, the re-
lationship between who they are and who they’re speaking to, who
is listening, what tone they’re using, how polite the social context
is, whether the context makes it likely that they’re threatening or
harassing or bullying the other person . . . with so much to think
about, it’s little wonder that our reactions to (and regulations about)
swearing are all over the place. How on earth are we supposed to
react sensibly to swearing, in practice? This is what we’re going to
turn to next. Armed with our theoretical insights about things that
make swearing more or less objectionable, we’re going to come up
with a framework upon which regulators can build sensible and co-
herent rules about swearing.

Acts, effects, intentions, predictions

If you can bear just a little more theory, traditional philosophy of

language can help us out here. In 1955, Oxford philosopher John
Langshaw Austin delivered a series of lectures at Harvard University
entitled How to Do Things with Words. Austin began from the ob-
servation that language is not simply a tool to describe or refer to
things in the world. We also use language to perform various speech
acts. For example, we can use words to promise, assert, apologise,
challenge, ask, resign, accept an offer, issue a warning, and so on.
122 For F*ck’s Sake

In some cases, there is nothing more to doing a certain act than

uttering certain words. If you want to apologise to Marley, you can
simply say ‘I apologise’ to Marley. Once you’ve done that, you’ve
apologised. And if you want to promise Owly that you’ll pay him
£100 tomorrow, you can do that simply by saying to him ‘I promise
to pay you £100 tomorrow’. When we say things like ‘I apologise’, ‘I
promise’, ‘I resign’, ‘I accept’, we’re not simply describing or referring
to things in the world. Just by saying those things, we’re performing
certain acts (apologising, promising, resigning, accepting). Austin
calls acts like these, which we can perform simply by uttering cer-
tain words, illocutionary acts.
It’s pretty easy to work out that someone who says ‘I apologise’ is
apologising, and that someone who says ‘I promise’ is promising,
but usually we can perform illocutionary acts without actually
saying that we’re doing it. We can apologise by saying ‘I’m sorry’,
and promise by saying ‘I give you my word that . . .’, or simply ‘I
will . . .’ in the right context. With some illocutionary acts, we al-
most never say explicitly which one we’re performing, even though
we could. For example, we don’t usually begin our assertions with ‘I
assert that . . .’ and our threats with ‘I threaten that . . .’.
Another category of speech act has to do with the effects of our
words on the person we’re speaking to. I can threaten you by saying
‘If you don’t make me a cup of tea right now, I’ll strangle you’, but if
I want to intimidate you, something else is needed. For me to intim-
idate you, you need to end up feeling intimidated. Something sim-
ilar is true for convincing, amusing, offending, annoying, alarming,
and impressing. A speaker can try to do these things, but they only
succeed if their listener is convinced, amused, offended, annoyed,
alarmed, or impressed as a result. Austin calls these sorts of acts
perlocutionary acts, and the effects that they have on the listener
perlocutionary effects.
Austin, as it happens, very briefly discusses swearing in How
to Do Things with Words. He notes that swearing expresses our
feelings, and he remarks that swearing doesn’t neatly fit the
 How to do things with swearing 123

framework he’s sketched. Swearing, he tells us, is neither an illocu-

tionary nor a perlocutionary act.1 So, why the little crash course on
Austin? Well, because when we swear, we perform other acts too,
and these acts make a difference to how objectionable our swearing
is. In fact, understanding what else we’re doing when we swear is
absolutely key to unpacking our judgements about it. Austin’s ac-
count provides us with a framework we can use to do this. Let’s take
a closer look.
One thing that Austin makes vivid is that some of the things we
do when we speak relate to the effects of our words on our listeners,
while we can do other things regardless of what effect we have on
listeners. Rules that regulate swearing—​and other sorts of objec-
tionable behaviour, for that matter—​are concerned with behaviour
that affects other people in certain ways. Nobody is interested in
making rules to prohibit or censor swearing by people who are alone
and out of earshot of anyone else, or in TV shows that will never
be broadcast to the public. This focus on the effects of swearing is
reflected in the language used in rules that are commonly used to
regulate swearing: laws that prohibit behaviour likely to breach the
peace, distress onlookers, provoke violence, and so on. People who
swear in certain ways and in certain contexts can be arrested under
these laws. We saw above that some organisations that regulate
swearing take things a step further by proactively researching how
swearing will affect people, and using this research to inform their

1 Why not an illocutionary act? His explanation here is limited and involves an appeal

to (his own) intuition. Even so, he remarks that ‘the illocutionary act is a conventional
act: an act done as conforming to a convention’ (Austin 1962, 105). So, in order for saying
‘I apologise’ to count as apologising or saying ‘I promise’ to count as promising, speakers
of the language must take saying those words to be performing those acts. For Austin,
the test of whether something is an illocutionary act is whether we could, if we wanted
to, perform it simply by saying we’re performing it. This means that while apologising,
promising, threatening, and asserting are illocutionary acts, swearing is not: we can’t
swear simply by saying, ‘I swear’. (We can, of course, use this form of words to swear in
another sense of ‘swear’—​the sense that has to do with promising or sincerely asserting
something.) Something similar is true, as Austin notes, of insinuating and implying,
which are not illocutionary acts. We can’t successfully insinuate or imply something by
saying ‘I insinuate’ and ‘I imply’.
124 For F*ck’s Sake

rules; this approach is taken in the UK by Ofcom and the BBFC.

The FCC relies on complaints from the public before enforcing
rules against broadcasters for the language they use. This focus on
the effects of swearing suggests that, when we’re trying to work out
whether someone who swears is doing something wrong (and if
so, how wrong), we should focus on their perlocutionary acts. That
means that perlocutionary acts like offending, upsetting, alarming,
intimidating, and distressing people are relevant to judging what’s
objectionable about swearing. Illocutionary acts like asserting,
threatening, promising, reprimanding, and warning look to be less
relevant.
Except . . . not so fast. Things are more complicated. We all
know that certain illocutionary acts tend to go hand in hand with
certain perlocutionary acts. By threatening someone (an illocu-
tionary act), we often intimidate them (a perlocutionary act);
by reprimanding someone (illocutionary), we often humiliate
them (perlocutionary); by forgiving someone (illocutionary), we
often soothe them (perlocutionary); and so on. Whether or not a
speaker performed a certain illocutionary act can make a differ-
ence to whether or not it’s appropriate to hold the speaker morally
responsible—​that is, praiseworthy or blameworthy—​for the perlo-
cutionary effects on the listener. If your neighbour feels intimidated
because you threatened them, it’s appropriate to blame you for
their feeling intimidated. But if your neighbour feels intimidated
merely because you offered to mow their lawn, it’s inappropriate to
blame you.
Not only do certain perlocutionary effects predictably follow
from certain things that we say, but sometimes we say what we
say because we want to bring about certain perlocutionary effects.
I might threaten you because I want to intimidate you. I might rep-
rimand you in public because I want to humiliate you. Or I might
forgive you because I want to soothe you. If we’re inclined to blame
or praise someone for the perlocutionary effects of what they say,
we’re going to blame or praise them even more in cases where they
 How to do things with swearing 125

intended those perlocutionary effects than in cases where they

merely foresaw those effects.
In fact, acting with the intention to bring about certain effects,
and whether a person could be expected to predict that their
behaviour will have certain effects, is often more important than
whether those effects actually occur. The law in many countries
prohibits and penalises attempted murder, conspiracy to commit
a crime, and dangerous driving even in cases where nobody
is harmed. And laws that are used to regulate swearing focus on
the likely effects of swearing, rather than its actual effects. In the
US, fighting words—​which, as we’ve seen, have been taken to en-
compass certain instances of swearing—​are words that ‘are likely
cause a fight’. In the UK, Section 5 of the Public Order Act prohibits
‘threatening or abusive words . . . within the hearing or sight of a
person likely to be caused harassment, alarm or distress thereby’.
Breach-​of-​the-​peace legislation, which in several countries has
been used to arrest people for swearing, applies in cases not only
where someone has actually breached the peace but also in cases
of behaviour likely to do so.2 What we intend, and what is likely to
follow from our actions, is important regardless of the effects we
actually produce.3

2 A few examples: in England and Wales, the leading authority is the 1982 case of R

v. Howell (QB 416; [1981] 3 All ER 383 (Ct. App.). Australian law has also adopted the
conception set out in Howell. In Scotland, the relevant legislation is Criminal Justice
and Licensing (Scotland) Act §38(1) (2010). In the US—​where attempts to prosecute
breaches of the peace have occasionally been challenged on the basis that they are
unconstitutional—​the 1936 Texas case Head v. State (96 S.W.2d 981 (Ct. Crim. App.)
defines breach of the peace as an act ‘which disturbs, or threatens to disturb, the tran-
quility enjoyed by citizens’.
3 Why have I focused on the law here, rather than on other sorts of rules around

swearing? Simply because the law is a particularly rich source of explicit information
about how it’s possible to behave objectionably merely by attempting to do something
that one fails to do, and by doing something likely to lead to certain effects which don’t
occur. The reason for the law’s detail here is probably practical: criminalising even failed
attempts at wrongdoing and behaviour that is likely to lead to certain effects even if it
doesn’t means that prosecutors are not burdened with having to prove that any negative
effects actually occurred, and that people can be intercepted and arrested before they ac-
tually do any harm.
126 For F*ck’s Sake

Sweary acts

Let’s bring this back to swearing. Offending people by swearing

is a perlocutionary act, and therefore not entirely within the con-
trol of the speaker. But causing offence is an easily predictable
effect of swearing—​at least for those of us who are fluent in the
language we’re using, able to understand applicable social norms
and adjust our behaviour accordingly, and familiar enough with
the culture we’re in to grasp whether it’s inappropriate to swear
in the current social context. (That’s not to say that we never mis-
judge things. Many of us have experienced the awkwardness that
can follow an ill-​advised Bollocks! in the company of people who
turn out to be disapproving. Reading the room isn’t an exact sci-
ence.) In general, then, it’s appropriate to hold people respon-
sible for causing offence when they swear. And indeed, this is
what we do.
However, our informal attitudes towards swearing are one
thing; formal rules are another. When it comes to formulating and
enforcing rules about swearing, offence is only a very small part
of the story. A person who causes offence by swearing, but who
doesn’t use the strongest swear words, who doesn’t swear in the
sorts of aggravating ways described in the previous chapter, and
who doesn’t, in the course of their swearing, also do anything that
would be objectionable even without swearing (such as threatening
or slandering another person), does something only very mildly
objectionable. An example is someone who unthinkingly exclaims
‘Shit!’ after accidentally dropping food on their lap. Such a person
might raise eyebrows if they’re in polite company, but punishing
them would be inappropriate. It would be comparable to punishing
them for other potentially offensive minor infractions of etiquette,
like addressing another person in an overfamiliar way or not fol-
lowing a strict dress code. Rules about swearing need to focus on
 How to do things with swearing 127

behaviour that’s rather more heavyweight than this, which is to say

that they need to focus on behaviour that does more than merely
cause people to feel offended. That means we need a way to evaluate
aspects of sweary behaviour other than what was said and whether
anyone was offended.
Here is where Austin’s framework is useful. To work out how
objectionably a person behaves when they swear, we can ask: what
else was the speaker doing, besides swearing? Did they merely
mutter ‘Oh, bollocks!’ to nobody in particular when they used the
wrong spoon to add sugar to their tea at the church fundraiser?
Or did they swear in a way that expressed disrespect, by doing
something like screaming ‘Fuck you, Father!’ while the vicar was
announcing the results of the embroidery contest? If the speaker’s
swearing expressed disrespect, we can then focus on the perlocu-
tionary effects of the speaker’s behaviour to work out how serious
a matter it is. What did the speaker do that involved an effect on
other people? Perhaps the vicar dropped her tea; perhaps the or-
ganist choked on his custard cream; perhaps those around the
swearer feared for their safety. Were any of these effects morally
concerning—​that is, were they negative, undeserved by whoever
experienced them, and the sorts of effects that we’d view as sig-
nificant enough to warrant considering taking action against
the speaker even if they hadn’t involved swearing? If so, can the
speaker reasonably have been expected to foresee that those effects
were likely?4 If so, did the speaker intend to produce those effects?

4 To keep things relatively simple, I’m glossing over an important issue here. Often,

it’s appropriate to blame a person who foresees that certain effects of their actions are
merely possible, even if not likely. For example, people who drive while drunk are widely
viewed as blameworthy even when it’s not likely (i.e. highly probable) that they will cause
any harm by doing so. It matters only that it is somewhat probable that they might cause
harm. How much risk of negative consequences we’re willing to tolerate before blaming
someone varies depending on the possible consequences: if those consequences are very
bad, we’ll want to avoid even a small risk that they might occur.
128 For F*ck’s Sake

Were any morally concerning negative effects likely or intended

even if they didn’t actually arise? These questions—​and, admit-
tedly, it’s quite a mind-​boggling list—​help us work out whether the
speaker did anything wrong, and if so, how wrong. Importantly,
they are questions that we can ask of non-​sweary behaviour, too,
in trying to work out how objectionable it is. Comparing sweary
behaviour with similar non-​sweary behaviour can help ensure that
we respond proportionately to swearing—​in other words, it can
help ensure that a person’s swearing doesn’t lead us to view their
behaviour as more objectionable than it actually is.
Now, as I said, this is quite a perplexing range of factors to con-
sider when making judgements about swearing. Thankfully,
though, there’s a way to simplify it a little. One way involves
using our intuitions about non-​ sweary behaviour to calibrate
our judgements about swearing, in order to help ensure that our
judgements about swearing do not get knocked off course by the
visceral responses we sometimes have to rude words. In addition,
we can specify what, at a minimum, must be true of a speaker in
order for them to be justifiably judged blameworthy for swearing,
in particular. This minimum standard is as follows: it must be the
case that it was reasonable to expect the speaker to have foreseen
that significant, morally concerning, negative effects on others
were likely to follow from their behaviour—​regardless of whether
any such effects actually materialised. Any speaker who does not
meet this condition is not blameworthy for swearing. All this is
summarised in the diagram below.
Did That Sweary Speaker Do Did the speaker’s swearing have any significant,
Anything Wrong? A Rough Guide For morally concerning, negative effects on others?
Regulators. NO YES

Is it reasonable to expect the Is it reasonable to expect the

speaker to have viewed any speaker to have foreseen
such negative effects as that those effects were
likely? NO NO likely?

YES YES

Did the speaker swear with Did the speaker swear with
the intention of causing such the intention of causing
negative effects? those effects?

Significant negative effects

Speaker foresight
Speaker intention
YES NO NO YES
Speaker did not act
wrongly by swearing

Speaker did not act

wrongly by swearing

Compare to non-sweary acts where the actor behaves recklessly with

regard to whether such negative consequences might follow

Compare to non-sweary acts where the actor foresees but

does not intend to cause such negative effects

BLAMEWORTHINESS
Compare to non-sweary acts where the actor intends to cause
such negative effects but fails

Compare to non-sweary acts where the actor succeeds in their

intention to cause such negative effects
130 For F*ck’s Sake

You might be wondering: if we’re supposed to judge the blame-

worthiness of sweary behaviour by comparing it to non-​sweary
behaviour, how is this a way of judging the blameworthiness of
swearing at all? According to this view, swearing looks like merely
an aggravating factor: it can make already-​objectionable behaviour
(like, say, making threats) worse, but without any other objection-
able behaviour, it’s not objectionable enough to regulate. In this
respect, we can compare it to things like volume of speech and ag-
gressive body language.
Let’s take a moment to consider this idea of swearing as an
aggravating factor. The reality is more nuanced than it might at first
seem. Swearing cannot make the difference between whether or
not the speaker performs an illocutionary act. Chucking a fuck or a
bollocks into an utterance can’t turn it into an order or a question or
a threat if it would not otherwise have been an order or a question
or a threat, and removing swear words from a warning or a resigna-
tion or an acceptance can’t stop it being a warning or a resignation
or an acceptance. Swearing can, however, alter the mood of our il-
locutionary acts. It does this by expressing the speaker’s emotions
and their attitude towards the listener and perhaps also the social
context. A person who says to their employer ‘I fucking resign’, in-
stead of simply ‘I resign’, not only resigns but also expresses a certain
attitude towards their employer and/​or their job. By expressing the
speaker’s attitude in this way, it can intensify the act that the speaker
is performing: swearing in the course of threatening someone typ-
ically emphasises the threat, making it seem more credible, au-
thentic, and—​well, threatening. If the illocutionary act in question
is objectionable, as threats often are, the addition of swearing can
be an aggravating factor. It can, in other words, make an already-​
objectionable act yet more objectionable. But this is not always the
case, and it depends on the context and the relationship between
the speaker and the listener. In some cases, swearing in the course
of performing an objectionable illocutionary act can indicate to the
listener that one is not serious, and so mitigates or cancels rather
 How to do things with swearing 131

than aggravates the act. In cases where the illocutionary act in

question is not objectionable, mitigating or cancelling it can turn it
into something objectionable. The sweary insult in ‘I apologise, you
shithead’ might indicate to the listener that the speaker’s apology
is insincere, which undermines the reconciliatory effect that
apologising typically has, and might make a future reconciliation
more difficult. But context is key: in some cases, the same utterance
might be more reconciliatory than a swear-​free apology, because
the swearing might inject a welcome bit of levity into an otherwise
solemn business. And while swearing may in general lend a sense
of urgency to an order, in World War I the familiar, everyday order
to ‘get your fucking rifles’ was recognised as much less grave and ur-
gent than the order to ‘get your rifles’ (Brophy and Partridge 1930).
The ways in which swearing can affect the mood of illocutionary
acts, emphasising some and undermining others, might seem
hopelessly complicated. An awareness of the factors that produce
these effects helps lend some order to the chaos. We looked at some
of those factors in the previous chapter. Considering questions, like
Would this utterance been more or less objectionable if it had been
made in a different tone of voice/​by a different sort of speaker/​to a
different sort of listener/​accompanied by different body language? can
help us compare and evaluate different cases and isolate whether it
was the swearing itself or some other aspect of the behaviour that
made the act objectionable.
Things are different with perlocutionary acts. In some cases,
swearing might be merely an aggravating factor: a speaker who
intimidates another person might intimidate them even more if
they swear, and if intimidation is objectionable, it is more so if it
is emphasised. But, unlike with illocutionary acts, swearing can
make the difference between whether or not certain perlocu-
tionary acts are performed at all. A speaker who intimidates a lis-
tener by swearing might not have intimidated them at all had they
not sworn. A speaker might, by swearing, fail to persuade a listener
who would have been persuaded had the speaker not sworn. And
132 For F*ck’s Sake

so on. When we’re trying to assess how objectionable a speaker’s

behaviour is when the speaker has sworn in the course of per-
forming a certain perlocutionary act, then, we can make prog-
ress by considering questions like If the speaker had not sworn,
would the listener still have been intimidated/​distressed/​shocked/​
traumatised by the speaker’s behaviour? and Had the speaker not
sworn, what other behaviours could they have engaged in that would
have likely produced similar effects on the listener? The former
sorts of questions will help us work out how much of a contribu-
tion the speaker’s swearing made to the objectionable nature of the
behaviour: if the behaviour would have been about as objectionable
even without the swearing, then the swearing is a red herring; if the
behaviour would have been much less objectionable without the
swearing, then we need to explore why. The latter sort of question is
helpful in keeping swearing in perspective: if, for example, aggres-
sive body language would probably have produced similar effects in
the listener, then the speaker’s swearing looks to be about as objec-
tionable as using certain body language.5
What about cases in which swearing is explicitly forbidden
by the rules—​ as it is, for example, in many rules governing
broadcasting—​and in which those who break the rules face pun-
ishment? Is swearing more objectionable in cases like this? Well,
yes and no. We saw, from the offence escalation story, that there is
something objectionable about behaving in a way that one knows to

5 Though we also need to consider questions about whether the speaker could have

been expected to foresee the effects of their behaviour, and whether they intended such
effects. It’s perhaps plausible to hold that speakers have a greater awareness of the likely
effects of their swearing than they do of the likely effects of their body language, and
that they have greater control over the former than the latter. For example, the speaker’s
swearing and being tall are both things that could potentially contribute to a listener’s
being intimidated by the speaker. However, while we can reasonably expect the speaker
to foresee that their swearing is likely to intimidate the listener and to exercise the choice
to abstain from swearing in order to avoid intimidating the listener, it might not be rea-
sonable to expect the speaker to foresee that their being tall is likely to intimidate the
listener (we’re often unaware of exactly how we’re perceived by others), and it is certainly
not reasonable to expect the speaker to choose not to be so tall.
 How to do things with swearing 133

be disliked—​at least, without good reason. The more salient to the

listener is the fact that the speaker knows it to be disliked, the more
objectionable is the swearing to the listener. If there is an explicit
rule against swearing, which it’s reasonable to expect the speaker
to know about, there’s a sense in which this makes the speaker’s
swearing more objectionable than it would have otherwise been.
On the other hand, though, it tends to happen that explicit rules
about swearing just formalise what everyone is expected to know
anyway. While breaking explicit rules is a new way for a sweary
speaker to express their disrespect for those around them, swearing
in such a context expresses disrespect even without explicit rules.
Something different applies in cases where there are explicit
rules against swearing in contexts where it is otherwise not clear
that swearing is inappropriate. Pubs are generally contexts where
swearing is tolerated, although some pubs, at some times of day, are
more family-​oriented, in which case swearing is more likely to be
inappropriate. Often, it is difficult for newcomers to distinguish be-
tween pubs where swearing is tolerated and those where swearing
is not tolerated. Because of that, the management of the latter sorts
of pubs sometimes have signs, prominently displayed near the bar,
asking customers not to swear. A new customer who walks into a
pub where swearing is not tolerated and proceeds to have a sweary
conversation behaves objectionably if the pub is one of those that
prominently displays signs asking customers not to swear but does
not behave objectionably if there is no such sign.
Of course, people break rules for all sorts of reasons, and doing
so is not always wrong or bad. Some rules are bad rules. Rosa Parks
broke the rules when, in 1955, she refused to give up her seat on an
Alabama bus to a white person, but she did nothing wrong. Rules
that regulate swearing, like other sorts of rules, should on balance
make the world a better place than it would be if there were no such
rules. Creating rules that meet this standard is often difficult—​and
one purpose of the arguments we’re looking at here is to try to make
that task a little easier.
134 For F*ck’s Sake

Beyond speech acts

In comparing sweary and non-​sweary objectionable acts, we don’t

have to stick too closely to Austin’s framework. Our lesson from
Austin can be: speaking is a way of doing things, some of which
relate to the effects of the speaker on others and some of which are
predictable ways of bringing about effects on others, and the things
we do when we speak can often also be done in other ways. For our
purposes, doing things can incorporate more than illocutionary and
perlocutionary acts. Acts like lying, slandering, insinuating, and in-
sulting are neither illocutionary nor perlocutionary acts, but they
are ways in which speakers can produce morally concerning effects,
sometimes with foresight or intention.
There’s another interesting thing that emerges from reflecting
on speech acts: some speech acts can be performed without using
words at all. Usually, we use language to make promises (I promise
to . . .) but sometimes children make promises to each other by
‘pinky promising’: entwining their pinky fingers. We can issue
a warning using words (Look out!), with images (think of those
warning signs depicting falling rocks), or with a gesture, like
holding up a hand. We can intimidate using words, gestures, or—​as
in The Godfather—​a horse’s head in a bed. It should not come as a
surprise, then, that it’s possible to swear without using words. In
many cultures, holding one’s middle finger aloft is regarded as an
offensive gesture. Known as ‘the bird’, ‘flipping off ’, or simply ‘the
finger’, it originated in ancient Rome and Greece, where the cynic
philosopher Diogenes is said to have used it (Diogenes Laërtius
c. 300, VI.2.34). It means approximately the same thing as Fuck
you!: the finger is used in roughly the same way as this expression, it
is offensive in roughly the same contexts, and it offends for the same
reasons (i.e. it expresses disrespect). Like swear words, it has taboo
connotations: the gesture has long been taken to represent the penis
and to be associated with sexual penetration (Rosewarne 2013,
51ff). Also like swear words, its offensiveness can be explained by
 How to do things with swearing 135

offence escalation: it is a gesture that is disliked and known to be

disliked, and in light of this, we are offended when people whom
we know to understand all this make the gesture at us. At the same
time, just like its verbal equivalents, there are contexts where the
middle finger can be used in a humourous or even in an affec-
tionate way.
The finger is not the only gesture that can be understood as a
non-​verbal form of swearing. Others include the V-​sign (which
resembles a backward ‘victory’ or ‘peace’ gesture), used in the UK,
Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand, which is a slightly less offen-
sive version of the middle finger; the fist-​raising, bicep-​slapping
gesture known by various names including the bras d’honneur and
Italian salute; the Greek moutza (arm extended, fingers spread,
palm facing the person one is addressing, sometimes emphasised
by slapping the back of the extended hand with the other hand);
the thumbs-​up gesture (offensive in Islamic cultures); the ‘fig’ ges-
ture, used in Turkey and elsewhere (which resembles the hand ges-
ture that, in places including the UK and the US, adults use when
pretending to steal children’s noses); the gesture used in the US
and other cultures to mean okay (thumb and index finger making
a circle, other fingers extended), which is offensive in Brazil; and
the palm-​up, index-​finger-​curling gesture that in some countries
is used to beckon, but which is offensive in many Asian coun-
tries. These gestures typically have taboo origins, although these
origins are often unknown by the people who use the gestures,
and sometimes—​as in the case of the V-​sign—​it is unclear what
its origins are.6 They can all be thought of as non-​verbal forms of
swearing, although the variety of ways in which one can swear with
these gestures is more limited than the ways in which one can swear
with words. The middle finger is an effective way to express Fuck
you! but cannot adequately express, say, Whichever Tory fucklump

6 For more on offensive hand gestures, see LeFevre (2011).

136 For F*ck’s Sake

decided that British schools must promote ‘British values’ is an em-

barrassing fantasist bell-​end.
Right then. We have a framework for making sensible decisions
about swearing. Where does this leave our gut-​feeling judgements
about when it’s appropriate to feel offended by swearing? Am
I trying to convince you that those judgements are wrong? Well, no.
But our gut-​feeling judgements do leave room for bias, which—​if
our judgements are allowed to shape formal regulations without
any sort of sense-​check—​could lead to injustice. In the next chapter
we’ll explore how this might happen, and how we can be on guard
against it.
 10
Fairer swearers

You might be forgiven for thinking that all this theory about speech
acts is a bit much. After all, thinking about what speakers are
doing when they swear, as a way to gauge the offensiveness of their
swearing, is not a novel idea. Unconsciously, we do this all the time
when we form intuitive, gut-​feeling judgements about how serious
an instance of swearing is. Swearing’s power to shock and offend
very often means that, when someone swears, we hear (rather than
infer) the threat they are making, or the anger they are expressing,
or the contempt they are conveying. It’s not something we need to
stop and think about; it’s something we perceive directly and un-
mediated. In this respect, the way in which we pick up on what
people are doing when they swear resembles the way in which the
philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein claimed we pick up on how they
are feeling. In Zettel, he wrote:

‘We see emotion’.—​As opposed to what?—​We do not see fa-

cial contortions and make inferences from them (like a doctor
framing a diagnosis) to joy, grief, boredom. We describe a face
immediately as sad, radiant, bored, even when we are unable to
give any other description of the features.—​Grief, one would like
to say, is personified in the face. (1970, 225)

Because of this, it might seem that we don’t need Austin and his
speech acts in order to work out what someone is doing when they
swear—​whether, for example, one person’s Get the fuck away from
me constitutes a threat, or whether another person’s He’s a bit of a
138 For F*ck’s Sake

cunt is a warning. What does the framework sketched in the pre-

vious chapter add to our existing understanding?

Putting the brakes on bias

Being reflective and explicit about how we translate our gut-​feeling

judgements about the offensiveness of swearing into explicit claims
about what a person was doing when they swore and how that af-
fected the offensiveness of their swearing has great benefits for un-
derstanding swearing and responding to it fairly and appropriately.
For one thing, it’s useful in enabling us to assess and compare the of-
fensiveness of separate instances of swearing. Thinking about what
acts the swearer was performing in each case, and how we know,
helps us catalogue and compare what (if anything) the swearer
did wrong in each case; which in turn gives us a way to work out
whether our gut-​feeling responses were correct in each case. And
sometimes our gut-​feeling judgements do get it wrong. They can
conceal prejudice and bias, which—​if we care about treating people
fairly—​are important to identify and set aside. For example, there’s
empirical evidence that Black men tend to be viewed as larger and
more threatening than similar-​sized white men, especially by white
people (Wilson et al. 2017). This means that, if we rely solely on
gut-​feeling judgements about how offensive swearing is, people are
more likely to view swearing as threatening when the swearer is a
Black man compared to when the swearer is not a man or not Black.
This in turn will lead to Black men being judged (and in some cases
punished) more harshly for swearing than other people.
There is evidence of this happening. In the UK, Denzel Cassius
Harvey’s 2010 conviction (later overturned) for swearing at the
police during a drugs search was based on a pretty mild case of
swearing. He said, ‘Fuck this, man. I ain’t been smoking nothing’,
‘Told you, you wouldn’t find fuck all’, and (when asked if he had
a middle name), ‘No, I’ve already fucking told you’. Apart from
 Fairer swearers 139

swearing repetitively at a police officer, he wasn’t doing anything

objectionable that could have justified his arrest. He wasn’t making
a threat, defaming anyone, or even uttering an insult. While it’s rea-
sonable to view his choice of words as disrespectful—​some might
say justifiably so, given that he was not carrying any drugs, and
given that Black men are disproportionately targeted by the po-
lice for on-​the-​spot drugs searches—​any disrespect was expressed
indirectly. By contrast, the Conservative MP Andrew Mitchell’s
act of calling police officers fucking plebs—​for which he was not
arrested, let alone convicted—​was a more serious instance of
swearing. His use of the word plebs—​a British slur for the lower
classes—​expressed his sense of social superiority to the people he
addressed, which made this an instance of a more powerful person
swearing contemptuously at a less powerful person; something
that, as we saw in the previous chapter, aggravates the offensiveness
of swearing.
Of course, we can’t cure racism and other prejudices just by trying
to respond sensibly to swearing. But we can make progress towards
fair judgements. If, instead of relying on our gut feelings to compare
the offensiveness of different instances of swearing, we identify
individual factors that make swearing more or less offensive and
which do not refer to swearers’ race, gender, accent, or other irrele-
vant considerations, we help ensure that our judgements are based
on relevant considerations.1 A person whose gut feeling leads them
to view a Black man’s swearing as more threatening than similar
swearing by a white man is more likely to revise their judgement if

1 What makes a consideration ‘irrelevant’ in this context? We can refer to broader

conceptions of equality and discrimination to answer this question. If an act is offensive,

harmful, or otherwise wrong, it is not made more so by the offender’s being a member
of a certain group based on their ethnicity, gender, religion, sexual orientation, and
so on, except when certain features of the act make these considerations relevant. For
example, desecrating a religious building is worse when the offender is a member of a
group that has historically oppressed followers of the religion in question, and we will
see in Chapter 11 that the use of slurs is generally more offensive when the speaker is not
a member of the group targeted by the slur.
140 For F*ck’s Sake

they reflect on why they found the former more threatening than
the latter than if they don’t reflect at all.
Consciously reflecting on the basis of our judgements about
swearing is a good way for us as individuals to ensure that we re-
spond fairly and appropriately to swearing, but doing so is especially
important for organisations that make and enforce regulations
about swearing—​the police, broadcasters, sports organisations,
and so on—​since such organisations have greater power than
the average person to punish and censor, and they typically face
a greater demand to justify their decisions about swearing, espe-
cially in novel or unusual cases. There’s a spectrum of ways in which
we can engage in the right sort of reflection on swearing. At one
end, for organisations that punish or censor swearing, making and
justifying judgements about the offensiveness of swearing with ref-
erence to an explicit checklist of exacerbating factors will help in
promoting fairness, consistency, and transparency. Such a checklist
could include the sort of things that we’ve discussed from Chapter 6
onwards. At the other end of the spectrum, people who simply want
to understand and question their own attitudes to swearing can sys-
tematically interrogate their judgements by considering why they
responded to a certain instance of swearing in the way they did,
and whether they might have responded differently if the person
swearing had been a different gender, social class, race, and so
on. Midway along the spectrum we might find parents who want
to encourage their children to take a sensible, curious attitude to
swearing, and who approach this task by discussing things like con-
text, tone of voice, relationship between the speaker and listener,
and what else the speaker was doing besides swearing.

Educating our intuition

Questioning and reflecting on our gut-​feeling judgements before

we act on them is not always practical or sensible—​if we’re alarmed
 Fairer swearers 141

by a gunshot unexpectedly and at close range it’s best to dive for

cover immediately rather than wait until we’ve reflected on whether
the sound indicates a genuine threat—​but when there’s no great
urgency to act on our judgement, and especially when getting it
wrong can result in unfairness to others, we can and should reflect
before acting. As we reflect on, correct, and discuss our gut-​feeling
judgements, we train those judgements to be more accurate.
Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s ‘social intuitionist’ model of
moral judgement provides a framework that can help us understand
how this might happen. He believes that the moral judgements
we make are not the outputs of a process of reasoning. According
to this view, we come to believe things like murder is wrong and
equality is good without the help of our rational faculties. This idea
strikes us as strange; after all, we tend to think of beliefs like these
as ones that can be defended with reason, and we like to think that
we hold them because they can be defended with reason. However,
Haidt believes that although moral reasoning does have a role in
moral judgement, it’s not quite the role we think. He has argued
that our moral judgements are usually formed on the basis of our
intuition; that is, on the basis of ‘quick, automatic evaluations’ in
a process that is ‘more akin to perception’ than ‘rational reflection’
(Haidt 2001, 814). Moral intuitions can be emotional: they include
the visceral horror we feel when we hear accounts of the Holocaust
and the disgust that we feel in response to reports of sexual abuse.
Moral reasoning comes into the picture only when we’re asked by
others to explain or defend our moral judgements, or when we’re
trying to persuade someone else to change their beliefs about a
moral issue. So, our moral judgement about a particular issue—​that
murder is wrong, say—​comes before our moral reasoning about
this issue. The judgement is not caused by the reasoning. We start to
reason about it only when someone asks us, ‘Hey, why do you think
murder is wrong?’, or when we encounter someone who insists that
there’s nothing wrong with murder, and when as a result we feel the
need to convince them otherwise.
142 For F*ck’s Sake

While Haidt (2001) believes that ‘moral reasoning is rarely the

direct cause of moral judgement’ (815), it influences our moral
judgements indirectly. The moral intuitions that we have are
shaped, in part, by our own and other people’s reasoning about
them. As a result, the moral intuitions that we start out with can
change following reflection and discussion with others, which in
turn leads our moral judgements to change. We often see this hap-
pening at a societal level—​take, for example, the increasing rec-
ognition of same-​sex marriage in societies around the world over
the last decade or so. We could tell the following social intuitionist
story about this. Same-​sex marriage was initially prohibited be-
cause of a widespread intuition that homosexuality was wrong. But
arguments against discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation
have led many people to reflect on, question, and eventually reject
their intuitive aversion to homosexuality—​and at a societal level
this has been reflected in measures like recognising same-​sex mar-
riage. Here, we have a change in moral judgement—​specifically, a
rejection of the judgement that homosexuality is wrong—​on the
basis of moral reasoning. But according to the social intuitionist
story, the change in moral judgement was not a direct result of the
moral reasoning. The change was mediated by intuition: moral
reasoning about homosexuality led to changes in people’s moral
intuitions about it, and this in turn led people (and, eventually,
societies) to change their moral judgements about homosexuality.

Sweary self-​improvement

Let’s link this back to swearing. Not everyone agrees with Haidt’s
social intuitionism about moral judgement, in part because of
how general it is. It’s a bold move to claim that all moral judge-
ment happens in this way; something that Haidt acknowledges by
emphasising that he does not present his model as ‘an established
 Fairer swearers 143

fact’ (Haidt 2001, 815). Even so, it fits the way in which we generally
respond to swearing extremely well. Swearing’s seemingly mag-
ical capacity to shock us makes us especially likely to form moral
intuitions about its wrongness. After all, when we find ourselves
judging that a fellow motorist acted wrongly when they screamed at
us to ‘Get the fuck out of my way!’, our judgement is not usually the
outcome of a dispassionate process of moral deliberation. Rather,
we simply perceive, without needing to think about it, that this
person wronged us. The immediacy of this sort of judgement, as we
have seen, means that bias can creep in unnoticed, with the result
that some people may unjustly be judged more harshly than others
for comparable acts of swearing. But Haidt’s social intuitionism
offers hope here. If he’s right, then although our moral judgements
about swearing may be intuitive and immediate, there is scope to
influence them with reason and to make them consistent and fair.
This is something we can do by explicitly reflecting on what’s wrong
with swearing, and by examining and questioning the factors that
underlie our moral judgements about it.
The upshot of this is that, contrary to first impressions, we do
need to theorise about swearing—​not because we’re incapable of
forming moral judgements about swearing without reflecting on
what lies behind those judgements but because it’s important that
our judgements about swearing should be sensible, consistent, and
fair. If you found yourself rolling your eyes while reading about the
FCC’s response to Bono’s fucking brilliant in Chapter 8, or siding
with Ken Loach when he complained about the view taken by the
BBFC of swearing in his films, this is something you can help with
right now. Chat with friends about your responses to swearing.
Be curious about how you (and they) respond as you do. Be open
to questioning and, if necessary, revising your thinking about it.
Organisations that regulate swearing tend to take their lead from
the public, and the more sensible the public is, the better the rules
will have to be.
144 For F*ck’s Sake

Ensuring a fair and just approach to dealing with offensive

language isn’t just about reacting appropriately to it, however.
Sometimes the language itself, and the act of using it, propagates
prejudice and oppression. We’re going to look at this in the next
chapter, where we consider how the norms of swearing compare to
those of slurs.
 11
Swears vs. slurs

Suppose you’re one of those people who think of themselves as

pretty liberal about swearing. You don’t see the fuss about the odd
swear dropped into conversation, and you’re certainly not going
to clutch your pearls and fret about how the world is going to hell
in a handcart simply because it’s possible to find the odd uncen-
sored shit on the internet. People need to calm the fuck down about
swearing, right? But you are likely to react differently to other forms
of offensive language. Especially if you’re one of these liberal sorts,
the thought of using a slur is apt to wipe the smile off your face
pretty quickly. Swears are a bit of fun; slurs are horrifying. What’s
the difference?
We’ve touched on slurs and how they compare and contrast
with swears a few times over the previous chapters. There are
some similarities between swearing and slurs. Both involve taboo
language—​in some sense, they’re words that we ought not to use.
Both are also forms of language that often convey the speaker’s dis-
respect. Both are tolerated—​or even welcomed—​in some contexts,
and condemned (sometimes strongly) in others. Despite these
similarities, there are important differences too. They attain their
power to offend in different ways. The sort of offence they cause
is different. And they’re different morally, not just in degree but in
kind. Slurring is a more serious matter than swearing. Let’s take a
closer look.
146 For F*ck’s Sake

The journey to offensiveness

Swear words, as we’ve seen, come to be offensive via offence escala-

tion. Offence escalation plays a different, and relatively minor, role
in how slurs come to be offensive. Generally speaking, offence esca-
lation isn’t at all necessary for slurs to become offensive.
As a case study, let’s take what is probably the most notorious
English-​language slur: the n-​word. (I’m going to avoid writing it
out in full, for reasons we’ll explore in Chapter 13.) This word is de-
rived, via Spanish and French, from the Latin word for black. Over
the centuries, it has had a variety of uses, not all of them negative.
The Oxford English Dictionary lists 1577 as the earliest written use
of it, and 1775 as the earliest written use ‘as a hostile term of abuse
or contempt’. Exactly how and when it became a slur is unclear,
but for our purposes it will suffice to make two observations. First,
it has long been widely used by white people to talk about Black
people in a disrespectful and contemptuous way. Second, much of
its use in this way predates widespread recognition by white people
that Black people are not deserving of disrespect and contempt on
account of their being Black. As a result, while it’s a taboo word
today, this wasn’t always the case. For many years, it could be used
in polite conversations among white people without causing an-
yone to recoil. The view that there is anything wrong with the word
follows on the heels of advances in the battle for universal recogni-
tion that Black people are equal to non-​Black people. This battle is
a very long way from being over, and even the most basic advances
in this area are still very recent: in the US, slavery legally ended with
the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865, and legally enforced racial
segregation ended only in 1964 with the Civil Rights Act.
Was the n-​word, used by white people ‘as a hostile term of
abuse or contempt’, offensive in the years before it became widely
recognised that Black people are equal to non-​Black people? Was
it offensive before it became widely dispreferred? Was it a slur in
 Swears vs. slurs 147

those years? Is there anything wrong with using it today ‘as a hos-
tile term of abuse or contempt’ in a context where one can be sure
that nobody who hears it is going to feel offended by it—​as might
happen if, for example, a white supremacist who lives in his parents’
soundproofed basement invites some fellow white supremacists to
their home for an n-​word-​riddled discussion about politics? The
answer to all of these questions is yes, and the same applies to other
slurs too.
Before going on to take a look at why the answer to these
questions is yes, let’s pause to note that we’ve hit upon some im-
portant differences between swears and slurs. Swears, unlike slurs,
are not hostile terms of abuse or contempt about members of a
particular group. We can certainly swear (or, for that matter, use
neutral terms) in a way that is hostile, abusive, and contemptuous,
but swearing doesn’t have to be hostile, abusive, or contemptuous,
and indeed much swearing doesn’t fall into any of these categories.
Swears, to count as swears, must be widely dispreferred; slurs need
not be widely dispreferred. Swears, unlike slurs, are not offensive
words before they become widely dispreferred. And while there’s
nothing wrong with swearing in a context where one can be sure
that nobody who hears it is going to feel offended by it, slurs are of-
fensive regardless of whether anyone feels offended.
We can make sense of some of these differences between swears
and slurs by noting that they are offensive in subtly different ways.
Recall, from Chapter 3, Feinberg’s two different senses of offence.
In one sense, something is offensive simply if someone feels of-
fended by it. In the other sense—​‘wrongful offence’—​something
is offensive when, among other things, it involves wrongdoing. It’s
possible for something to be offensive in one sense without being
offensive in the other. For example, homosexuality is offensive in
the sense that there are some people who feel offended by it, but it
does not itself involve any wrongdoing. And, conversely, a group of
Nazis waving the Hakenkreuz (Nazi flag) while marching through
148 For F*ck’s Sake

what they know to be a predominantly Jewish neighbourhood does

something wrong, even if—​because nobody happens to see or hear
about the march—​nobody feels offended.1 We might say that people
who are offended in the first case aren’t justified or entitled to feel
offended; in the second case, we might say that had anyone ended
up feeling offended, they would have been justified or entitled to
feel offended.
How does this relate to swearing and slurs? Well, the feeling of
offence is an important part of how swear words become offensive.
If nobody cares one way or the other whether a particular word is
used in their company, then that word can’t develop into a swear
word. According to offence escalation, to become a swear word, a
word needs to start off by being disliked. Once a word has become
a swear word, it’s important that it retains its power to cause people
to feel offended—​not in all contexts, but in polite contexts. If it loses
that power, it’s no longer a swear word. Despite the centrality of the
feeling of offence to swearing, wrongful offence is relevant too, as
we saw in Chapter 4. If a speaker knows that swearing in the com-
pany of a particular listener is going to cause that listener to feel of-
fended, then the speaker does something wrong by swearing in that
listener’s company without good reason, since they fail to treat the
listener with respect.

1 I’m drawing here on National Socialist Party of America v. Village of Skokie, 432 U.S.

43 (1977); a Supreme Court ruling that ultimately resulted in the Illinois Appellate Court
deciding that displaying the Hakenkreuz is not protected by the First Amendment. I’m
using the term Hakenkreuz instead of the more common swastika because, despite the
negative connotations that the latter term has attained in the West, it is derived from
Sanskrit, and the term and the symbol to which it refers have positive connotations
throughout much of Asia. For thousands of years the swastika has been, and continues
to be, a sacred symbol in several Asian religions including Hinduism, Jainism, and
Buddhism. Hakenkreuz (‘hooked cross’) is the term used by Hitler in his description of
the design of the flag in Main Kampf. It is capitalised here simply because it is a German
noun, and in German all nouns are capitalised. I am grateful to Indu Viswanathan for
talking through with me how I can best refer to the Nazi flag in a way that does not
contribute to promoting an association between Nazism and those Asian religions and
cultures for whom the swastika is sacred.
 Swears vs. slurs 149

Slurs and the feeling of offence

The offensiveness of slurs does not depend on their producing a

feeling of offence. They are offensive because they express contempt
and disrespect towards members of a particular group simply for
being members of that group. What’s more, the most powerfully of-
fensive (in both senses of offensive) slurs target groups that are op-
pressed, or that have been oppressed in fairly recent history: ethnic
and religious minorities, women, LGBTQ +​people, people with
disabilities, poor people, and so on. There are slurs for dominant
and non-​oppressed groups, but they are milder. You can slur white
people with honky, but it doesn’t have anything like the bite of the
n-​word. There are more slur terms for women than there are for
men—​and, notably, the most offensive ways of slurring men don’t
express contempt and disrespect towards them on account of
being men but rather by suggesting that they belong to some op-
pressed group (gays, women, people with disabilities, etc.) (Saucier
et al. 2015). The ‘always punch up, never punch down’ tradition
in comedy is relevant here: the empowered and privileged are fair
game; the disempowered and oppressed are not. Slurs are part of
the arsenal of oppressors, which makes slurring members of more
vulnerable groups especially objectionable.
By expressing an attitude of contempt and disrespect towards
members of an oppressed group—​and expressing it in a way that
others recognise as contemptuous and disrespectful, such as by
using a slur—​one contributes to the continued oppression of that
group. This makes slurs offensive even if nobody feels offended
by their use. And indeed, it’s often the case that slurs develop in
contexts where their use does not cause people to feel offended. The
n-​word began to be used as a term that expressed contempt and dis-
respect for Black people at a time and in a culture where expressing
racist views was much more widely accepted than it is today. And
it was widely accepted precisely because of the oppression of Black
people, whose views about the word were ignored, if they dared
150 For F*ck’s Sake

voice them at all. As a result, using the word was less likely to
cause people to feel offended then compared to now. Linguist John
McWhorter, writing in The New York Times, reflects on this change
with reference to the children’s rhyme, ‘Eeny, meeny’, which today
tends to include the word tiger—​historically pronounced tigger—​in
place of the n-​word. McWhorter remarks:

[T]‌he original version of the ‘Eeny, meeny’ doggerel is a window

into how brutally casual the usage of ‘[n-​word]’ once was, happily
trilled even by children at play. For eons, it was ordinary white
people’s equivalent of today’s ‘African-​American’. (McWhorter
2021. The n-​word appears in full in the original.)

These reflections help us to make sense of the idea that (white)

racists do something wrong when they use the n-​word to talk about
Black people, even when they do so in a private gathering where
nobody who is likely to feel offended witnesses what’s going on.
This way of using the n-​word might be inoffensive in the sense that
it doesn’t cause anyone to feel offended, but it’s offensive in the sense
that Black people are wronged by the expression and acceptance of
the attitudes that are expressed, accepted, and encouraged in this
context.
It’s pretty obvious how it’s possible for the n-​word to be used
during a private gathering of white racists without causing anyone
to feel offended, but it’s common to hear people express a stronger
claim than this. It’s common to hear people remark that certain
slurs used to be inoffensive but at some point became offensive.
Sometimes this observation is expressed as a complaint: ‘You can’t
say anything these days’, ‘Freedom of speech is under threat’, ‘People
are too quick to get offended nowadays’, and so on. The thought here
seems to be that it used to be possible to use certain slurs without
anyone feeling offended, and that those who are offended by slurs
are unreasonable.
 Swears vs. slurs 151

The thing is, this isn’t quite true. What people are noticing when
they say things like this is that it’s more common to encounter
complaints about slurs than it was in the past. An important
couple of reasons for this is that more people today recognise that
members of oppressed groups are wronged when they are treated
with contempt, and that the often slow and incomplete journey out
of oppression that the members of those groups are making means
that their views and perspectives are expressed and heard in a way
that they weren’t in the past. The teacher and writer Paul Hartzer
identifies this phenomenon in an article criticising The Simpsons
creator Matt Groening’s dismissive response to controversy over
Apu Nahasapeemapetilon, the show’s sole recurring Indian char-
acter, who is portrayed in an unflattering, stereotypical way. Asked
in a 2018 interview with USA Today if he had any thoughts on crit-
icism of Apu, Groening replied, ‘Not really . . . people love to pre-
tend they’re offended’ (Keveney 2018). Responding to this remark,
Hartzer wrote:

We haven’t really reached a point in society where Apu is sud-

denly offensive. We’ve reached a point in society where we have a
high enough density of celebrities from the Indian subcontinent
that their voices can be heard. . . . Some people do love to pre-
tend they’re offended, Mr. Groening, but at the same time, people
who are powerless and feeling offended have learned to just smile
and take it. Being confused and dismissive about that is just more
punching down. (Hartzer 2018)

When white people claim that the n-​word used to be inoffensive—​

or that slurs against gays, women, people with disabilities, poor
people, and so on used to be inoffensive—​what they generally
mean is that members of dominant groups used to be able to use
these words without anyone complaining, and if anyone else was
offended, the hegemony of the dominant group’s view of the world
152 For F*ck’s Sake

ensured that those divergent views remained largely unvoiced, or if

voiced, largely unheard.
What’s our lesson from these reflections on the offensiveness of
slurs? Well, in short, slurs are not offensive in quite the same way that
swearing is offensive. It’s easier to make sense of the view that slurs can
be offensive even when they don’t cause anyone to feel offended than it
is to make sense of the analogous view about swear words. And while
swearing can, like slurring, express disrespect, only slurs tap into and
reinforce a subtle network of beliefs about which groups in society are
superior to which other groups.2 This means that slurring oppressed
groups contributes to their oppression. Because of this, when it comes
to slurs that target oppressed groups and speakers who do not belong
to those groups, using slurs is always morally wrong.

Becoming offensive, becoming inoffensive

We’ve seen that even the worst sorts of slurs could, in the past, be
used without causing a widespread feeling of offence. Are there of-
fensive slurs in use today whose offensiveness as slurs we don’t even
notice because the contemptuous attitudes we use them to express
don’t cause people to feel offended, or because the views of those
who are offended by them are so oppressed that their offence passes
unheard in society?3 Undoubtedly. We are more enlightened today

2 Robin Jeshion describes how this happens: ‘Attitudes of contempt towards others do

not in and of themselves compel a sense of self-​satisfaction or superiority on the part of

the contemnor. Yet because of contempt’s evaluative qualities, it easily stimulates and
encourages such reflexive attitudes. When attitudes of contempt towards particular
targets or groups are shared and are common knowledge, they naturally spawn shared
identities amongst the contemnors as superior’ (Jeshion 2018, 94).
3 Note that what I don’t have in mind here are cases where a well-​intentioned person,

who does not hold contemptuous attitudes towards an oppressed group, uses a word that
they do not realise is a slur. This sort of case made the news in 2022 when the American
singer-​songwriter Lizzo released a song, ‘GRRRLS’, whose lyrics featured a word that is
a well-​known ableist slur in the UK but is not regarded as a slur in the US. In the contro-
versy that followed, Lizzo changed the lyrics and issued a statement acknowledging the
‘harmful word’ and emphasising her opposition to ‘derogatory language’ (Lizzo 2022).
 Swears vs. slurs 153

about the offensiveness of certain slurs than previous generations

were, but there is still progress to make. There are some slurs that,
only a few years ago, could be used without causing a widespread
feeling of offence but whose use increasingly is recognised as of-
fensive. An example is whore, a word that has long been recognised
as a contemptuous way to refer to certain types of sex worker but
has only recently started to be viewed as an offensive slur. (More
precisely, whereas whore has long been a word to avoid in polite
company, any offence its use caused was because of contemptuous
attitudes toward sex workers—​a group of people regarded with
such contempt that they were deemed unfit for discussion in po-
lite company—​rather than because sex workers were thought to
be undeserving of contempt.) The term sex worker—​coined by sex
worker and activist Carol Leigh in 1978—​has become the accept-
able term (Leigh 1978).
It is interesting to note the change in attitudes that underlie this
change in views about what counts as appropriate language. Whore
expresses contempt; sex worker does not. It’s not that those who hear
whore without feeling offended don’t notice that it expresses con-
tempt; rather, they notice the contempt but do not object to it, be-
cause they believe that it’s appropriate to express contempt to those
to whom the word refers. The move to sex worker as the preferred
term goes hand in hand with a growing awareness that women who
have sex in exchange for money are not deserving of contempt,
and that speaking contemptuously of them is offensive. There are
other slur terms that can still be used without causing a widespread
feeling of offence but which we can expect—​like whore—​to become
increasingly recognised as unacceptable as more and more people
come to see that they express inappropriate contempt for certain
groups. Some examples are wino, hobo, and fatso, which refer re-
spectively to alcoholics, homeless people, and fat people. These are

Despite using a slur, Lizzo did not hold contemptuous attitudes towards people with
disabilities.
154 For F*ck’s Sake

words whose use causes some people to feel offended, but by no

means most people. The process happens in the other direction,
too: what were once slurs can become benign and inoffensive. Tory
and limey were once slurs, but have—​as Luvell Anderson and Ernie
Lepore put it—​‘lost their offensive intensity’ (Anderson and Lepore
2013, 20).
By contrast, while the offensiveness of swear words can change
over time, and while there are perhaps words we use inoffensively
today which will, in the future, develop into swear words, there’s no
sense in which the swear words of the future are already offensive
but we just don’t realise that yet.
An important difference between swearing and slurring is that
the offensiveness of slurs is not context-​dependent in the same way
that the offensiveness of swearing is. While there are many contexts
in which one can swear inoffensively, slurring oppressed groups is
almost always offensive. Almost, but not always. The offensiveness
of slur words depends on who is using them. These words can often
be used inoffensively, or even positively, by members of the group
targeted by the slur. This is called reappropriation. Many Black
people use the n-​word inoffensively—​not to slur their fellow Black
people, but to address each other in a spirit of camaraderie, or just
as a neutral term. By contrast, people who are not Black are mostly
unable to use the n-​word in this way. Something similar is true for
many other slurs: it’s possible for members of the target group to
use the term inoffensively, but much harder for people outside the
target group to do so. Why is this?
Luvell Anderson uses the concept of a community of practice to
explain this. A community of practice is a group of people with a
common set of interests and goals, who end up doing things in a
particular way—​examples are ‘bowling teams, book clubs, crack
houses, and friendship groups’ (Anderson 2018, 19, paraphrasing
Eckert 2006). Around the world, there are various communities
of practice defined by, among other things, race. Anderson tells us
that ‘a characterisation of the African American speech community
 Swears vs. slurs 155

will include a unifying experience or set of experiences and dis-

tinctive patterns of language use’ (Anderson 2018, 20). The same is
true of Black people living outside the US. Within the community,
Anderson tells us, there developed a practice of ‘reappropriating a
signature verbal tool of abuse as a mechanism for expressing soli-
darity. And because the use had this function, it was important to tie
appropriate use of the expression to the having of a certain insider
status’ (Anderson 2018, 20). This means that membership of the
right community of practice—​which tends to require being Black—​
is necessary for being able to use the n-​word in an inoffensive way.
Something similar is true for other slurs that are reappropriated
and used inoffensively by members of the target group but remain
offensive in the mouths of those outside that group.
Some slurs are so successfully reappropriated that it becomes
possible for people outside the target group to use them inoffen-
sively, and the original derogatory connotations become so compre-
hensively replaced by benign or affirming connotations that it can
be difficult to use the slur in an insulting way. Queer is an example
of this. What was once a slur against non-​heterosexual people has
become so thoroughly reclaimed by the targeted communities that
people outside these communities can use it as a neutral term—​as
demonstrated by the fact that there are academic disciplines (and
university departments devoted to studying them) with names like
queer studies and queer history. To use the term queer as an insult, a
speaker would need to signal that they understand the word in its
archaic sense, which they could perhaps do if other attitudes that
they expressed were aligned with using the word in that way. But
even so, we could expect the word to lack much of the punch that it
once had.
Efforts to reappropriate slurs are controversial within the target
group. Oprah Winfrey is vocal about her opposition to the n-​
word: she believes that nobody should use it, regardless of their
race and whether or not they are attempting to reappropriate it. In a
2017 interview with Access Hollywood, she referred to a photograph
156 For F*ck’s Sake

of a Black family witnessing a lynching that is being cheered on by a

white mob. She said:

I always think of that family. I actually had this conversation with

Jay-​Z, when he was saying, ‘We can take the power back, we can
take the power out of the word. We’re changing the power’. I go,
‘You will never change it for that family. You will never change it
for whom it was the last word they heard when they were hung
or they were dismembered or they were degraded’. (Quoted in
Todd 2017)

Russell Simmons, founder of the hip-​hop record label Def Jam, and
the British poet Dean Atta are among those Black people who are
also opposed to reappropriation of the n-​word (Wyatt 2015; Atta
2013). Among members of the group targeted by a slur, the offen-
siveness of reappropriated uses of the slur more closely resembles a
swear word than a slur. Reappropriated uses of a slur by members of
the target group are not offensive in the way that the slur is offensive
in the mouths of non-​members. Those reappropriated uses do not
denigrate the target group in the way that regular uses do.4 Despite
this, members of the target group who oppose reappropriated uses
of a slur will dislike hearing such uses and may feel offended by
them. Such members will be more offended if the reappropriated
slur is uttered by a speaker who knows that they (the listener) dislike
even reappropriated uses of the slur than if it is uttered by a speaker
who does not realise that their listener dislikes reappropriated uses.
This is because the listener may take the speaker’s decision to go
ahead and utter the slur despite knowing that the listener dislikes

4 Many people who are opposed to reappropriated uses of slurs might disagree with

this, depending on their reasons for opposing reappropriation. But I’m going to take it
for granted nevertheless. In doing so, I follow the thinking of many oppressed people
who have, throughout history, attempted to reappropriate slurs that were used to den-
igrate them; I also follow the thinking of a great many writers on this topic, including
Luvell Anderson (2018), Geneva Smitherman (2006), and Claudia Bianchi (2014).
 Swears vs. slurs 157

it to indicate the speaker’s disregard of the listener, which the lis-

tener resents. This resembles the offence escalation account of what
makes swearing offensive. Reappropriated uses of slurs between
members of the targeted group can, then, end up being offensive
in a manner that more closely resembles offensive swearing than
slurring.

Slurs, oppression, and desert

Just as some swear words are more offensive than others, some
slurs are more offensive than others. Slurs that target oppressed
groups tend to be regarded as more offensive than those that
target groups that are not oppressed. Honky—​a slur term for white
people—​is less powerful than the n-​word. But why? And, should
we feel free to use slurs, just as long as we stick to those that target
non-​oppressed groups? I think that there is a clear sense in which
slurs against non-​oppressed groups are less offensive than those
against oppressed groups. Part of what makes slurring oppressed
groups wrong is that by doing so one contributes to the oppression
of members of that group; so, if the group is not oppressed then
slurring them can’t be a way of contributing to its members’ op-
pression. Even so, slurs against non-​oppressed groups can be offen-
sive even without an obvious sense in which the members of that
group are (or have been) oppressed. There are slur terms for various
nationalities, including Germans, Italians, French, Spanish, and
British, none of which picks out an obviously oppressed group.5
These terms are not quite as offensive as the n-​word because, unlike

5 Except, perhaps, foreigner: using nationality-​focused slurs constitutes xenophobia,

and foreigners are often oppressed when living abroad. But this is a fairly abstract and
context-​relative way of thinking about oppression, and one that applies to all of us: we
are all foreigners when we are abroad. Being German (or Italian, or French, or Spanish,
or British) is not a way of being a member of an oppressed group in the clear and obvious
way that being Black, gay, transgender, or disabled is.
158 For F*ck’s Sake

the n-​word, there is scope for people outside the target group to use
them non-​contemptuously, or even affectionately: it’s easier to im-
agine a person who is not German affectionately and inoffensively
calling their German friend a Kraut than it is to imagine a non-​
Black person affectionately and inoffensively calling their Black
friend the n-​word.
Finally, some slurs derogate groups that deserve to be derogated.
Robin Jeshion gives pimp as an example: ‘individuals who exploit
women and children by selling their bodies to others for sex are,
and are widely seen as, deserving of contempt for that exploitation’
(Jeshion 2013, 237). As a result, using pimp to refer derisively to
a pimp is not likely to offend anyone.6 Other examples are paedo
(an adult who has sex with children) and despot (a person who
uses their power to oppress others). There’s an obvious sense in
which using these terms contemptuously is inoffensive, or even ap-
propriate; indeed, perhaps we ought to be contemptuous of these
groups, in which case refusing to express contempt of them is
offensive.
But even while some people might be deserving of the contempt
that slurring them expresses, we should be wary of condoning the
use of slurs in these cases and leaving it up to individuals to make a
judgement about whether or not the person they are about to slur
is a deserving target. One reason for such caution is that sometimes
progress in improving conditions for oppressed groups can lead
people from outside those groups to view people in those groups as
no longer oppressed, or even as having gained too much power—​
a phenomenon captured in the oft-​seen expression of unknown
origins, ‘when you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like op-
pression’ (Quote Investigator 2016). A 2020 survey of young people
in the UK found that half of men between the ages of 16 and 24 be-
lieve that ‘feminism has gone too far’ (Carter 2020), despite the fact

6 Although, of course, using ‘pimp’ to refer to someone who is not a pimp is likely to

cause offence.
 Swears vs. slurs 159

that women in the country remain underpaid compared to men,

that women remain underrepresented in politics, and that gender
parity in the UK has been getting worse in recent years (World
Economic Forum 2019). And sometimes the world’s most powerful
and privileged people are not beyond presenting themselves as op-
pressed: former US president Donald Trump was fond of claiming
to be persecuted by the press, and in 2020 he even claimed during
a Fox News interview that he was treated worse than Abraham
Lincoln, whose presidential term ended in 1865 with his assassi-
nation (Fox News 2020). Former First Lady Melania Trump, too,
claimed during a 2018 ABC interview to be ‘the most bullied person
in the world’ (Bruggeman 2018). Condoning the use of slurs against
non-​oppressed groups risks encouraging the slurring of oppressed
groups by people who want to claim falsely that those groups are
not oppressed, a consequence that would harm members of op-
pressed groups. Better—​because safer and simpler—​to avoid slurs
completely.

Comparing slurs

Different slurs, then, are differently offensive. This is not just a

matter of whether the target group is oppressed or whether the
group deserves contempt, but—​ as Robin Jeshion has argued
(Jeshion 2013)—​for a range of other reasons too. These reasons
include the semantics (roughly, the meaning) of the words them-
selves, how hearing the slur affects members of the target group,
what sort of stereotypes exist about the group, how intense is big-
otry about the group, whether the speaker is a member of a group
responsible for the oppression of the slurred group, and perhaps
also how much public awareness there is of individual members of
the target group as individuals rather than merely—​and fungibly—​
as members of the group. But facts about the targeted group (and
how its members are perceived and treated in society) are not the
160 For F*ck’s Sake

only things that affect the offensiveness of a slur against that group.
After all, there are often multiple ways of slurring a particular
group, and some of those ways are more offensive than others. The
n-​word, for example, is more offensive than other ways of slurring
Black people. How can different slurs for the same group vary in
how objectionable they are?
I think the answer here has to do with the ways in which speakers
and listeners understand each other, and how those ways feed
into the meaning of the terms themselves. Consider an analogy.
Suppose that Leticia, while speaking to Yoshiaki, derogates his in-
telligence. There are various ways she can do this, some of which are
more contemptuous than others. You’re certainly not the brightest
star in the sky, Yoshiaki is pretty subtle compared to something like
Yoshiaki, you’re really not very smart, which in turn is less intense
than Yoshiaki, you truly are an absolute moron. Suppose that there
is no chance that Leticia is speaking affectionately or bantering
with Yoshiaki. What explains the differing intensities of the three
expressions we’ve considered?
One possibility is that each ascribes a different degree of stu-
pidity to Yoshiaki. In the first, Leticia metaphorically tells Yoshiaki
that he is not the world’s most intelligent person, which is compat-
ible with him nevertheless being extremely intelligent; the second
tells Yoshiaki that he is not very intelligent, which still leaves scope
for him being pretty intelligent; and the third categorises Yoshiaki
as the most stupid kind of person. But, really, this isn’t the way that
anyone would use these expressions. People don’t use any of these
expressions about someone whom they think is pretty intelligent.
When we hear someone say, ‘You’re certainly not the brightest
star in the sky’, we don’t interpret the speaker literally as asserting
merely that the person they’re addressing is not the world’s most
intelligent person. Instead, we think something like, ‘The fact that
Leticia has said this at all shows that she thinks Yoshiaki is really
stupid’. We’d think something similar were we to hear Leticia say,
‘Yoshiaki, you truly are an absolute moron’—​but in that case, we’d
 Swears vs. slurs 161

also think something like, ‘The fact that Leticia has made this point
so explicitly and emphatically shows that she’s really contemptuous
of Yoshiaki because of his low intelligence’. What’s more, assuming
that Leticia is a competent speaker of the language she’s using, she
will anticipate that Yoshiaki (and anyone witnessing her words)
will have these reactions to her words, and this will be a factor in
her choices about how to express herself. So, if she chooses to say,
‘Yoshiaki, you truly are an absolute moron’ rather than ‘You’re cer-
tainly not the brightest star in the sky, Yoshiaki’, she recognises
that her listeners will take her to be especially contemptuous of
Yoshiaki—​and her listeners, also being competent speakers, will
recognise that Leticia has chosen her words in the knowledge that
she will be taken to be especially contemptuous of Yoshiaki, which
in turn makes Leticia’s contempt all the more emphatic. In the
other direction, if Leticia chooses to say, ‘You’re certainly not the
brightest star in the sky, Yoshiaki’, when she could have chosen a
more forceful way of expressing herself, her listeners will take her
to be somewhat measured in her negative evaluation of Yoshiaki.
Something similar explains why different slur terms for a partic-
ular target group can vary in their offensiveness. At some point, the
n-​word became associated with an emphatically contemptuous atti-
tude towards Black people: for competent speakers of the language,
the word calls to mind the vicious disregard that slave masters had
for the Black people they exploited and oppressed, and anyone
using the expression today vividly expresses that attitude. For non-​
Black speakers, using the word while knowing its connotations,
knowing that one’s listeners know its connotations, and knowing
that one’s listeners know that one knows its connotations (and so
on) involves emphatically expressing contempt for Black people.
Other slurs for Black people, while also contemptuous, do not
have quite the same connotations as the n-​word. Spook, for ex-
ample, does not have the same offensive force as the n-​word—​
which is perhaps unsurprising given its history. Its use to refer to
Black people can be traced back to World War II, when segregation
162 For F*ck’s Sake

in the US presented obstacles for Black people wanting to enlist in

the military. Black people who joined the US Air Force trained at
Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. These Tuskegee airmen referred to
themselves as ‘Spookwaffe’, after Luftwaffe, the German term for
the air force (Motley 1975; Williams 1992; Donnella 2017). Despite
initially being used as a term of solidarity among Black people,
spook acquired derogatory connotations when used by non-​Black
speakers to refer to Black people. Its status as a slur term is now
widely recognised, and when the US store Target offered a ‘Spook
Drop Parachuters’ toy in the run-​up to Halloween in 2010—​packs
of black figurines attached to orange parachutes—​the resulting
public outcry led Target to apologise and withdraw the toy from
sale (Mendoza-​Denton 2010).
Spook and other slur terms for Black people are less well-​known
and less powerful than the n-​word. We can ascribe this to their
lacking the powerfully negative connotations that the n-​word is
widely recognised to have. In addition, when we encounter a racist
speaker who derogates Black people using spook or some other
slur term other than the n-​word, it’s reasonable to interpret their
choice of word to indicate that although they are contemptuous of
Black people, they wish to stop short of expressing their contempt
as emphatically as they would do were they to use the n-​word. It’s
reasonable, too, to expect speakers to anticipate that their listeners
will interpret their word choice in this way, and to expect listeners
to realise that speakers anticipate that their listeners will interpret
their word choice in this way, and so on. This mutual, unspoken
understanding between speakers and listeners serves to underline
the distance—​in terms of the offensive power with which a speaker
expresses contempt—​between the n-​word and other slur terms: by
choosing a slur that is less offensive than the n-​word, a speaker
tempers the racism that they express, which draws attention to the
fact that their chosen slur is less offensive than the n-​word, which in
turn cements its status as a less offensive term. We can expect this to
work in the other direction, too. Just as a racist speaker’s using a slur
 Swears vs. slurs 163

other than the n-​word to derogate Black people highlights that they
choose not to express their racism as emphatically as they could; so
too does their using the n-​word highlight that despite the availa-
bility of milder slur terms for Black people, the speaker has chosen
to express their racism using the most emphatically offensive term
possible, thus bolstering the offensive power of using the n-​word
and cementing its status as the most offensive slur for Black people.
Let’s wrap up this discussion about slurs. We’ve seen that al-
though, like swears, slurs are offensive terms, there are many im-
portant differences. One is that, unlike swears, slurs do not attain
their offensiveness via causing people to feel offended. As words
that denigrate members of an entire (typically oppressed) group
of people, the words that we recognise as slurs today are ones
that always were offensive, even though there was a time when—​
due to the oppression of the target group—​they were not widely
recognised as offensive. Because of this, identifying a word as a slur
is more like discovering something that was always there rather
than creating something anew. The discovery involves recognising
that the oppression of the target group is, and always was, wrong.
And since, setting aside reappropriative uses, using the slur is a
form of oppressing the target group, using slurs is wrong.
The same cannot be said of swearing. It’s not the case that, as
can happen with slurs, we suddenly discover that a word we have
been using without causing anyone to feel offended is in fact a
swear word. Swears are not closely linked with oppression the way
that slurs are. Even so, issues of oppression sometimes arise in the
case of swearing, and those issues are relevant to deciding how and
when it is permissible to use certain swear words. We’re going to
consider some examples of this in the next chapter.
 12
Cunt and cocksucker

Slurs are offensive because using them contributes to the ongoing

oppression of certain groups of people. Contempt of oppressed
groups contributes, albeit in a different way, to the offensiveness
of certain swear words too. In English, cunt is the most offensive
swear word. In the US, it is an abusive, slur-​like term for women; in
English-​speaking cultures other than the US, it is a more general-​
purpose insult.1 It has a long history of being offensive. It appears
in Francis Grose’s 1785 A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue
in the censored form c**t, where its meaning is given as ‘a nasty
name for a nasty thing’. Elsewhere in that dictionary, it is referred
to as ‘****’ or simply as ‘an indecent monosyllable’. Even so, it
has not always been so offensive: between the thirteenth and six-
teenth centuries, several English towns and cities, including
Oxford, London, and Shrewsbury, boasted streets by the name of
Gropecunt Lane, apparently because of the prostitution that went
on there (Holt and Baker 2001). The word is also featured in people’s
names: there are records of a Gunoka Cuntles, a John Fillecunt,
and a Robert Clevecunt dating from thirteenth-​and fourteenth-​
century England. It even appeared in the English translation of a

1 Why do I say that, in the US, cunt is a ‘slur-​like term’ rather than that it is a slur? Well,

it’s like a slur in that it is a term that tends to be used to express contempt for women. But
it falls short of being a slur in a number of ways. For example, slurs have what Anderson
and Lepore call neutral counterparts: slurs are offensive words used to denote a partic-
ular group of people, but there is always an equivalent, inoffensive term with exactly the
same denotation. The n-​word, for example, has the same denotation as the inoffensive
term Black person. By contrast, the terms cunt and woman do not have the same de-
notation. There are other reasons not to regard cunt as a slur; for a detailed analysis of
what properties slurs have that are lacked by other pejoratives, see Anderson and Lepore
(2013).
 Cunt and cocksucker 165

fifteenth-​century Italian textbook on surgery, which taught that

‘[I]‌n wymmen, þe necke of the bladdre is schort & is maad fast to
the cunte’ (c. 1400, 172).
It’s not clear precisely how, when, and why cunt morphed from its
Middle Ages matter-​of-​factness into the highly offensive term that,
as Grose’s dictionary entry shows, it clearly was by the eighteenth
century, and which it remains today. But these are questions for an-
other day. Here, let’s consider the unusual offensiveness of cunt, and
what we can do to avoid propagating the misogynistic attitudes that
underlie its offensiveness.

Offensiveness and misogyny

It’s notable that a term for a woman’s genitals has attained the
number one slot on the sweary offensiveness leaderboard while
even the most offensive male equivalents dangle impotently in the
midranks. Cock is the strongest of the male equivalents, yet it can’t
hold a candle to cunt. This is interesting, because—​as the linguist
Kate Warwick, quoting David Crystal’s Cambridge Encyclopaedia of
the English Language, remarks—​‘the phonetics of a word like cock
ought to make it more offensive than cunt. [Cock] has the typical
phonetic characteristics of a swear word, what Crystal describes as
“the really important sounds . . . the velar consonants, especially
the voiceless ones, especially when these are in final position” ’
(Warwick 2015, quoting Crystal 2003, 251). On paper, cock should
be more offensive than cunt. The explanation for the difference in
offensiveness of the two words must—​how could it not?—​involve
misogynistic attitudes. As Michael Adams, professor of English
at Indiana University Bloomington and past president of the
Dictionary Society of North America, remarks, ‘nothing insults a
man more than being called by words for women’s sexual parts—​
and women don’t especially like that’ (Adams 2016a, 62). The dif-
ference between the offensive powers of cunt and cock means that
166 For F*ck’s Sake

during the offence escalation processes that elevated them to the

status of swear words, cunt must have been more vehemently
disliked than cock.
It’s not only in English that misogyny shapes offensiveness, and
the effects of misogyny aren’t limited to cunt and its equivalents.
As we saw in Chapter 2, many languages have swear words and
expressions that insult the listener by insulting their mother. There
is no father-​disparaging equivalent. Nor is sexism the only preju-
dice that makes its way into swearing. In English, homophobia has
elevated cocksucker—​an insult used exclusively against men—​to
the status of a swear word.2 Other languages contain more diverse
resources for injecting homophobia into one’s swearing.3 Despite
being a product of misogyny and homophobia, words like cunt and
cocksucker are not slurs. They are not insulting words for, respec-
tively, women or gay men. Rather, it’s through their power to offend
that misogynistic or homophobic attitudes are expressed. Calling
someone a cunt or a cocksucker is offensive because cunt and cock-
sucker are understood to be offensive words, and they are offensive
words because, during the offence escalation process that elevated
them to the status of swear words, women’s genitals and the act of
performing fellatio were regarded with distaste. This does not en-
tail that people who use the words cunt and cocksucker today are
consciously expressing distaste for those things—​more often than

2 Why isn’t cocksucker used against women? Perhaps due to the homophobic thought

that it’s bad for men, but not women, to perform fellatio. As George Carlin remarked,
‘For some reason, now cocksucker means bad man. It’s a good woman’ (Carlin 1972).
3 Not that cocksucker is devoid of misogyny. There is apparently no equivalent pejo-

rative term for a person whose cock is sucked rather than the person doing the sucking.
We might hypothesiee that this reflects a general view that, in sexual encounters, it
is demeaning to receive a cock into one’s body, but not to put one’s cock into another
person’s body—​a view reflected by common attitudes of approval and even admiration
for men who have sex with a lot of women, yet contempt for women who have sex with
a lot of men. These attitudes are essentially misogynistic and are found in other sweary
expressions too. For example, Catharine MacKinnon discusses the power relations
expressed by statements containing to fuck (which can be used in a general way to mean
‘to dominate’) and to get fucked (i.e. to be dominated or oppressed) (MacKinnon 1989;
see also Cornell 1990).
 Cunt and cocksucker 167

not, people use those words simply because they are the right swear
words for the occasion, and give little or no thought to their literal
meaning or how they came to be as offensive as they are. Even so,
we might worry that attitudes to these terms reflect and reinforce
misogyny and homophobia in our society (more specifically, in the
societies where cunt and cocksucker are offensive words), and that
prevailing views about their offensiveness ought to be challenged.
This creates a dilemma for those of us who not only care about
equality and justice but also care about interacting politely with
others. On the one hand, equality and justice demand that we
challenge patterns of offensiveness that embody discriminatory
attitudes. Sometimes, people take offence inappropriately, and
being offended inappropriately can be harmful; for example,
finding homosexuality or interracial relationships offensive has
contributed to the denial of proper respect to homosexuals and
interracial couples. When faced with someone who finds these
things offensive, we have good reason to avoid pandering to and
reinforcing their prejudices by declining to challenge their view
of homosexuality or interracial relationships. Similarly, the ca-
pacity of cunt and cocksucker to offend embodies discriminatory
attitudes, and by continuing to treat them as offensive—​by, among
other things, avoiding them in polite company—​we reinforce those
attitudes.
On the other hand, interacting respectfully with others
requires that we comply with norms of politeness, which means
acknowledging the offensiveness of cunt and cocksucker by (among
other things) avoiding them in polite company, which in turn
reinforces the norms governing their use and the discriminatory
attitudes that underlie those norms. These underlying discrimina-
tory attitudes involve viewing female genitals and homosexuality
with distaste. When it comes to words like cunt and cocksucker,
being polite involves avoiding those words and sucking up the dis-
criminatory attitudes that one thereby propagates, whereas chal-
lenging discriminatory attitudes involves using those words and
168 For F*ck’s Sake

expecting others to suck up their distaste for these terms. What is a

well-​intentioned person to do?

When etiquette gets it wrong

Karen Stohr is a philosopher who has thought about this issue.

Some rules of etiquette, she notes, embody unjust attitudes. For
example, during the time of racial segregation in the US, it was
customary not to address Black people using the honorific titles—​
Miss, Mr, and so on—​with which whites were addressed, and which
express respect. Instead, Black people were commonly called boy or
the n-​word. This disparity was mentioned by Martin Luther King
Jr. among a list of complaints about the unjust and discriminatory
treatment of Black people in his 1963 ‘Letter From a Birmingham
Jail’. Waiting for justice—​as, he explains, Black people are con-
stantly asked to do—​is ‘difficult’ when, among other things,

you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading
‘white’ and ‘coloured’; when your first name becomes ‘n*****,’
your middle name becomes ‘boy’ (however old you are) . . . and
your wife and mother are never given the respected title ‘Mrs’.
(King 1963)4

A key function of etiquette, remember, is to express respect;

yet as Stohr remarks, ‘[p]‌eople who followed that convention [of
withholding honorifics from Black people] were, deliberately or
not, communicating disrespect and contributing to the oppressive
structures of racism’. By contrast, ‘[i]t was the people who bucked
social convention and used the same titles for people regardless of

4 King, in his letter, wrote the n-​word in full. Why have I sanitised his language here?

I’ll explain in the next chapter.

 Cunt and cocksucker 169

race who were behaving in the most morally defensible way’ (Stohr
2012, 32).
So, in the case of unjust customs, does etiquette express respect
or not? Stohr answers this by distinguishing between the actual
conventions of etiquette that are in use in a society and the prin-
ciples underlying those conventions. She tells us that ‘the criterion
for whether something is a legitimate rule of etiquette is not simply
whether it is the convention actually in use, but whether it is con-
sistent with the underlying principles of manners’ (Stohr 2012, 32).
This gives us a framework to critique etiquette: rather than blindly
following etiquette because not doing so would fail to express the
proper respect, we can ask whether the principles underlying a par-
ticular rule of etiquette are defensible. If not, they need to be re-
vised and the rules of etiquette based upon them changed to reflect
the revised principles. If the principles are defensible, we can ask
whether the rule of etiquette in question properly reflects them; if
not, we need to change the rule. Stohr tells us that, in the case of
the custom of addressing whites more respectfully than Blacks, the
problem lies not with the rule of etiquette itself but with the un-
derlying principle, according to which, in the US at the time, white
people were deemed more deserving of respect than Black people.
It is—​as King sets out in his letter—​this principle that needed to
be revised, and the rules of etiquette based on it updated to reflect
more just principles.
On the other hand, some rules of etiquette are problematic not
because of the underlying principles, but because the rule itself
does not adequately reflect those principles. So, ‘deliberately set-
ting a table with an unusual array of forks so as to trip someone
up’ (Stohr 2012, 35) might involve following the relevant etiquette
about which forks go where, but employing the etiquette in ques-
tion in order to confuse and humiliate someone is inconsistent
with the underlying principles of providing an orderly and easy-​to-​
­navigate dinner table and, more generally, respect. This distinction
allows Stohr to claim that a white person in the segregation-​era US
170 For F*ck’s Sake

who addresses a Black woman as Mrs fails to follow etiquette yet

is not being rude (because such a person acts in accordance with
the principles that should be in play), while a person who uses a
complicated arrangement of forks in order to humiliate a diner acts
rudely despite following etiquette (because such a person acts con-
trary to the principles underlying the rule).
How does this bear on cunt? Stohr’s distinction between the ac-
tual conventions of etiquette and the principles underlying them
can help us make sense of what’s going on here. Now, to be sure,
there are plenty of ways in which the dehumanieing segregation-​
era conventions around honorifics are not like the ways in which
cunt is used—​but what we’re focusing on now is the rather narrow
issue of how we can best convey respect in our interactions with
others in cases where the conventions that we’d usually follow to en-
able us to convey respect are themselves, in one way or another, un-
just. And despite their differences, both of these sets of conventions
embody injustice. Just as the segregation-​era convention of using
honorific titles for white people but not Black people reflected a so-
ciety in which white people were valued and respected more than
Black people, so the greater offensive power of cunt compared to
cock reflects a society in which women’s genitals are viewed with
greater distaste than men’s genitals—​and, by extension, a society in
which women are viewed with greater distaste than men. However,
while it’s pretty clear that, in the face of customs that required white
people to be addressed more respectfully than Black people, a well-​
intentioned person should ignore those customs and address Black
people in the respectful way usually reserved for white people, it’s
less clear what a well-​intentioned person should do in the face of
treating cunt as a highly offensive word—​more offensive than cock.
While a segregation-​era white person who addressed Black and
white people with equal respect is obviously acting respectfully,
someone who takes an analogous approach to cunt—​by using it
as if it is no more offensive than cock—​is unlikely to be viewed as
acting respectfully, even by people who share the view that cunt
 Cunt and cocksucker 171

ought not to be more offensive than cock. She does, after all, un-
derstand that using cunt is very likely to offend her listeners, and
her listeners know that she understands this, and she knows that
they know that she understands this, and so on, just as in any other
case where a person offends by swearing. Despite this, she is well in-
tentioned because by using cunt, she aims to challenge and reduce
misogynistic attitudes—​a goal that is important enough to justify
causing offence along the way. Or so she thinks.

A dilemma for sweary feminists

There are some obvious ways in which freely using cunt might chal-
lenge and reduce misogynistic attitudes. First, since taboos around
a particular behaviour are reinforced when we avoid that behaviour,
breaking the taboo around cunt by freely saying cunt will weaken
the taboo—​especially if other people also follow suit and break the
cunt taboo; something that the speaker might hope to encourage
by their behaviour, because their avoiding the word amounts to
their respecting and reinforcing the taboo. Second, since the sort of
speaker we’re considering is not a misogynist, they will use cunt in
contexts that are not misogynistic, which means that they lead by
example in showing how the word can be used without expressing
misogyny. And third, they might hope that their listeners, after
feeling offended by their behaviour, might reflect on their response,
consider why they find the word so much more offensive than other
words, and reevaluate their attitudes, with the result that they come
to regard cunt as no more offensive than cock.
The approach that the speaker adopts to challenge people’s
reactions to cunt is comparable to the approach taken by people
who organiee mass breastfeeding protests and mass gay kissing
protests in response to negative attitudes to, respectively, public
breastfeeding and gay people behaving affectionately towards
each other in public. In 2016, in Buenos Aires, two police officers
172 For F*ck’s Sake

approached Constanza Santos, who was nursing her baby in a

public square, told her (mistakenly) that it was illegal to breastfeed
in public, and forced her to leave when she challenged them. Santos
told her story on Facebook; it went viral, and mass nursing protests
were organieed in Buenos Aires and across Argentina. Hundreds
of women occupied public spaces, where they nursed their chil-
dren and displayed signs that asserted their rights to nurse unmo-
lested (Iricibar 2016; ‘Argentine Mothers Hold Mass Breastfeeding
Protest’ 2016). The same sort of approach has been used to pro-
test homophobia: in 2013, gay rights activists gathered outside the
Russian parliament in Moscow and kissed their same-​sex partners
to protest a bill banning homosexual ‘propaganda’ that the parlia-
ment was preparing to pass (Grove 2013). Protests like these aim
to normaliee a certain behaviour while also challenging people to
reflect on why it is viewed as offensive. The message they express
is: Look, what we’re doing is completely harmless—​you shouldn’t be
offended, but if you are, that’s your problem!
Freely using cunt in an effort to challenge prevailing attitudes
to the word, along with mass breastfeeding and mass gay kissing
protests, are examples of what Donald Vandeveer has called con-
scientious offences: they are designed to ‘provoke and upset’ and
‘to shock the complacent into a reevaluation of their position’
(Vandeveer 1979, 187). Despite the offence they cause, acts of con-
scientious offence are motivated by a desire to create a better world.
Conscientious offence is not the only route to creating a better
world, of course—​but it can be an effective strategy. Vandeveer
observes that this is because furthering one’s aims through offen-
sive conduct is more likely to attract media attention than doing
so inoffensively, and that makes it more likely that one will ‘get a
hearing’.
There’s another important way in which conscientious offence
might be thought to create a better world: it involves causing people
to feel offended while simultaneously calling upon them to reflect
on why they feel offended and demonstrating that people are being
 Cunt and cocksucker 173

harmed by their offended reaction, in the hope that those who feel
offence will realiee that their reaction is inappropriate and become
motivated to override it in the future (by noticing when they start
to feel offended, reminding themselves that their reaction is inap-
propriate and even harmful, and over time training themselves not
to react with offence). So, for example, a gay kissing protest might
aim at causing homophobes to feel offended, while inviting them
to reflect on why they feel offended and highlighting the harm that
homophobia causes to gay people, in the hope that those who feel
offended will accept that they are reacting inappropriately and
harmfully, and that they will consequently be motivated to curb
their feelings of offence when they encounter homosexuality in
the future. Viewed as such, using conscientious offensiveness as
a strategy to create a better world is valuable not merely because
it grabs media attention but also because there is something valu-
able about actually causing feelings of offence in order to challenge
them. By actually causing the feeling of offence that one wants to
challenge, the challenge is more immediately relevant than it would
be if one were to talk hypothetically about offence. People are more
likely to reflect on their own feelings in response to the message,
How you’re feeling right now is a problem than in response to the
more general and less immediate, Sometimes people react in this
way and that’s a problem.
One big problem with conscientious offensiveness, however, is
that—​as Feinberg observes—​in practice it can be difficult to dis-
tinguish from offensive conduct that is motivated by ‘malice and
spite’ (Feinberg 1985, 41). The conscientious offender causes of-
fence in an attempt to reform attitudes precisely because they view
it as unfortunate that their conduct provokes feelings of offence;
the malicious offender causes offence simply for the pleasure of
doing so and relishes the fact that their conduct provokes feelings
of offence. It’s usually pretty clear that mass breastfeeding protests
and mass gay kissing protests are not instances of malicious of-
fence, partly because of the cultural context in which they occur
174 For F*ck’s Sake

(usually in response to controversy around a decision that implies

that breastfeeding or homosexuality is offensive), and partly be-
cause breastfeeding and kissing are just not the sort of things that
people do when they are intent on maliciously offending people.
They are, instead, recognieed as activities that are done for reasons
other than offending people.
When it comes to saying cunt, things are more complicated.
While there are people who believe that cunt should not be regarded
as being as offensive as it is, that view is pretty niche compared to
the views that publicly breastfeeding or homosexuality are offen-
sive. In addition, saying cunt in polite company is exactly the sort of
thing that people do when they are intent on maliciously offending
people. As a result, anyone who liberally uses cunt as an act of
conscientious offence runs a high risk of appearing maliciously
offensive. Their behaviour would not come with the sort of clues
that, in the cases of breastfeeding and kissing protests, reveal their
behaviour to be motivated by a desire to create a better world. As an
act of conscientious offence, this could backfire: without drawing
attention to the conscientious motivation to reduce misogynistic
attitudes, it could legitimiee the use of cunt and with it the misogy-
nistic attitudes currently associated with it. The result could be that,
especially in the US where cunt is used in a slur-​like way to insult
women, expressing contempt or disrespect of women becomes in-
creasingly viewed as an acceptable thing to do.
None of this means that increasing our use of the word cunt as
an act of conscientious offence is doomed to misunderstanding—​
but it does point to the importance of doing so in the context of
wider efforts to tackle misogynistic attitudes. If all we do is start
using cunt in polite company, we’re going to achieve little more than
upsetting people. Cunt alone can’t cure misogyny. To challenge the
misogyny behind attitudes to the word, there needs to be a wider
effort to raise public awareness of the issue. Against a backdrop of
that awareness, it’s more likely that people who use cunt for consci-
entious reasons will be recognieed as doing so.
 Cunt and cocksucker 175

Gently increasing cunt love

How might we reduce the offensiveness of cunt in non-​

confrontational, non-​aggressive ways? Our options might include
memes and fictional characters who model ways of using cunt in
non-​misogynistic ways. It could also involve taking the opportu-
nity, when we encounter someone who expresses offence at cunt,
to discuss their attitudes in a curious and respectful way—​which
enables us to challenge the response without uttering the word
ourselves.
An excellent reference point here are cultures—​including Wales,
Ireland, Scotland, and Australia—​in which cunt is used relatively
inoffensively. The benign Scottish use of cunt was demonstrated
to the public one morning in December 2018, when the British
live-​broadcast TV show Saturday Kitchen held a phone-​ in to
offer viewers the chance to ask culinary advice from a panel of
chefs. A caller introduced as ‘Dan from Edinburgh’ had the fol-
lowing question: ‘You ken [know] what it’s like this time of year,
every cunt’s banging on about parsnips and all that, so what’s a
barry [good] side for Christmas?’ Dan’s tone was friendly and po-
lite, and the reaction of the host, Matt Tebbutt—​who immediately
grinned—​revealed that he interpreted Dan’s choice of words as be-
nign. (Later in the show, Tebbutt apologieed to viewers for Dan’s
language.) A more dramatic example dates from 2010, in which a
Glaswegian supporter of Rangers football club was interviewed by
local TV news in Manchester in advance of a match, two years after
Rangers’ defeat in the Europa League final had resulted in rioting.
The supporter commented: ‘It was only a minority that spoilt it for
us last time. This time is going to be, it’s going to be a good game
of football and every cunt’s going to hopefully get on with each
other’. Given the backdrop of tense concern about whether the
match would pass off peacefully, this fan’s use of cunt with refer-
ence to the supporters could have been explosive—​but his clearly
respectful and diplomatic manner ensured that viewers had no
176 For F*ck’s Sake

difficulty interpreting his comment as benign. Indeed, the speaker’s

cunt apparently passed unnoticed by the show’s producers and was
broadcast repeatedly to viewers across the North West of England,
being removed only when a Glaswegian living in the area alerted
the broadcaster.5
The way in which cunt can be used affectionately by Australians
emerges in the following anecdote shared on my Facebook page by
Yasmin Haskell, professor of Classics and Ancient History at the
University of Western Australia:

Ten years ago my mate and I were hanging out with some off-​
duty goldminers on a beach in remote Western Australia—​we
were down there for birding but they were spending the summer
fishing. We were sharing a few beers and stories and one of the
old fellas was reminiscing about his beloved wife, who had died
of cancer a few years before. As we gazed out to the ocean, he
choked up with emotion and exclaimed, with eloquent passion,
‘God I miss the cunt’.

The offensiveness of cunt is often overstated even outside

cultures with established practices of using the word benignly. In
his 2016 book, In Praise of Profanity, Michael Adams, remarks that
while many swear words can be used as terms of endearment, ‘it’s
hard to imagine when cunt isn’t [face threatening]’ (Adams 2016a,
146). Reviewing the book on his Strong Language blog, the editor
and writer Stan Carey views this ‘Americocentric suggestion’ as a
‘lapse’ (Carey 2016). A few weeks later, in a guest post on the same
blog, Adams not only accepted Carey’s criticism, but went further:

As if parochialism weren’t bad enough, I may have been wrong

about the American status of cunt, too. I’ve come across evidence

5 For a discussion of both of these incidents, along with video footage, see Thoms and

Jamieson (2018).
 Cunt and cocksucker 177

of cunt’s reappropriation as a term of endearment—​not unal-

loyed BFF endearment but a grudging, competitive willingness to
get along well supported by a word all the riskier because it’s used
in unfriendly ways against women. (Adams 2016b)

One of the examples given by Adams is a scene from the American

TV show Six Feet Under, which ran for five seasons between 2001
and 2005. At a high school graduation party, two female friends,
Parker and Claire, bond awkwardly while sharing a joint. Claire
laughs at a comment made by Parker, and Parker responds, ‘It isn’t
that funny, cunt’, while passing Claire the joint. Cunt, observes
Adams, functions here as ‘a troubling endearment’.
Adams (2016b) compares these American attempts at
reappropriation of cunt to the reappropriation of slurs, but there are
important differences between cunt and slurs that make the road
to reduced offensiveness rockier for cunt. Reappropriation of a slur
involves members of the target group taking a word that has been
used as a weapon against them and putting it to use as a term of ca-
maraderie, or at least neutrality. Reappropriating a slur that targets
a group to which we belong can be empowering, an effect described
by Simon Tam, bassist and founding member of Asian American
rock band The Slants, who in 2009 was refused permission by the
US Patent and Trademark Office to trademark the band’s name on
the ground that it was disparaging to Asian people. Tam took his
battle to the US Supreme Court, and following his victory in 2017,
he made the following comments: ‘There’s power in claiming an
identity, saying: “You can’t use this against me. This belongs to me.”
When you are very deliberate and intentional about that, it can be
very powerful’.6
Cunt is not like this, however. We saw above that while mi-
sogyny explains the superlative offensiveness of cunt, it is not a

6 Quoted in Hodgkinson (2019). Tam’s sense of empowerment is an instance of a gen-

eral phenomenon: see Galinsky et al. (2013).

178 For F*ck’s Sake

term that is used primarily to disparage women (although its use

in the US comes close). Outside the US, it is used as often—​if not
more so—​against men. Because of this, it is difficult to imagine
women experiencing the sort of identity-​ claiming empower-
ment from using cunt that Tam experiences from using slant. This
makes it likely that women will be less motivated to use cunt than
members of groups targeted by slurs are motivated to reappropriate
those slurs.
Another difference between the sort of reappropriation of cunt
that we’re concerned with here and reappropriation of slurs is that
the end goals are different. With cunt, the goal is a general reduc-
tion in the word’s capacity to offend, which applies always and
everywhere, so that there is no context in which cunt is a more
powerfully offensive word than cock, regardless of who utters it.
Reappropriation of a slur, by contrast, aims specifically to counter
the harmful effect of the slur term on members of the target group
by establishing an empowering use of the term within the target
group. Reappropriated slurs remain offensive when used by those
who are not members of the target group, and even those members
of the target group who are actively promoting a reappropriated,
empowering use of the term tend to oppose non-​members using the
term, even when those non-​members attempt to use it in the same
non-​weaponieed way that members use it. This was highlighted
in May 2018, when rapper Kendrick Lamar was performing at
Hangout Fest in Gulf Shores, Alabama. Lamar often invites fans
on stage to rap with him during his live shows, and it has become
a recognieed norm among his fans that those who are not Black
should omit the n-​word where it appears (reappropriated) in the
lyrics. On this occasion, a white fan named Delaney came on stage
and sang the n-​word as it appeared in the lyrics three times before
Lamar stopped the track. He explained to her, patiently and politely,
‘you got to bleep one single word’, just as another non-​Black fan
who ‘knew the rules’ had done earlier in the show. The crowd can
be heard jeering and yelling in the background. Lamar’s response,
 Cunt and cocksucker 179

Delaney’s immediate apology, and the hostility of the crowd all

point to the reappropriated n-​word being off limits for people
who are not Black, even when it comes to singing lyrics penned by
a Black performer.7 This norm was underlined a year later, when
the American actress Gina Rodriguez posted a video on Instagram
featuring her rapping along to a Fugees song that featured the
n-​word. Rodriguez uttered the word, and in the backlash that
followed she removed the video and apologieed (Romano 2019).
As we’ve seen, it would be fantasy to imagine that the goal of
realieing a situation where ‘there is no context in which cunt is a
more powerfully offensive word than cock’ can be achieved by re-
ducing the taboo around cunt alone. Misogyny is about more than
rude words. But there is reason to hope that by changing attitudes
to cunt, it can be removed from the misogynist’s armory. One
promising way to do this would be to lead the way with regulatory
decisions. When it comes to creating and enforcing rules around
swearing, regulators generally aim to reflect public opinion rather
than to influence it. But a little pushing at boundaries can go a long
way. We saw in Chapter 8 that use of cunt by Glaswegian characters
in the 2012 film The Angel’s Share led to its receiving from the

7 BlackTree TV (2018); Santiago (2018). For footage of another white fan, Payton

Renner, rapping with Lamar three years earlier without uttering the n-​word, see Renner
(2015). Following the Delaney incident in 2018, media coverage included discussions
about whether Lamar was at fault. He had, after all, invited a white person to rap lyrics
that were replete with the n-​word—​what did he expect? However, given that the offen-
siveness of the n-​word in the mouths of non-​Black people is well known, the need for
non-​Black fans to omit the n-​word when on stage with Lamar was a well-​established
norm, and the gentleness with which Lamar raised the issue with Delaney, it would be
uncharitable to blame Lamar here. Even without the established norm about how non-​
Black fans should behave on stage at Lamar’s concerts, it would be highly reckless for a
non-​Black person to take an invitation to sing on stage as a license to utter the n-​word,
especially to a large crowd, despite the lyrics of the song. It is certainly not obvious that
it is permissible to utter the n-​word under such circumstances; at best it is ambiguous,
and faced with such ambiguity the appropriate way forward is to err on the side of not
causing offence. For a fan, being invited on stage by Lamar to rap with him is comparable
to being a guest in his home and invited to ‘make yourself at home’. We know not to take
such invitations literally: our host may have food in the cupboards and their phone lying
on the table, but the polite guest refrains from helping themself to a snack and scrolling
through their host’s private messages.
180 For F*ck’s Sake

BBFC the most restrictive possible classification—​a decision that

the makers of the film claimed failed to recogniee the nuances of
the often inoffensive ways that cunt is used in Scotland. By taking
a more permissive approach in cases like this, the BBFC could call
public attention to the fact that cunt is not always and everywhere a
truly offensive word, which would have been an important step in
dismantling some of the misogyny associated with it. Complaints
could be used as an invitation to educate and change attitudes.
Taking this approach, however, would involve acknowledging
that decisions about how to regulate swearing should not be
solely guided by and reflective of public opinion. It would involve
recognieing that such decisions also have a role in shaping public
opinion. The question of what public opinion ought to be is more
difficult to answer than the question of what public opinion cur-
rently is, and the process of attempting to shape public opinion
is tricky and potentially open to abuse. Even the expression
shape public opinion has a somewhat sinister air; after all, whose
standards are the ‘right’ ones here, and who gets to decide? Such
shaping is best done with a light touch, perhaps by focusing on the
question: What unjust views might decisions about what is offen-
sive embody, and how could regulators best ensure that they do
not unwittingly reinforce those views? Such a policy would involve
taking seriously the possibility that the offensiveness of certain
swear words is influenced by misogyny, homophobia, and other
prejudices—​even in cases where the people who find those words
offensive are committed to justice and equality—​and, in order to
avoid propagating those prejudices, making less restrictive regula-
tory decisions about those words than would have been made were
the aim solely to reflect public opinion. This approach could be in-
cremental: there’s no urgency to jump right in with a Scottish TV
show aimed at toddlers entitled Wee Cunts. Over time, one well-​
judged regulatory decision at a time, the benign cunt would eclipse
the misogynistic. As Raskolnikov observes in Dostoyevsky’s Crime
and Punishment, ‘Man grows used to everything, the scoundrel’!
 13
Cunt and ‘cunt’

Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. All that hand-​wringing in the pre-
vious chapter about reducing the offensiveness of certain swear
words and whether it’s okay to cunt at people in the course of a cru-
sade against misogyny, as if all ways of saying or writing offensive
words are equal—​yet the truth is that they’re not. There are some
pretty familiar devices that we routinely use when we want to strike
a balance between saying the (rude) words we want to say and
avoiding causing offence. We’re going to get into this now.
If we want to avoid offending anyone in contexts where swearing
is inappropriate, we can simply avoid swearing. But what if, for one
reason or another, we don’t want to do that? Often, we want to be
able to utter (i.e. speak or write) swear words in contexts where
swearing is inappropriate. And we often want to be able to do that
without shocking anyone, and without attracting disapproval or the
sorts of penalties that swearing attracts in certain formal contexts.
Suppose, in a polite context, we want to give an accurate report of
what another person said, and what that person said contained
swearing. Assuming that we value both accuracy and politeness,
we face a dilemma. Accurately reporting what the person said
requires us to utter a swear word, which is impolite; but politely re-
porting what was said requires us to omit the swear word, which
compromises the accuracy of our report. This dilemma is especially
acute for news outlets. Accuracy is central to their business (the re-
spectable ones, at any rate)—​but so, too, is avoiding alienating their
audience through offensive language.
Thankfully, there are some ways for us to have our cake and eat
it too. It’s possible to communicate swear words politely—​or, at
182 For F*ck’s Sake

least, it’s possible to make them less impolite for the purposes of
reporting them.

Sanitisation

One familiar device is what I’m going to call sanitisation, in which

we partially or wholly censor a swear word by replacing some or
all of the letters in a written swear word with asterisks or other
symbols, or obscure part or all of a spoken swear word with a bleep.
(The latter, of course, is really only available in broadcasting; it’s not
something we’re easily able to do in the conversations we have in
the wild.)
News outlets use sanitisation all the time. Swearing, after all, can
be very newsworthy, especially when it’s done by a public figure
who we think should know better. But, while no news outlet wants
to miss out on a gripping story, many news outlets—​particularly the
mainstream ones—​have policies restricting the use of swear words
in their reports. Those outlets must find ways to balance conveying
to their audience what was said with adhering to their own policies
around language use. This happened in the UK in July 2015, when
His Royal Highness The Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, late hus-
band of the late Queen Elizabeth II, was filmed asking a journalist
to ‘Just take the fucking picture’ during a photoshoot. Given that
toilet, perfume, and pardon are among the words that members of
the British royal family will not utter, it is unsurprising that Prince
Philip’s fucking was interesting to many.1 The incident was widely
covered in the news, with much of print and internet news media
using asterisks to obscure some of the letters in fucking. Where
video footage was shown by news outlets, His Royal Highness’s
fucking was obscured with a bleep. Asterisks and bleeps are widely

1 See Fox (2004) for more on words that the British royal family, and the British upper

classes in general, will not utter.

 Cunt and ‘cunt’ 183

recognised methods of sanitising language in such instances. This

is despite the fact that these techniques are usually applied sparsely
enough to leave the audience in no doubt which particular word is
being reported. Swear words are rarely sanitised as much as they
could be. Fucking becomes f**king, f***ing, or f******, but rarely
*******; bleeps, too, often begin only after the word’s initial conso-
nant has been enunciated, and while in video footage the speaker’s
mouth is sometimes visually obscured to make it difficult to use lip
movements to help identify the bleeped-​out word, this is far from
always being the case.
The practice of using asterisks (and other techniques) to censor
taboo words has a long history. In Judaism, it has long been blas-
phemous to name the god of the Jews. In Jewish writing it is cus-
tomary to omit letters from God’s name, to refer to God indirectly
as Ha Shem (The Name) or Adonai (Lord), or to write G—​d. The
latter technique was once used by Christians too, although it is now
obsolete. The belief that uttering or writing certain words is taboo,
but that partially censored versions of those words are acceptable,
is not unique to swearing. It might seem that sanitisation shouldn’t
work—​it doesn’t prevent the communication of the word to the au-
dience, after all—​but it does. We’ll consider how it works in the next
chapter.

Quoting and mentioning

First, though, we’re going to focus on how we can mitigate the of-
fensiveness of even unsanitised swear words. One way involves
quoting swear words. Another involves mentioning swear words
rather than using them. (I mention swear words when I observe that
our list of familiar swear words includes shit, piss, fuck, and cunt. By
contrast, in this fucking sentence I am using swear words like that
shit is going out of fashion.) The use/​mention distinction is central
to traditional philosophy of language: the late philosopher Donald
184 For F*ck’s Sake

Davidson recalled, as a student, receiving ‘a stern sermon on the sin

of confusing the use and mention of expressions’ (Davidson 1979,
79). There’s a murky nook in philosophy full of head-​scratching
about precisely how to articulate the use/​mention distinction, but
that needn’t worry us here. Our commonsense grasp of the dis-
tinction will enable us to look at what happens, offensiveness-​wise,
when we mention swear words rather than use them. As we’ll see
in this chapter, mentioning swear words is a way to reduce their
offensiveness—​but it’s not a foolproof mechanism.
The UK newspaper The Guardian makes an exception to the
widespread practice in mainstream news media of sanitising swear
words. The Guardian’s style guide on swearing says the following:

We are more liberal than any other newspapers, using language

that our competitors would not. . . .
The editor’s guidelines are as follows:
. . . use such words only when absolutely necessary to the facts
of a piece, or to portray a character in an article; there is almost
never a case in which we need to use a swear word outside direct
quotes. (Marsh and Hodsdon 2021)

Isn’t The Guardian daring? Well, not as daring as it would have

us believe. Swear words are much less offensive when they are
quoted: consider the difference in offensiveness between saying to
somebody, in a polite context, ‘Fuck you!’ and ‘He said, “Fuck you!” ’.
The conclusions that we draw about a speaker’s beliefs, intentions,
and attitude to others are different when they quote a swear word
compared to when they utter a swear word without quoting it.
This point is not unique to swearing. Consider the following. In
1997, three years before the end of the controversial ban on LGBT
people serving in the UK Armed Forces, the satirical news docu-
mentary TV program Brass Eye featured a fictional British Navy
captain, Sir Hugh Maharggs, who made the following argument
against permitting gay men to join the Royal Navy:
 Cunt and ‘cunt’ 185

Homosexuals can’t swim, they attract enemy radar, they attract

sharks, they insist on being placed at the captain’s table, they get
up late, they nudge people whilst they’re shooting, they muck
about. Imagine the fear of knowing you have a gay man on board
a boat. When you retire at night, you think to yourself: God, will
I wake up and find everybody dead? You can’t run a ship like that.
(Morris 1997)

What conclusions did you draw about my own views on LGBT

people serving in the Royal Navy after reading that last paragraph?
Hopefully, none. The only views on this topic that appeared in the
paragraph above were formatted as a block quotation and ascribed
to a fictional character, which you understand means that the
quoted remarks don’t reflect my own views. Had the quoted remarks
not been formatted as a quotation, nor ascribed to another speaker,
however, you could take them to express my own views. But there’s
more. Although you can’t take those quoted remarks to reflect my
own views about LGBT people serving in the Royal Navy, there are
other conclusions you can draw from the fact that I’ve quoted them
in the context that I’ve quoted them. You can, for example, con-
clude that I am trying to make a point about quotation, and—​given
the point I’m trying to make—​that I definitely don’t hold the views
quoted. Something similar happens when offensive remarks are
quoted in the news. Not only can quoted remarks not be ascribed
to the person who quotes them, but the fact of that person’s uttering
the quotation can support certain inferences about that person.
When The Guardian quotes unsanitised swear words, its readers
understand that it would be inappropriate to take offence at the
newspaper or the author of the article in question, and also that
the decision to leave the swear words unsanitised expresses certain
things about the newspaper. These things include, perhaps, that it
is committed to conveying ‘the facts of a piece’ and that it trusts its
readers’ sober love of truth will not be knocked off course by the
odd fuck or shit. Both of these inferences reflect quite well on The
186 For F*ck’s Sake

Guardian, and because of this, for The Guardian, the decision not
to sanitise swear words is win-​win—​but such a decision requires
its readers to recognise the significance of the distinction between
quoted and unquoted swear words.
When it comes to neutralising the offence of an uttered word, a
close cousin of quotation is the use/​mention distinction. The dis-
tinction between using offensive language and merely mentioning
it hit the headlines in June 2015 after then-​US president Barack
Obama said the n-​word during a podcast interview. The majority
of news stories that covered this incident were scandalised and re-
ported him as having used the word. In fact, he merely mentioned
it, as the context makes clear. What he said was, ‘It’s not just a
matter of it not being polite to say [n-​word] in public. That’s not the
measure of whether racism still exists or not. It’s not just a matter of
overt discrimination’.2

Quotation, mention, and slurs

Neither quotation nor mentioning provide the speaker with com-

plete protection against causing offence, however. Generally, when
we quote something offensive that somebody else has said, our
listeners’ offence will be directed at the person whose remarks we
are quoting, rather than at us. So, if I say to you: ‘Nigel said, “It’s
not my fault I’m late for work, I’d have been on time if there weren’t
so many immigrants on the roads” ’, any offence you feel is going
to be directed at Nigel, not at me.3 But sometimes speakers do
not escape unscathed when quoting offensive remarks. This can
happen when quoting slurs. In May 2020, Stanford University law

2 Writing in the Huffington Post, Harvey Simon was in a minority of journalists to note

that Obama had mentioned rather than used the word, and to draw out the difference
this made to how offensive (or not) Obama’s remarks were (Simon 2015).
3 The quoted passage paraphrases remarks made by Nigel Farage in 2014. See

Rawlinson (2014).
 Cunt and ‘cunt’ 187

professor Michael W. McConnell read aloud an eighteenth-​century

quote by Patrick Henry, which contained the n-​word. McConnell is
white, and his utterance of the n-​word was viewed with outrage by
his students and condemned by the dean of the law school, Jenny
S. Martinez (Anderson 2020). Not everybody working in education
views it as offensive for non-​Black people to quote the n-​word—​
anecdotally, among non-​Black philosophers working on slurs, I’ve
attended some talks by white philosophers who will utter the word
during the course of their talk on slurs, and some who won’t—​but
it remains controversial, largely due to the fact that the emotional
response it provokes in Black people does not distinguish between
quotation and non-​quotation, or between use and mention.4 (It’s
for this reason that I, a white person, did not quote Martin Luther
King’s remarks in full in the previous chapter, nor those of John
McWhorter in Chapter 11, nor those of Barack Obama above.)
Recall Oprah Winfrey’s comments, quoted in Chapter 11, on being
unable to hear the n-​word without thinking of lynching and degra-
dation. The writer Mahad Olad, whose Somali parents moved the
family to the US when he was very young, expands further. The n-​
word, he writes, ‘carries a lot of power and can elicit a visceral reac-
tion’, and while he supports Black people’s efforts to reappropriate
it, he ‘will probably never be comfortable with non-​Black usages of
n—​a and especially n—​er, even if they’re merely referring to it and
not using it’ (Olad 2019).

4 Why don’t those philosophers who utter the n-​word make the news, as McConnell

did? Perhaps because the context in which they utter it—​during talks dealing with the
semantics, pragmatics, and offensiveness of the n-​word and other slurs—​is recognised
as a context in which it is difficult to avoid uttering it. Perhaps because invariably such
talks are premised on the recognition that the n-​word is offensive, so the speakers are
recognised as opposed to its general use, as well as recognised as having spent a lot of
time and attention researching the word. Perhaps also because, depressingly, although
philosophy undergraduates are fairly racially diverse, the population of PhD students
and professional philosophers—​who generally make up the audience at these sorts of
talks—​remains mostly non-​Black in countries like the UK, the US, and Australia, which
means that utterances of the n-​word by non-​Black speakers during research talks tend
not to be utterances of the word in the presence of Black people, who are those most
likely to have a strong reaction to the n-​word.
188 For F*ck’s Sake

What’s going on in these contexts? Did those students who were

offended by McConnell’s quoting of the n-​word simply not under-
stand that he was quoting somebody else rather than expressing the
quoted sentiments himself? That seems unlikely. A more prom-
ising explanation for their reaction lies elsewhere. We saw above
that when a person quotes something, there are conclusions we
can draw from the fact that they’ve quoted the words in ques-
tion in the context in question. McConnell’s students recognised
that his utterance of the n-​word occurred within a quotation, but
perhaps concluded from his quoting it that the word came rather
too easily to his lips and therefore that he had failed to grasp its
significance. They might also have concluded that clearly he was
confident—​even without consulting his Black students about the
matter before the class—​that the word’s enclosure within quota-
tion marks would render it inoffensive. It’s far from clear that the
n-​word becomes inoffensive even in the context of a quotation that
is relevant to the subject being discussed, as the remarks of Oprah
Winfrey and Mahad Olad demonstrate. But even ignoring that, the
fact that McConnell did not consult his students prior to uttering
the quotation is itself significant.
Even if—​as many people apparently believe—​it is sometimes
appropriate to utter the n-​word in the course of quoting another
person, this does not mean that it’s polite or respectful to do so
without first consulting or at least warning one’s listeners. Especially
in the last few years, it’s become increasingly familiar in educational
spaces to warn students in advance about offensive or upsetting
content in classes and reading material. This includes appearances
of the n-​word: in August 2022, Exeter University in the UK made
the news for following various American schools’ practice of pro-
viding students on its American literature module with a warning
about the language in Mark Twain’s 1884 novel, Huckleberry Finn.
The warning stated that the novel ‘is problematic in a number of
ways, not least because of Huck’s use of the n-​word’ (Brown 2022).
 Cunt and ‘cunt’ 189

Preceding an utterance of the n-​word with a trigger warning,

however, is useful only in cases where we’ve already decided that
it’s appropriate to utter the word. It’s not clear that it would have
been appropriate for McConnell to utter the n-​word in his class,
even if his students had been forewarned. Issuing a warning, after
all, would not have involved consulting his students about whether
it was acceptable to utter the word in the first place—​and perhaps
that’s what was needed here. Perhaps, at the very least, McConnell
ought to have consulted his students in order to enable himself to
quote the n-​word in a way that was considerate and respectful of his
students.
To make this point clear, consider an analogy. When visiting
someone’s home for the first time as a guest, it’s appropriate to sit
on their furniture and to use their toilet if needed. Even so, it would
be rude to make oneself comfortable on their sofa without being
invited to sit down, or to wander off to use their toilet without first
asking for permission. We wait for permission in this context not
because we think that sitting on the sofa or using the toilet might
be inappropriate but in order to signal our acknowledgement that
our host is in charge. Awaiting permission says I recognise that any
use I make of your home while I’m here is a favour from you to me.
Similarly, had McConnell discussed with his students—​and given
particular weight to the views of his Black students—​his plans to
quote the passage containing the n-​word during class, his act of
consulting them would have expressed something like I recognise
that my being able to quote this word inoffensively during class is
a favour from you to me. For him to utter the word without prior
discussion was the equivalent of entering someone’s home as a
guest and sprawling on their sofa before one has been shown into
the living room and invited to sit down. Both are objectionable,
regardless of whether or not quoting the n-​word in relevant edu-
cational contexts and sitting on one’s host’s furniture are generally
appropriate.
190 For F*ck’s Sake

The limitations of sweary quotation

Quoting swear words isn’t likely to get you into the sort of hot water
in which McConnell found himself, but you still need to tread
somewhat carefully to avoid falling foul of certain conclusions that
your audience might draw from the fact that you’ve quoted the
words in question in the context that you’ve quoted them. A single
quoted swear word, in order to communicate accurately what an-
other person has said, can reflect well on both speaker and audi-
ence, as we saw from The Guardian case. But take it too far—​for
example, by repeatedly uttering the quotation—​and you risk your
audience concluding that you’re not quoting swear words because
of a noble commitment to clear communication but because you
simply enjoy saying rude words.
In the case of news outlets, we can draw an analogy between
quoted swearing and gore. When news outlets report a murder,
it’s often appropriate for them to mention some aspects of how the
murder occurred, such as what weapon was used, what injuries
the victim suffered, where the crime occurred, and so on. But we
would find it distasteful and gratuitous were a news report about
a murder to include lingering, close-​up footage of the victim’s
wounds and lengthy descriptions of the last moments. With gore
in the news, as with swearing, we expect enough but not too much.
What constitutes enough and too much is, of course, a matter of
social convention, and varies with context—​what constitutes too
much gore in a mainstream news report may be appropriate in a
documentary about a serial killer—​but we expect news outlets to
do a decent job of reflecting the prevailing views of its audience
about this.
The swearing/​gore analogy is not perfect. As we’ve seen, swearing
(at least when certain people do it) can itself be newsworthy; gore
generally isn’t. In cases where swearing is newsworthy, swearing is
not a peripheral detail which can be omitted; it’s the main point of
the story. Mentioning swear words might seem straightforwardly
 Cunt and ‘cunt’ 191

and obviously appropriate in those cases, while sanitising them

(as some news outlets and broadcasters do) might seem bizarre
and nonsensical. But, in fact, things are much more compli-
cated. Incidents of swearing—​particularly those involving British
royalty—​are routinely reported in the news in a way that indicates
that the very readers who are interested in being kept up to date
about when members of the British royal family utter swear words
are very much not interested in encountering the swear words
uttered. A striking example of this is a story from 2019, in which the
British tabloid Express ran a story about how Prince Philip swore
at Queen Elizabeth II using unknown words ‘between 1949 and
1951’ (Bet 2019). It’s also apparently newsworthy—​and here we risk
getting thoroughly entangled in theoretical distinctions—​when
members of the British royal family merely mention swear words.
In 2013, during an episode of the British comedy quiz show Was
It Something I Said?, the actor Brian Blessed related an encounter
with the Queen in which she mentioned fuck:

The Queen said to me, ‘You know, Mr Blessed, the other week
when you were on [British comedy quiz show] Have I Got News
For You, you did say “F. U. C. K”. thirty times, you know you didn’t
care to swear—​but, of course, it’s an Anglo-​Saxon word, fuck, it
means “spreading of seed”.’ (Channel 4 2013)

Much audience laughter followed this anecdote, and the host of the
quiz, comedian David Mitchell, responded with an incredulous,
‘Have you heard the Queen say fuck? That is amazing’. Reporting
this exchange seven years later, Express included a video clip in
which Blessed’s spelling-​out of fuck was left uncensored but his
utterance of fuck, despite its offensiveness being double-​bagged
as a mention within a quotation, was obscured with a bleep. In
the accompanying text, fuck was rendered as f**k (Scarsi 2020).
Clearly, despite Express taking its readers to be sufficiently inter-
ested in royal swearing to want to hear about sweary incidents that
192 For F*ck’s Sake

occurred more than seventy years earlier, it does not take those
readers to be so interested as to want to encounter the uncensored
words themselves, even when those words are merely quoted,
merely mentioned, or both.
Let’s pause to take stock of where we are. Words that are offen-
sive when we use them can be inoffensive when they are quoted
or mentioned—​ but not always. Some words uttered by some
speakers—​including slurs uttered by people outside the target
group and swear words uttered by the late Queen—​are so shocking
to some listeners or readers that it hardly matters whether the
words are used, mentioned, or quoted; the effect of the words is
felt regardless. Sometimes, we manage to act offensively despite
quoting or mentioning a certain word because of the conclusions
that our audience draws about our quoting or mentioning the
word. If our audience thinks that we are quoting or mentioning the
word in question more than is necessary, they might conclude that
we’re enjoying uttering the word, which leads them to respond to
us as if we’d used the word. If the quoted or mentioned word is a
slur and the speaker is not a member of the target group, the au-
dience might conclude that the speaker’s willingness to utter the
word betrays their inadequate grasp of the word’s power to oppress
and offend, which leads them to react to the speaker as if they had
used the word. Sometimes, quoting or mentioning an offensive
word—​particularly a slur—​without prior discussion with one’s au-
dience can be disrespectful and rude. To get away with quoting or
mentioning an offensive word without causing offence, a speaker
needs to ensure that the conclusions that their audience will draw
about them will be positive ones. The Guardian manages to do this.
By aiming to minimise the swear words appearing in its reports, but
not shrinking from printing them in full where not including them
would be awkward, it manages to convey a serious-​minded com-
mitment to news reporting.
In some unusual cases, however, even when all the right boxes
are ticked, it’s still possible to offend with quoted or mentioned
 Cunt and ‘cunt’ 193

remarks. Here’s an example that was described to me by David

Edmonds just before he and Nigel Warburton interviewed me
about swearing for their hugely successful podcast, Philosophy Bites.
Imagine that, during a heated but polite discussion with a profes-
sional colleague whom you do not know well, your colleague says
to you, ‘I’m tempted to call you an arrogant prick, but since I want
to keep this polite, I won’t’. In saying this, your colleague stops short
of calling you an arrogant prick—​instead, they merely mention the
term—​but even so, they manage to convey their negative opinion
of you just as effectively as if they’d used the term. Your colleague
in this example is comparable to Stohr’s dinner host, whom we met
in the previous chapter, who deliberately sets the table with a com-
plicated collection of cutlery in order to trip someone up. Both act
in accordance with relevant rules of etiquette, which, respectively,
prohibit one from calling colleagues arrogant pricks and set out the
way in which cutlery should be arranged on a dinner table; but both
act contrary to the underlying principles of manners, which require
treating people with respect.
In terms of offensiveness, then, there is a difference between,
on the one hand, using swear words, and on the other, quoting or
mentioning them. But the whole area is an offensiveness minefield.
There are plenty of ways in which we can cause offence with quoted
or mentioned swear words. This makes it surprising that so many of
us succeed in quoting or mentioning swear words without causing
offence—​something that is perhaps explained by the fact that in
polite company most of us, like The Guardian, quote or mention
swears ‘only when absolutely necessary to the facts’. While many
people, when reporting verbatim what others have said, will give
voice to language that they would never include in their own vo-
cabulary, it’s often clear that they utter the words in question only
reluctantly and in the service of communicating clearly. This helps
to ensure that their audience does not view them as taking pleasure
in uttering the words, or failing to understand their offensiveness,
or any other conclusion that reflects negatively on the speaker. In
194 For F*ck’s Sake

general, fluent speakers of a language do understand the signif-

icance of uttering swear words in polite company, and where it’s
necessary to utter them, they do so with discomfort; this discom-
fort helps ensure that they are not viewed as acting offensively when
they quote or mention swear words.
But, what about sanitisation? It may well be true that there is a
strong case for the relevance of swear words in certain news reports
and some other contexts. But there are also universally recognised
methods of sanitising swear words using asterisks and bleeps. How
can uttering swear words in full ever be ‘absolutely necessary to the
facts’ when sanitisation is an option? How does sanitisation even
work—​after all, anyone who knows what fuck means also knows
what f*** means? We’ll turn to these questions in the next chapter.
 14
How the f*** do asterisks work?

In 2014, the International Journal of Advanced Computer

Technology accepted a paper by David Mazières and Eddie Kohler,
who are professors of computer science at Stanford and Harvard
universities, respectively. The paper was entitled ‘Get Me Off Your
Fucking Mailing List’. The entirety of the text, along with two
diagrams, consisted of the sentence Get me off your fucking mailing
list, repeated over ten pages and formatted like a standard scien-
tific paper. The paper’s acceptance highlighted the problem of pred-
atory academic publishers: organisations that spam thousands
of academics with offers to publish their research—​for a fee—​in
journals that have lofty-​sounding titles but which are not par-
ticularly selective about what they publish. (Despite being ac-
cepted, ‘Get Me Off Your Fucking Mailing List’ ended up not being
published, since the authors did not pay the $150 publication fee.)
Academic publishing practices are not usually of interest to the
general public, but this incident made the news around the world.
I learned of it in 2014 via a story on a news website—​sadly, I don’t
recall which one—​in which all mention of the content of the paper
in the headline and accompanying text was sanitised as Get me off
your f***ing mailing list, yet the story was illustrated with an image of
the front page of the article, which contained dozens of uncensored,
unsanitised fuckings. It was this news story that triggered my philo-
sophical interest in swearing. What was going on with the asterisks?,
I wondered. The word they were censoring was right there on the
screen. And even if it hadn’t been, anyone likely to be interested in
the story can easily work out what the partially obscured word is.
The practice of sanitising swear words with asterisks or
other symbols (and the audio equivalent of using bleeps during
196 For F*ck’s Sake

broadcasts and recordings, or saying things like effing in place of

fucking), is widely used as a way of communicating swear words
without causing offence, and apparently it is pretty effective. How
it manages to be effective is puzzling, and there are those who be-
lieve it shouldn’t be effective and that it shouldn’t be used. In her
‘editor’s preface’ to the second edition of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering
Heights, Charlotte Brontë condemned the practice of sanitisation
even while acknowledging its effectiveness in reducing offence:

A large class of readers, likewise, will suffer greatly from the intro-
duction into the pages of this work of words printed with all their
letters, which it has become the custom to represent by the initial
and final letter only—​a blank line filling the interval. I may as well
say at once that, for this circumstance, it is out of my power to
apologise; deeming it, myself, a rational plan to write words at full
length. The practice of hinting by single letters those expletives
with which profane and violent persons are wont to garnish their
discourse, strikes me as a proceeding which, however well meant,
is weak and futile. I cannot tell what good it does—​what feeling it
spares—​what horror it conceals. (Brontë 1850)

The Guardian style guide, after permitting the appearance of swear

words inside quotation marks, approvingly quotes Brontë as it
instructs its writers to ‘never use asterisks, or such silliness as b—​—​
, which are just a cop-​out’ (Marsh and Hodsdon 2021).
Both Brontë and The Guardian are clearly frustrated by the prac-
tice of sanitisation. The thought is: either swear or don’t swear, but
don’t mess about with half measures. Reminding ourselves yet again
of Feinberg’s distinction between two senses of offence helps us un-
derstand their attitudes here. Feinberg, remember, distinguished be-
tween a general sense of offence and a normative sense. Something is
offensive in the general sense when it causes people to feel offended.
Something is offensive in the normative sense when it involves
wrongdoing, which for our purposes includes rudeness or impo-
liteness. For us to view someone’s feeling of offence as reasonable or
 How the f*** do asterisks work? 197

understandable, we expect it to be explainable by what is happening

at the normative level: as Feinberg puts it, ‘the unpleasant mental
state [i.e. feeling offended] must be caused by conduct that really is
wrongful’ (1985, 2). Sanitisation is frustrating because, although it
really does work to stop people from feeling offended, it is not clear
what sanitisation changes at the normative level that could explain
this result. By writing f***, we still communicate fuck, after all. How
can f*** enable us to communicate fuck to our audience while also
telling them not to feel offended? This seems rather like punching
someone in the face while also telling them not to be hurt. It’s a mys-
tery how this could possibly work, which leads people like Charlotte
Brontë and the editors of The Guardian to conclude that sanitisation
should not work, and that it should not be used.
So, how does sanitisation work (or not work)? What difference
does it make to the sanitised swear words themselves? Well, not
much. There’s more to say on this, but, in short, sanitisation does
not work by stopping short of communicating swear words, or by
communicating something inoffensive in place of swear words.
It works, rather, by signalling something about the speaker’s
intentions and attitudes towards her audience: that she cares about
her audience’s feelings and that she does not wish to offend them.
This means that sanitisation works in a similar way to many other
widely accepted ways of expressing respect, such as saying please.

Sanitisation: it’s not about the word

Trying to explain how sanitisation works to mitigate the offensive-

ness of swear words by looking at what it changes about the words
themselves does not lead us anywhere satisfactory. There are a few
forms that such an explanation could take.
First, we could try to explain how sanitisation works by claiming
that we view the sanitised version of swear words as literally dif-
ferent words to the unsanitised versions. So, f*** is less offensive
than fuck because f*** and fuck are different words. We have already
198 For F*ck’s Sake

seen that swear words tend to have inoffensive synonyms: fuck and
copulate are expressions that (for certain uses of fuck, at least) mean
the same thing, yet they differ in their offensiveness. So, perhaps we
could tell a similar story for fuck and f***: they both mean the same
thing, but one is more offensive than the other.
This is not a plausible story, however. F*** and fuck are not dif-
ferent words. They are the same word. Writing f*** is simply a way
of writing fuck. We learn what f*** means by first learning what
fuck means, and if you wanted to explain to someone what f***
means, you’d do it by explaining that it’s fuck with most of the let-
ters replaced by asterisks. When we write f***, we assume that our
readers will understand us to mean fuck. When Prince Philip said,
‘Just take the fucking picture’ to a photographer and was reported in
the news as having said ‘Just take the f***ing picture’, those reports
were not inaccurate. They did not report him as having said some-
thing other than he did, and we don’t interpret them as such. When
we read a report that says, ‘Prince Philip said “Just take the f***ing
picture” ’, we take it to mean that Prince Philip said ‘Just take the
fucking picture’. All these reflections point to f*** and fuck being the
same word. Which, given that the word fuck is offensive, makes it
difficult to understand how f*** manages to be less offensive.
What, then, accounts for the difference in their offensiveness?
Perhaps the answer is that, while fuck is a swear word, f*** is not.
On the face of it, this view is highly appealing, because it fits with
the way in which people use the f***. Someone who chooses to say
f*** instead of fuck believes that, by doing so, they avoid swearing.
They use the sanitised version because they do not want to utter
a swear word. Even so, if we scratch the surface of this account, it
makes little sense. We have already seen that f*** and fuck are the
same word. We also know that fuck is a swear word. This means that
f*** must also be a swear word. One and the same word cannot both
be and not be a swear word.
Second, even if f*** and fuck are not different words, perhaps
we don’t have to concede that they are the same word. Perhaps
 How the f*** do asterisks work? 199

f*** is not a word at all. After all, the asterisks are not letters, but
placeholders for missing letters. The asterisks are linguistic IOUs.
It might be that, by writing f***, one stops short of writing a word,
even if the context makes it clear to the audience what word one
would have written had one gone ahead and written a word. This
would explain how f*** manages not to be an offensive word: some-
thing cannot be an offensive word unless it is a word. In this
sense, f*** is rather like the catchphrase that Homer utters before
strangling Bart in The Simpsons: ‘Why you little—​!’ Homer stops
short of saying something offensive, but the inoffensive words that
he does say leave us in no doubt about how his sentence would have
been completed had he decided to complete it. The catchphrase
suggests something offensive without needing to say it. Perhaps f***
communicates the offensive word fuck by inoffensively suggesting
it. And just as Homer’s catchphrase is not a complete sentence, per-
haps f*** is not a complete word.
However, it is implausible to claim that f*** is not a word. It
functions linguistically exactly as fuck does. Anything that we can
say with fuck, we can also say with f***, which means that since fuck
qualifies as a word, it is difficult to deny word status to f***. And
if we wrote ‘F*** is a four-​letter word’ and someone were to reply
‘No, it’s a one-​letter-​and-​three-​asterisk not-​word’, we wouldn’t take
them seriously—​we’d think they were being overliteral and (per-
haps deliberately) missing our point.
F*** might lack the cathartic, expressive power of fuck, but that is
not enough to disqualify it from wordhood. Almost all words, after
all, lack the cathartic, expressive power of fuck. Despite its being
comprised mostly of asterisks, and the fact that we use it as much
for what it enables us to avoid saying as for what it enables us to say,
the case for claiming that f*** is not a word is weak.
Third, we might try the following explanation. When we say
that f*** and fuck are the same word, we mean that they are both
ways of expressing or communicating the same word. But no-
body could deny that they are each different ways of expressing
200 For F*ck’s Sake

or communicating that same word. One way involves writing all

the letters of the word; the other involves substituting most of
those letters for asterisks. This is the only difference between the
unsanitised and the sanitised ways of communicating the word—​
at least in their written forms. That one of them is more offensive
than the other must be because one is a more offensive way of
communicating the word fuck than the other. One way of viewing
this, which accurately reflects our motivation for using f*** instead
of fuck in certain contexts, involves claiming that by writing f***,
we spare the reader the word fuck. We allow the reader a glimpse
of the word—​just enough to see what’s going on—​without making
them dwell on it. Reading f*** is to reading fuck as watching a
horror movie from behind the sofa is to being forced to view it, our
eyes propped open like Alex in A Clockwork Orange. This view of
things certainly seems to be held by news editors who require their
journalists to sanitise swear words. Editorial guidelines that require
the news that Prince Philip said fucking to be expressed as ‘Prince
Philip said “f***ing” ’ aim at communicating to readers precisely
what Prince Philip said but in a way that spares them the offensive
word that he uttered.
On the surface, this talk of sparing the reader (or listener)
sounds plausible—​but actually, if sparing the reader is the concern,
there are far better strategies than sanitisation. If we really wanted
to spare the reader the offensive word, we could avoid including the
word at all. It is, after all, possible to report that Prince Philip swore
without conveying exactly what word he used. A report could say
that Prince Philip uttered a swear word, and perhaps that the word
in question was one of our strongest swear words. If news editors
really were serious about sparing their readers swear words, this
is what we should expect them to do. Or they could use asterisks
(or bleeps) to obscure the entire word, rather than just part of it,
as tends to be the custom. But, in fact, the way in which asterisks
and bleeps tend to be used makes clear that we don’t want it to be at
all obscure which word we are using. We typically leave enough of
the original letters or sounds to leave the reader in no doubt about
 How the f*** do asterisks work? 201

what word is being used. We want our audience to know which

word we’re using. Communication is, after all, the whole point of
language.
In any case, if we really do wish to spare readers swear words,
using asterisks or bleeps to sanitise swear words is an ineffective
way to go about it. Often, this strategy has the opposite effect. By
partially obscuring swear words, we force the reader to work harder
in order to work out which word we are using. This can result in
the reader having to devote more attention to the mystery swear
word than would be necessary had we left the word unsanitised,
as David Marsh, writing in The Guardian, illustrates with the fol-
lowing anecdote:

[A]‌Twitter user commented that, before he saw the word ‘knob-

head’ in the Guardian, he did not know what the word denoted by
another newspaper as k******* was supposed to be. I sympathise.
How is the poor reader expected to differentiate between b*******
and b*******? (The former, of course, is ‘bastards’; the latter, ‘bol-
locks’.) (Marsh 2012)

Consider also the following list from the Daily Mail, which had
appropriated a report from Slate about the most commonly used
swear words on Facebook. The Daily Mail reported the top ten
words as follows:

1. F***
2. S***
3. Bloody
4. P***
5. B****
6. Crap
7. C***
8. C***
9. Damn
10. D*** (Bloom 2014)
202 For F*ck’s Sake

It takes more time and thought to make sense of this list than
it would had the swear words been left unsanitised. What, for ex-
ample, are we to make of words 7 and 8 in this list? Is 7 cunt and
8 cock, or vice versa? We know that neither of them can be crap,
which appears unsanitised at number 6; although its synonym, shit,
is sanitised at (where else?) number 2. The Daily Mail has failed to
spare its readers the trauma of encountering swear words. And in-
deed, in this case and many others, the swear words are the entire
point of the story. It’s a story about swear words. Running a news
story about swear words while also attempting to spare readers the
swear words is too bizarre to make sense. Sanitisation cannot be
about sparing the audience the swear words.

What we communicate besides the words

If sanitising swear words with asterisks does not spare the reader the
swear word, perhaps it instead allows the writer to communicate the
swear word while also communicating that they recognise its offen-
siveness and want to mitigate that offensiveness. This would fit nicely
with our earlier observations about the relevance of what the reader
(or the listener) takes to be the writer’s (speaker’s) intentions in using
swear words. A large part of what makes swearing offensive, we saw,
is that when we swear, we know that we are likely to offend our au-
dience, but we go ahead and do it anyway. Our audience, seeing that
we are being insufficiently considerate of their sensibilities, resents
us for inflicting the word on them, and takes offence. However, when
we use asterisks to sanitise swear words, we effectively say, ‘I want
to communicate to you the word fuck, but I know that writing that
word will offend you, and I don’t want to offend you, so I’m writing
f*** instead’. Asterisks, then, give us a way to swear without setting
off the usual chain of inferences between us and our audience that
culminates in their taking offence at what we say.
This explanation sounds right. We do recognise and mitigate
the offensiveness of fuck by instead writing f***. But this is merely a
 How the f*** do asterisks work? 203

restatement of our original point that many people prefer reading

f*** to reading fuck. It doesn’t give us any additional insight into
how f*** manages to communicate fuck while also being less offen-
sive than fuck. On the contrary, it presupposes that f*** is less of-
fensive than fuck. After all, if f*** were not less offensive, then using
it would not enable us to mitigate the wrongness of writing fuck,
because by writing f*** we would be doing something as offensive
as writing fuck. Doing something offensive while recognising its of-
fensiveness does not mitigate its offensiveness. Quite the opposite
in fact: using disliked terms while recognising that they are disliked
leads to offence escalation, as we’ve seen already. If f*** is less of-
fensive than fuck in part because it enables the speaker to com-
municate that she recognises the offensiveness of fuck, we need a
plausible story about how this works to mitigate offensiveness.
Thankfully, a plausible story is available. Recall Feinberg’s ac-
count of what (wrongful) offence is: we are offended when we ex-
perience a mental state that we dislike (disgust, shock, horror,
etc.), when we attribute that state to the wrongful conduct of an-
other person, and when we resent that other person for causing that
state. Applied to swearing, we are offended by swear words when
encountering them causes us to feel bad (shocked, unsettled, un-
comfortable), when we attribute that bad feeling to another person’s
having sworn inappropriately, and when we resent that person
for causing us to feel bad. That sense of resentment, in the case of
swearing, commonly takes the form of a belief that the speaker
could easily have avoided swearing but did not, and the fact that
they did not prompts us to infer that they hold a disrespectful or
contemptuous attitude toward us. We’ve seen that swearing’s power
to shock and offend has less to do with the words themselves and
more to do with the attitude that the speaker manages to convey by
swearing. Another way of putting this point is: encountering swear
words is only mildly unpleasant for people who take offence at
swearing—​the bulk of their displeasure results from encountering
(what those people take to be) the disrespectful and contemptuous
attitudes of people who swear.
204 For F*ck’s Sake

Sanitisation works not by shielding us from offensive words

(although there’s a sense in which it does do that, as we’ll discuss
below) but by enabling the writer to signal that she do not hold a
disrespectful or contemptuous attitude towards the reader, which
in turn prevents the reader from resenting her role in any dis-
pleasure caused by encountering the easily recognisable sanitised
word. When a writer sanitises a swear word, she does not merely
signal her recognition that the word is offensive (which, as we saw
above, would not alone explain how sanitisation manages to reduce
the offensiveness of swear words). She also makes a sacrifice: she
could have written the word in full, but chose not to, due to her so-
licitude towards her reader. Uttering the word in full would have
been more satisfying than uttering a sanitised version. This sacri-
fice is not lost on her reader. As we saw in Chapter 5, swearing (and
taboo-​breaking in general) can be fun. Sanitising swear words is a
recognised way to avoid the taboo of swearing, which means that by
opting to sanitise, one opts to forgo the fun of breaking the taboo.
But not only is sanitising swear words a recognised way of avoiding
the taboo of swearing—​it’s a recognised way of doing so in order
to avoid offending one’s reader. This means that what our reader
takes from our use of sanitisation is: I care about your feelings. The
writer who uses sanitisation conveys that she is trying to do her
best to strike a balance between communicating using language
and protecting her reader’s feelings; a balance that is difficult to
strike when swearing is important to what she wants to communi-
cate. What the writer signals, in such an instance, is incompatible
with the attitude of disrespect and contempt that we risk conveying
when we swear unsanitised. As a result, sanitisation, when used
wisely, cancels out that attitude. In doing so, it removes the primary
means by which swearing causes offence.
It may seem, at this point, that sanitisation has a ‘house of cards’
feel about it. By sanitising, we manage to signal our solicitude to-
ward our reader, yet we do so by substituting an offensive word
for something that is barely less offensive. How can this possibly
work? The answer, I think, is: it doesn’t matter. There are plenty of
 How the f*** do asterisks work? 205

examples in etiquette where we signal solicitude through behaviour

that, on close scrutiny, doesn’t make sense. We hold the door open
for the person behind us, and in doing so signal solicitude towards
them even when we have no doubt that they are capable of opening
the door themself. We say Good morning to our neighbours as we
pass them on the street even on mornings when it seems that world
events have rendered the morning anything but good. We offer
to compensate a colleague who has done us a favour even when
it is clear to us that they will decline our offer. When it comes to
signalling solicitude, it’s the thought that counts. The mechanisms
via which we do it—​sanitisation, holding doors open, and so on—​
enable us to do it not through doing something practically useful
or helpful but simply through being recognised ways of signalling
solicitude. As Sarah Buss has argued, the word please (and its
equivalents in other languages) means, simply, You are worthy of
respect. Something similar is true of sanitisation, and of the other
ways of signalling solicitude described here.

When asterisks don’t cut it

I’ve claimed that sanitisation cancels out the attitude of disre-

spect and contempt that we risk conveying to our reader through
unsanitised swearing when used wisely. This qualification is im-
portant. For sanitisation to work in reducing the offensiveness of
swearing, we need to use it sparingly. It needs to be plausible to
our reader that we are caught in a dilemma: we want to commu-
nicate something that makes the use of swearing difficult to avoid,
and we want to minimise the damage to our reader’s sensibilities.
Overusing sanitised swear words, or using them in a way that leads
the audience to suspect that the author is deriving glee or cathartic
pleasure from using them, undermines sanitisation’s capacity to
signal solicitude to the reader. The notoriously sweary character,
Malcolm Tucker, in the 2009 movie In the Loop (a spin-​off of the TV
show The Thick of It), did not signal solicitude to Linton Barwick
206 For F*ck’s Sake

when he said the following to him: ‘I mean, you are a real boring
fuck! Sorry, I know you disapprove of swearing, so I’ll sort that: You
are a boring eff-​star-​star cunt’! In this case, Tucker’s liberal use of
unsanitised swearing, along with his aggressive and generally im-
polite tone, ensures that the small amount of sanitisation he utters
does nothing to dilute his contemptuous attitude.
Here’s another example. Consider again that heavily sanitised list
of swear words published by the Daily Mail. Imagine if, instead of
printing the sanitised words in a list, it had offered them up in the
form of the following sweary puzzle for its readers:
1

2 3 4

6 7

ACROSS DOWN
3. Of the fluid that is pumped 1. Male bird
by the heart
5. Female genitals 2. Abbreviated form of the name ‘Richard’
6. Copulate 3. Female dog
8. Solid waste from the body 4. Condemn by God
9. Liquid bodily waste produced 7. Solid waste from the body
by the kidneys

In some ways, this puzzle would have done the same job for
the Daily Mail as the sanitised list that appeared in the published
 How the f*** do asterisks work? 207

article. It communicates the relevant words to the reader without

having to write them in full. It’s actually even more sanitised than
the sanitised list: the sanitised list displays at least part of each
rude word, whereas they are not displayed at all in the puzzle, only
hinted at by clues that do not contain swear words. Even so, it’s dif-
ficult to imagine the Daily Mail’s readers being impressed by this
puzzle. I’m not aware of any research comparing attitudes to reg-
ular sanitisation with attitudes to sweary puzzles, but my hunch is
that the Daily Mail readership’s response to a sweary puzzle would
more closely resemble its response to unsanitised swearing than
its response to regular sanitisation. Complaints would be rife. But
why, given how thoroughly sanitised are the swear words in the
puzzle?
The reason is that what the Daily Mail signals to its readers via
the sanitised list is different to what would be signalled with the
puzzle. With the sanitised list, the message is: We recognise that
these swear words will offend you and because we care about not
offending you we’re not printing them in full. With the puzzle, the
message is different. Puzzles are fun! A sweary puzzle would have
signalled to readers: We think you’ll enjoy guessing these swear
words and because we care about your enjoyment we’re not printing
them. A newspaper that publishes a crossword puzzle omits the
answers from the puzzle not because it wants to help its readers
avoid the words in question but because it expects that the readers
will have fun working out the words from the clues and writing
them in the puzzle. This shows that sanitisation does not render
swear words less offensive by covering them up but through the
unwritten message of solicitude that it enables the writer to convey
to the reader.
Sanitisation does not succeed in completely protecting the
reader or listener from the shock and offensiveness of swearing.
For this reason, it is not regarded as suitable for certain audiences,
including those consisting of young children. Clangers is a British
stop-​motion TV series for children. It was initially broadcast during
208 For F*ck’s Sake

the 1960s and 1970s, although it was reprised with new episodes in
2015. Each episode of Clangers has a script, but actors use whistles
rather than words to give voice to the characters, and the whistles
follow the same cadence of the scripted speech. The show’s creator,
Oliver Postgate, described in an interview that in one of the orig-
inal episodes, Major Clanger responds to a stuck door by whis-
tling, ‘Oh sod it, the bloody thing’s stuck again!’. Despite the fact
that the words were whistled rather than spoken, and therefore
can be regarded as sanitised, the BBC objected to the line on the
ground that ‘people will know’ (Banks 2005). Communicating even
a sanitised form of swearing is, it seems, unacceptable in certain
contexts.
This capacity of sanitisation to convey a residue of whatever
is objectionable about swear words has been used to comic ef-
fect. The ‘unnecessary censorship’ segment of the American talk
show Jimmy Kimmel Live features video footage of public figures
speaking, censored with bleeps despite the fact that no swearing
occurs. The effect, which turns on the association that the audience
makes between bleeping and swearing, is to make the speakers ap-
pear far more foul-​mouthed than they really are. There are written
examples of this too: in 2021 the Toronto-​based financing soft-
ware company, Wave, published an advertisement that read, ‘Wave
Money is changing the whole ***king industry’. The censored
word, in this case, is banking.1 Also in 2021, an advertisement for
Clarkson’s Farm, an Amazon Prime documentary show about the
efforts of disgraced British journalist Jeremy Clarkson to become a
farmer, featured the headline ‘Jeremy Clarkson is a f***er’. In both
these cases, sanitisation is used to lend shock value to inoffen-
sive words by—​to borrow Nancy Friedman’s expression—​swear-​
ifying them.
Sanitisation, then, is sometimes ineffective at reducing offensive-
ness. But there’s more. Sometimes sanitisation makes things worse.

1 For this and some similar examples, see Friedman (2021).

 How the f*** do asterisks work? 209

It does this by encouraging a lazy attitude to reducing offensive-

ness, which sometimes results in failing to address what is really of-
fensive. An example of this involves the footballer John Terry, who
in 2012 stood trial for calling fellow footballer Anton Ferdinand a
fucking Black cunt during a match. The first and third of these words
were sanitised in almost all newspapers that covered the story. In
a story about the coverage, The Guardian printed a letter from a
reader, who wrote:

Thanks, in any event, to The Guardian for reporting without coy-

ness what Mr Terry is alleged to have said to Anton Ferdinand.
I never cease to be amazed by newspapers which shyly make him
say ‘f***ing black c***’, leaving intact the one word which aroused
Mr Ferdinand’s wrath. (Marsh 2012)

This reader raises exactly the worry we are considering

here: that sanitising swearing can distract us from other, more
serious, sources of offence. Terry, after all, was not standing trial
for swearing but for racial abuse. He would not have ended up
in court had he omitted the word Black and restricted himself to
calling Ferdinand a fucking cunt (although he may, perhaps, have
been punished by sporting or broadcasting authorities). It was
the inclusion of Black that turned a mere sweary insult into a slur.
Conversely, the word Black is not offensive, but it became so when
weaponised in the way that Terry used it. Should Terry’s outburst,
then, have been sanitised (if at all) as f***ing B***k c***? No: I think
doing this would have been unsatisfactory for at least two reasons.
First, Black is not a word that is generally sanitised, and sanitising
it would therefore have been puzzling to readers. Second, given
that Black is generally used in a neutral or positive way to refer
to Black people, implying (through sanitisation) that it is offen-
sive would have been insulting. Terry’s expression was, in effect,
unsanitisable. By mindlessly following a ‘sanitise rude words’ rule,
newspapers that published f***ing Black c*** failed to grapple with
210 For F*ck’s Sake

these wider issues, while also sending a shoulder-​shrugging We’ve

done enough signal.
A more dramatic example—​because it contains a slur—​comes
from the consistently awful Daily Mail in January 2022. The
tabloid’s Twitter account shared a link to a story entitled ‘Model
is filmed calling Asian club doorman “a little [p-​word] f**k” ’. The
Daily Mail printed the p-​word in full. While the Daily Mail later
deleted the tweet and sanitised the slur on their website, the jour-
nalist Lorraine King tweeted a screenshot of the original tweet with
the words, ‘Is it just me that finds the p-​word much more offensive
than the f-​word?’ The resounding reply from her followers was: No.
The need to align one’s sanitisation practices with more widely
implemented values goes beyond decisions about which words
to print and which to censor. The British daily tabloid The Sun
published a photograph of a topless model on page 3 of every issue
between November 1970 and January 2015. This was always con-
troversial, and the practice finally ended following a high-​profile
‘No More Page 3’ campaign that had run for several years. At the
same time, The Sun has long had a policy of not printing the word
tits in full—​it prints a sanitised version, t*ts. This sanitisation policy
suggests that The Sun’s editors take a solicitous attitude towards any
readers who might be offended by tits, yet almost forty-​five years
of printing uncensored photographs of tits, despite controversy,
betray a different attitude. As in the John Terry case and the Daily
Mail case, The Sun’s approach to mitigating offensive content is
brainless: it sanitises the usual words yet fails to engage with wider
questions about offensiveness.
These examples illustrate that sanitising swear words can go
hand in hand with a complacent and thoughtless attitude towards
mitigating offence. If we are serious about taking steps to en-
sure that we do not cause undue offence, then we should be pre-
pared to invest more care, thought, and effort into this than is
required by simply substituting asterisks for letters in certain
words. Mitigating offensiveness requires a level of empathy and
 How the f*** do asterisks work? 211

sensitivity to the feelings of others that is absent from the examples

of sanitisation that we just considered; it also requires reflection on
when the importance of not causing offence is outweighed by other
considerations, such as the importance of reporting the news accu-
rately, or the importance of highlighting an injustice. But this itself
is not an argument against sanitisation; it is, rather, a cautionary tale
about the importance of not underestimating what is required in
order to avoid giving undue offence. And while the examples above
provide an interesting contrast between, on the one hand, vigilance
against giving offence, and on the other, a thoughtless or even reck-
less attitude towards offending other people, they do not provide
evidence that sanitising swear words leads one to be more offensive.
There are more important things we can do to avoid causing offence
than sanitising swear words, but this does not entail that sanitising
swear words is a bad idea.
 15
Swearing as a force for good

Our focus, so far, has been on offensive swearing: what makes it

offensive, how it compares to other offensive language, and how
its offensiveness can be mitigated. But, isn’t there an upside to
swearing—​and even to offensiveness more generally? Consider the
following anecdote from journalist Joan Acocella:

The philosopher Noël Carroll told me once of an international

conference in Hanoi in 2006. On the first day, to break the ice, the
Vietnamese and the Western scholars, taking turns, had a joke-​
telling contest. The first two Vietnamese scholars told off-​color
jokes, but the Westerners, still fearful of committing some social
error, stuck to clean jokes. A stiff courtesy reigned. Finally, the
third Western contestant (Carroll, and he recounted this proudly)
told a filthy joke about a rooster, and everyone relaxed. The con-
ference went on to be a great success. (Acocella 2017)

Three cheers for Noël Carroll, his ‘filthy joke about a rooster’, and
the death of ‘stiff courtesy’. Let’s take a look at the good that swearing
can do, in spite of—​or even because of—​its capacity to offend.

Respect the power of swearing

Plenty has been written about the advantages of swearing. Perhaps

the most well-​known recent work in this vein is a series of studies
by psychologist Richard Stephens and his colleagues, who showed
that swearing can help us withstand pain. Stephens had his
 Swearing as a force for good 213

experimental subjects submerge a hand in a bucket of very cold

water for as long as they could. Doing this is, after a while, painful,
not simply cold. Some participants repeatedly swore while their
hand was submerged. Others remained silent, or uttered a neu-
tral word, like solid. Those who swore during the experiment were
able to withstand the pain for longer than those who remained si-
lent, or who uttered a neutral word. Stephens and colleagues then
introduced some invented swear words—​fouch and twizpipe—​to
test whether the analgesic effect of swear words was due to their
being funny and distracting. The real swear words came out on top
(Stephens and Umland 2011; Stephens and Robertson 2020). And
it’s not just the pain we feel in our bodies that swearing can help
us withstand: a study by psychologists Michael Philipp and Laura
Lombardo found that swearing helps us cope with the ‘social pain’
resulting from being ostracised (Philipp and Lombardo 2017).
Stephens and his co-​authors suggest that swearing helps us cope
with pain because it increases emotional arousal. Even so, among
those participants who swore during the experiment, the analgesic
effect was greater for those who tend not to swear a lot during their
daily lives than for those who swear a lot. This points to one way
in which swearing regularly can rob the words of some of their
power for the person who swears—​their ‘power’, in this case (and if
Stephens and his collaborators are right about why swearing helps
people withstand pain), is the emotional change we undergo when
we swear.
The worry that swearing too much robs swear words of their
power is a pretty commonly expressed objection to swearing—​and
it implicitly recognises the value of swearing. After all, why worry
about swear words losing their power if their power is not some-
thing worth preserving? This concern was brought out by the com-
parison that we considered in the introduction between the British
public’s outraged reaction to the Sex Pistols swearing on TV in
1976 and the far milder reaction to former Sex Pistol John Lydon
swearing on TV in 2004. The comparison did not pass unremarked
214 For F*ck’s Sake

at the time of the second incident, with various people—​including

Mark Lawson in The Guardian—​asking whether this heralded the
demise of swearing (Lawson 2004). This concern has not gone
away: I was asked to write an article on exactly this topic for The
Ethics Centre in 2015 (Roache 2015). The worry is that swearing’s
power to shock and offend means that it has expressive power that
other words lack, and that by overusing swear words, they lose this
power and become more like non-​swear words: still useful, per-
haps, but not uniquely so. Is there substance to this worry?
Well, yes and no. It’s certainly true that the shock power of in-
dividual swear words rises and falls. Part of that has to do with
context: as Lawson notes, one important difference between the
Sex Pistols’ sweary TV interview in 1976 and John Lydon’s 2004
outburst is that the former occurred during a teatime broadcast
whereas the latter took place almost ninety minutes after the 9 pm
watershed—​the time after which, in the UK, TV shows may contain
material that is not suitable for children—​and so even ignoring the
twenty-​eight-​year gap between them, we could expect the former
to be more shocking than the latter.
Broadcasting restrictions on swearing are often viewed as the
outcome of a tug-​of-​war between those who value freedom of ex-
pression and conservatives who want to keep the airwaves clean—​
but, at least in one instance, swearing’s power to offend has been
put to humane use. British comedy duo Mel and Sue (Mel Giedroyc
and Sue Perkins) found an ingenious way to use the rules against
swearing on air to protect the privacy of overemotional contestants
while co-​hosting the baking competition series The Great British
Bake Off. In an interview with The Guardian in 2013, Perkins
explained, ‘if we see [a contestant] crying or something, Mel
and I will go over there and put our coats over them or swear a
lot because we know then that the film won’t be able to be used’
(Carpenter 2013).
The measure of swearing’s capacity to offend, however, does not
depend solely on who the audience is and how accepting they are of
 Swearing as a force for good 215

offensive language in general. The power of individual swear words

to shock and offend changes over time too. That’s just what happens
with swear words, and explains why damn is not as shocking a
word today as it once was. Swear words tend to track wider cul-
tural values: the words that we find most shocking and offensive
are those linked to the things we value the most. So, as society has
become more secular, the shock value of damn has receded; and in
the last couple of decades, the offensiveness of slurs relating to eth-
nicity, sexual orientation, and disability has increased. I don’t think
we need worry that we’re going to run out of ways to shock, offend,
express strong emotion, cope with pain, and so on. But what’s in-
teresting about the worry that we might, is that despite being often
expressed by people who disapprove of swearing, it reveals a recog-
nition that swearing is valuable, and that it performs an important
function that can’t be performed using other words. On this view,
swearing is a linguistic superpower that must be respected and used
with care—​otherwise we squander its precious gifts.

Swearing and intimacy

There is something to this worry—​even if it’s unlikely that we’re

going to run out of ways to do the things that we do with swearing.
Much has been written on the good things that swearing enables us
to do. Michael Adams—​whose discussion of the intimacy-​fostering
cunt in Six Feet Under readers will recall from Chapter 12—​has
argued that far from being simply a crass way to upset people,
there are many overlooked uses to which we put swearing; uses for
which other words are no good (Adams 2016a). Part of this relates
to breaking the rules of politeness in a particular, calculated way—​
something that is illustrated by the anecdote above about Noël
Carroll.
The point is this: while, in most circumstances, politeness is im-
portant in oiling the wheels of our social interactions, sometimes
216 For F*ck’s Sake

impoliteness plays the same role. Trusting another person to

recognise when our impoliteness is done with love, and to react
warmly to it, can be an effective way to increase intimacy. Perhaps
you have close friends with whom you don’t think twice about
swearing, and never worry about them taking offence. Imagine it’s
the first time you casually swear in this way with a new friend: often,
there’s a brief moment of Can I say this? Can I trust them not to
take offence? In those situations, an analogue of offence escalation
can occur—​an analogue that we might call trust escalation. We
take a risk and decide to trust a new friend to react positively to
our swearing; they, recognising the risk we have taken and the trust
we have placed in them, react in exactly the way we hoped they
would and match our casual swearing with their own; we recognise
and are encouraged by their positive response; they recognise that
we have reacted in this way; and the friendship increases in inti-
macy. In this way, swearing—​and other breaches of etiquette, like
Carroll’s dirty joke—​can be an effective way to support intimacy
and connection. The link between swearing and intimacy has been
noticed by scientists: in a 2004 study, psychologists recorded the
conversations of workers in a New Zealand soap factoryand found
that good-​humoured swearing was common between workers who
knew each other well but absent in conversations between workers
who were not part of the same group (Daly et al. 2004). Michael
Adams, too, draws on examples from literature, politics, blogging,
and beyond to argue that swearing—​and profanity more widely—​
plays an important role in ‘marking and developing intimacy’
(Adams 2016a, 59).
Not unrelated to all of this is a 2017 study entitled ‘Frankly, we
do give a damn: The relationship between profanity and honesty’,
which found that profanity is associated with honesty and integ-
rity (Feldman et al. 2017). This article opens with the quotation
alluded to in the title: ‘Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn’. The
authors go on to remark: ‘Profane as it is, this memorable line by the
character Rhett Butler in the film Gone with the Wind profoundly
 Swearing as a force for good 217

conveys Butler’s honest thoughts and feelings’ (816). The role that
swearing can play in establishing intimacy, along with its link with
honesty, indicates that much as we might value good manners,
we also view them as introducing distance between ourselves and
those with whom we interact—​distance that it can be satisfying to
close so that we get a better look at what sort of person we’re dealing
with. Something like this satisfaction perhaps underpins the glee
with which news stories about swearing (and other etiquette
breaches) by royalty and other upstanding figures are reported and
consumed. Many layers of tradition, ceremony, and ritual separate
these people from the rest of us; but when they swear inappropri-
ately, it turns out that in this one respect at least, they are not so dif-
ferent from the people we work and socialise with.

Swearing as a pressure valve

In Swearing Is Good for You, Emma Byrne runs through a range

of swearing’s benefits. Among the ones described above, she also
argues that swearing ‘forestalls violence’. Byrne explains: ‘Without
swearing, we’d have to resort to the biting, gouging, and shit flinging
that our other primate cousins use to keep their societies in check’
(2017, 203). She points, for support, to the work of Professor Roger
Fouts, who adopted chimpanzees, taught them sign language, and
studied how they communicate. It turned out that the chimps
would use the sign for shit in much the same way that we humans
use the word shit; in other words, not just to refer literally to shit,
but also non-​literally as an insult and to express emotion. ‘Unlike
their wild cousins’, Byrne remarks, ‘these chimpanzees would
throw the notion of excrement instead of throwing the stuff itself ’
(2017, 204). If this is right, then our capacity to swear functions as
an emotional pressure valve and enables us to express the anger
and frustration that we might otherwise vent through violence.
Disapproving of angry swearing, in this case, is short-​sighted: you
218 For F*ck’s Sake

might not like to hear a shouty Fuck you! but you’d probably enjoy a
fistfight even less.
This pressure-​valve view of swearing might seem at odds with
the idea that swearing can constitute fighting words; that is, the idea
that swearing can make subsequent violence more likely, rather than
less likely. However, it could be that both are correct. According
to the pressure-​valve view, when a speaker uses swearing to vent
their anger, they are less likely to use violence themself. But if their
swearing constitutes fighting words, then it is more likely that others
will turn violent. This makes intuitive sense: if you’re feeling angry
and you’re allowed to yell swear words at someone who just stands
there and takes it, you can probably expect to run out of steam
pretty quickly. But as self-​calming measures go, it’s a risky strategy,
since you’re reasonably likely to find yourself on the receiving end
of your interlocutor’s own sweary outburst (if not their fist)—​which
is likely to send your stress levels up rather than down.
The examples of swearing’s positive side that we’ve considered
in this chapter all have something in common: they tell us that if
we were tempted to dismiss swearing as nothing more than offen-
sive language, we have underestimated it. Sure, swearing offends
people—​but look at all the good things it can do too!
 16
The value of offensiveness

Throughout this book, I’ve been taking for granted that it’s pretty
easy to offend people. Too easy, perhaps. So easy that we need
strategies to avoid inadvertently offending people even when
we’re just trying to communicate with them. But what if things
were different? What if we struggled to cause offence even when
we wanted to? What if we could throw out as many cunts and
motherfuckers as we liked, as repetitively and directly and aggres-
sively as we could manage, and all we’d get in response were indul-
gent smiles and perhaps comments about how adorable we are?
What, exactly, would we lack in that case—​and is it something
worth having? In this chapter I want to show you that there are
some people who lack something important through their ina-
bility to cause offence by swearing, and that by lacking it, they are
victims of a moral wrong.

Swearing and disability

Feinberg makes a pretty strong claim about swearing. He writes:

By virtue of an almost paradoxical tension between powerful

taboo and universal readiness to disobey, the words acquire their
strong expressive power. The utterance of one of these words for
any purpose in an inappropriate social context is sure to produce,
220 For F*ck’s Sake

as if by magic, an extraordinary emotional response in one’s

listeners, most of whom treat the word with a kind of exaggerated
respect, anxiety, and even fear. (1985, 190–​91)

He’s wrong, unfortunately. It’s not the case that swearing inap-
propriately ‘is sure to produce’ the ‘extraordinary emotional re-
sponse in one’s listeners’ that we associate with saying the wrong
thing at the wrong time. Only certain speakers can reliably offend
people with swearing, by which I mean that some speakers can
utter swear words as disrespectfully and aggressively and directly as
they can and yet still not manage to produce a feeling of offence in
those around them.
The late Mel Baggs, an American disabled activist and blogger,
highlighted this issue in a blog post, and explained why it is a
problem. Baggs used a computerised communication device to ex-
press what they were ‘unable to say in real time’. One page of their
communication software was devoted to asserting boundaries with
other people, and featured sentences that they could utter by tap-
ping a picture. The sentences varied in forcefulness, ranging from
the relatively polite Leave me alone and You’re too close to me to
assertions like Get out of my face and Fuck off. On their blog, Baggs
described a distressing encounter with a woman who tried to force
Baggs to converse and make eye contact with her, and who became
patronising and abusive when Baggs tried to make it clear that they
didn’t want to interact. Baggs explained the importance of being
able to treat people rudely:

It is absolutely vital that people who use communication devices,

have ways to respond to violations of our basic boundaries.
Disabled people are far more likely than others to have others
behave invasively with us, ranging from subtle to violent. People
teach us from our earliest years onward that such invasion is
normal, natural, and something we should accept without com-
plaint. We have to have the means to say no.
 The value of offensiveness 221

And we have to have the means to say no forcefully, even

rudely. We need to be able to use cuss words, even if we have the
kind of personality that would never use them. Sometimes the
only reason that we appear unnaturally even-​tempered is because
we’ve never been allowed to be otherwise. We have the right to
say fuck off, but people don’t always give us the ability to do so.
Of course, even if we say things like that, there’s no guarantee
anyone will listen. Some people’s reactions when I get mad, re-
mind me of the way people giggle at my cat when she swipes
someone who touched her in a way that hurts her. It’s like she and
I aren’t real enough to them, so our anger is cute and funny.
I’ll also never forget the time someone made an asinine com-
ment when I was out in public. I typed a response and stuck the
speaker up to his ear so he could hear it. All his friends burst out
laughing. One of them said ‘Dude, that guy’s cussing you out
using a machine!’ Which is . . . so much not the response I was
going for. (Baggs 2012)

When Baggs tells us that ‘people don’t always give [them] the
ability to’ say fuck off, what they mean is that while they can (with
the help of their communication device) utter the words, those
words fail to impact their listener in the way that they would had
another person uttered them. Baggs simply wasn’t recognised—​
or, perhaps, given permission—​by others as someone who could
swear offensively. Their comment that their anger is regarded by
others as ‘cute and funny’ provides us with a clue about why their
attempt to cause offence with swearing didn’t come off: the sorts
of speaker emotions that, as we saw in Chapter 6, typically make
swearing more objectionable, failed to do so when Baggs swore an-
grily, because those around them either didn’t notice the anger or,
if they did, were not affected by it in the usual way. Saying fuck off
to another person, in a polite context, ought to shock and offend
them—​but Baggs found themself unable to produce this effect by
uttering the words.
222 For F*ck’s Sake

Swearing in a foreign language

People with disabilities aren’t the only ones who may find it difficult
to shock and offend people through swearing. People for whom
the language in which they are swearing is their second (or third,
fourth, fifth . . .) language—​for brevity, LX users—​also experience a
bumpy ride with swearing.
As far as I can tell, there has not been any published research
on how people for whom the language in question is their first
language—​L1 users—​view swearing by LX users. Research on
swearing and multilingualism has tended to focus on how LX users
view swearing, rather than how their swearing is viewed by others.
This research has found that LX users view swear words in the LX
to have less ‘emotional force’ than swear words in their L1 (Dewaele
2010b; Gawinkowska et al. 2013), or as being ‘weaker’ (Dewaele
2010a), or even ‘fake’ (Dewaele 2010c). LX users also tend to have a
reduced understanding of exactly what LX swear words mean and
how strong they are, compared to L1 users (Dewaele 2016). This is
a predictable consequence of the fact that students of foreign lan-
guages tend not to be taught by their instructors how to swear—​an
oversight that Geraldine Horan has argued needs to be corrected
(Horan 2013).
Jean-​Marc Dewaele—​ a multilingual researcher who has
published extensively on LX users and swearing, and whose schol-
arly articles include the wonderfully named ‘ “Christ fucking shit
merde!” Language preferences for swearing among maximal pro-
ficient multilinguals’—​has remarked that ‘LX speakers may not
realise that their swearing in the LX might be interpreted differ-
ently by L1 users compared to the same words used by L1 speakers
in an identical situation’ (Dewaele 2017, 2). When I emailed him
to ask him for his thoughts on this, he was kind enough to elabo-
rate further, with the comment that ‘L1 users may react more di-
versely to swearing by LX users than by fellow L1 users’. On the one
hand, L1 users, detecting a foreign accent or some other sign that
 The value of offensiveness 223

the LX speaker is not part of the in-​group, may judge swearing by

a LX speaker more harshly, because they view swearing in the L1
as a privilege open only to L1 speakers. But on the other hand, L1
speakers, sensing that LX speakers do not fully grasp the meaning
and the strength of L1 swear words, often view swearing by LX
speakers as less offensive than swearing by L1 speakers.

Children, again

Something similar is true of children. We understand that, as

Timothy Jay and Kristin Janschewitz put it, children ‘acquire
the knowledge that some words are taboo before developing a
nuanced understanding of how and when to use taboo words’
(Jay and Janschewitz 2008, 275). Sometimes, swearing by chil-
dren is more shocking and offensive than swearing by adults, al-
though much of that turbo-​charged shock relates to the fact that a
child swore, rather than to the specific term that they used. Other
times, swearing by children is funny—​and again, this is often due
to the shock of hearing a child swear. If a child’s sweary outburst
happens to be caught on camera, then so much the better. This is
what happened a few years ago with a twenty-​five-​second video clip
of a smartly dressed toddler standing in a garden as some bubbles
float past her. When she spots them, she calls, ‘Come back, bubbles!
Come back!’—​before turning back to the potted plant she had been
examining and muttering, ‘Fuck’s sake’. Predictably, the clip became
widely shared on social media, where the reaction was hilarity
rather than offence. That sweet little girl in her shiny shoes, and her
Fuck’s sake. How incongruous!
Toddlers are unlikely to lose much sleep over the fact that they
face difficulties being taken seriously when they swear—​they do,
after all, have more effective weapons in their arsenal for upsetting
people, like throwing tantrums, inflicting sustained sleep dep-
rivation, covering entire rooms with Vaseline (as my daughter
224 For F*ck’s Sake

once did), and using a rock to wash their mother’s car (as my son
once did). But as Mel Baggs’s account illustrates, being incapable
of causing shock and offence by swearing can be a real problem.
People with disabilities and foreign speakers of our language lose
out on an important aspect of communication by not being able
reliably to cause offence. It happens because they are not part of
the ‘in-​group.’ In other words, their difficulties with causing offence
reveal them not to be part of the group whose opinion most people
care about, and whose validation and respect matter.
In some cases it is appropriate not to treat people as members of
the in-​group, but in other cases it reflects unjust attitudes. To see
this, imagine, first, how you might react to another adult who takes
offence at a toddler’s Fuck’s sake in the same way that they’d take of-
fence at the same utterance by an adult. I expect you’d view them as
overreacting. You might say to them something like, ‘Hey, it’s just a
little kid, don’t take it so seriously’. You’d say that because you think
it’s a mistake to include a toddler in the group of people who are
capable of offending you by swearing. By contrast, imagine urging
someone not to take seriously swearing by a person with a disa-
bility. The latter would be outrageous. Having a disability ought not
to disqualify a person from being recognised as a member of the
in-​group.1
This is what Baggs complained about when they wrote that
people with disabilities ‘have the right to say fuck off, but people
don’t always give us the ability to do so’. Their point is that people
with disabilities ought to be capable of producing the same effects
with fuck off that (almost) everyone else is able to produce, but
they aren’t, because they are inappropriately excluded from the in-​
group—​or, as Baggs puts it, they aren’t considered ‘real enough’.

1 What about cases where someone swears involuntarily, as people with Tourette’s syn-

drome do? There is a case here for not reacting with offence, but not because the swearer
does not belong to the in-​group. Rather, this sort of swearing can be viewed as inoffen-
sive because there is no question of it expressing the sort of disrespect that we associate
with inappropriate swearing.
 The value of offensiveness 225

Swearing on the outside

In fact, the group of people who are excluded from the in-​group,
and who consequently lose out on being able to offend by swearing,
is much bigger and diverse than I’ve suggested so far. People who
are unusual in any way risk not being able to use swearing effec-
tively. If you’re very small; if you’re unconventionally dressed; if you
speak with a high-​pitched voice, a strong accent, or some other un-
usual way of speaking; if you’re very old; if you’re recognisably other
in some way, then your ability to produce certain effects in other
people by swearing is less reliable and predictable than it is for other
people. In certain cases—​especially those where you are viewed as
unusually strong or powerful—​your swearing might cause more
shock and offence than other people’s swearing. But for the most
part, you might find that you’re not ‘real enough’ to cause offence.
This is a form of inequality that most of us don’t consider. When
we think about the norms around swearing, what’s most likely to
spring to mind is the widespread thought that swearing is in some
sense impermissible, and it’s impermissible because it’s offensive,
or at least potentially offensive. For most people, most of the time,
normative issues around swearing focus on how to mitigate the
risk of offending people. How to deal with the risk of not offending
people when we swear is something we don’t think about, because
we don’t have to. Most of us enjoy sweary privilege.
All this raises a normative question about swearing that we
haven’t yet considered. We’ve seen that sometimes, the right thing
to do might be to avoid swearing, in order to avoid causing offence.
But perhaps we ought also to consider that sometimes, the right
thing to do might be to feel offended by someone else’s swearing.
Because not being offended by another person’s swearing could be a
sign that something is awry in the way that we relate to that person,
and in some cases, that could be cause for ethical concern. If you’re
completely unconcerned by someone telling you to fuck off, ask
yourself why. Would you have been offended had someone else
226 For F*ck’s Sake

said the same thing to you? Would you have been offended if the
speaker had been a different gender, nationality, age, physical size,
or if they had sounded or looked or behaved differently when they
spoke? Concluding that you would have felt offended had someone
else told you to fuck off is not necessarily a red flag: we’ve seen that
there is a complex combination of factors that contribute to how
offensive a particular instance of swearing is. But reflecting on our
attitudes and patterns of offence in response to swearing can help
us spot influences that ought not to be there. If we find that we’re
less offended by the swearing of—​say—​people with disabilities,
small people, or bizarrely dressed people than by the swearing of
abled people, average-​sized people, and conventionally dressed
people, something is wrong. This does not mean that we do some-
thing wrong—​immoral, unethical, rude—​by failing to be offended
by the swearing of a particular person. But it might mean that, for
no good reason, we care less about that person’s attitude towards
us than we do about other people’s attitudes towards us. That is a
moral issue: it reveals that we’re not respecting them as we should.
Even people who are very unlike us are capable of spotting a twat
when they see one.
 Conclusion
You’re all fucking superheroes

Swearing, in its own modest way, is a superpower. Understanding

it—​and I hope you’re ending this book feeling that you understand
swearing better than you did when you started it—​is a rewarding
process that reveals to us some of the vast complexity and richness
in the way we use language to relate to each other. Language is, of
course, a tool that enables us to communicate information to one
another; but the way we swear reveals that language also enables
us (among other things) to express and communicate how we feel,
to fast-​track trust and intimacy with others, to cause shock and
upset, to create and reinforce shared values, and to defuse or esca-
late tension and conflict. And, incredibly, most of this stuff is going
on between and behind the words that we actually utter: it happens
through the inferences that we make about each other when we in-
teract, inferences that we generally don’t even realise we’re making.
There’s some comfort to that, especially in a world that has social
conservatives shaking their heads and moaning about how society
is falling apart because young people today are more connected to
their smartphones than they are to each other. It turns out that even
while we’re screaming sweary abuse at each other, we understand
each other more than we think. Even a snarled Fuck you! is a rich
and complex form of connection. (It is, of course, a form of connec-
tion that most of us would rather pass on—​so, keep that in mind
before you say it to your boss or your prospective in-​laws.)
It’s precisely because swearing is so powerful that we are faced
with some of the dangers that we’ve looked at in the course of this
228 For F*ck’s Sake

book. Our knee-​jerk response to swearing can be so dramatic that

we take leave of our senses and unreflectively judge those who
swear inappropriately to have done a Bad Thing. These automatic
responses can conceal bias and prejudice, which is a big problem
when they are fast-​tracked into law or other formal regulations.
We’ve seen that, if we can slow down and reflect on the way we re-
spond to swearing, then not only can we reduce the influence of
bias and prejudice, but we can also use the power of swearing to
reflect and reinforce social values in order to create a more just
society. Of course, sensible decisions about swearing alone aren’t
going to lead us to Utopia, but they can be one tool in the armoury
we use to fight injustice.
Embrace your superpower, friends. Use it wisely. Just don’t pull
on your underpants over your tights, superhero style. You’ll look
like a fucking knob.
 Acknowledgements

I’m approaching this acknowledgements section with more anxiety

than I’ve approached any other part of the book, because so many
people have contributed in various ways to creating this book, and
I would be mortified to forget to mention any of them. Very early
in the project—​as in, during the first few days—​I received encour-
agement from Jennifer Saul and Nigel Warburton. I was invited to
give a St Cross Special Ethics Seminar at the University of Oxford in
early 2015, which the university advertised on the main page of its
website (I still have the screenshot somewhere) and which quickly
became fully booked. I’m embarrassed at the half-​baked ideas
I shared during that talk, but the enthusiasm and engagement of
the audience members were inspiring, and I’m especially grateful to
Roger Crisp for his generous and thoughtful write-​up of the talk on
the university’s Practical Ethics blog.
Nigel Warburton opened my mind to the possibility that there
may be more mileage in this topic than a couple of articles in a
scholarly journal, and he pushed me to write this book, as well as
invited me to record an interview on swearing for Philosophy Bites,
the podcast he hosts with David Edmonds. I had such an inspiring
and interesting conversation with them, both during the interview
and behind the scenes.
My agent, Peter Buckman, was supportive and encouraging
throughout and kept up a patter of swearily good-​humoured emails
even while the three months he initially expected I’d need to write
this book (dream on, Peter) turned into seven years. I am, he has
told me, his slowest ever client, living or dead. Towards the end of
the process he even threatened to die before publication if I didn’t
230 Acknowledgements

get a bloody move on. Equally lovely, encouraging, and patient is

Lucy Randall, my editor at Oxford University Press. She has been
kind and understanding as one deadline after another whizzed by
with no sign of a finished draft. Her approach to editing the draft
has involved ten parts enthusiastic compliments to one part helpful
criticism, which I appreciated very much especially as I’ve spent
most of the process worrying that I’ve written a laughable pile of
junk. I’m sorry, Lucy, that I didn’t quite manage to remove all the
funeral-​related examples in the text (I used to be a goth, it’s in my
DNA now). Lucy also came up with the title of the book, after I’d
spent years puzzling about it. Yay, Lucy!
While I’m on the subject of my publisher, the entire team at
Oxford University Press has been wonderfully enthusiastic and
supportive. Everything they’ve done has exceeded my expectations,
from the beautifully designed and barely-​censored cover to the
mind-​bogglingly detailed publicity plan.
Someone else who took a wonderfully encouraging and
thoughtful approach to providing feedback is Karen Stohr, who
reviewed the draft for Oxford University Press, initially anony-
mously (to me). I was so worried about receiving the review that
I didn’t open it for a few days, and eventually got a fellow academic
in another discipline to read it for me and report back (thanks,
Marcus Munafó). I needn’t have worried: the review combined ex-
tremely sensible criticism with plenty of praise, in a masterclass of
how reviewing other people’s work does not need to be the painful
and combative process it often is. I was delighted to find out the
identity of the reviewer, since I am a big fan of Karen’s work and had
already quoted it in the book.
Aside from my woeful smattering of Welsh, I am embarrassingly
monolingual and could not have written about swearing in other
languages without help from other people. I appealed for help via
Philos-​L, an email list for philosophers that has been going for so
long that I hear Aristotle used it in his research for the Nicomachean
 Acknowledgements 231

Ethics. I asked my fellow subscribers to email me about the most

offensive words in their first language. Plenty of people took the
time to respond, and the replies were incredibly interesting and
entertaining. The examples of swearing from around the world in
Chapter 2 are mostly thanks to these people.
This section is already pretty long, so let me just reel off an
alphabetised list of names of some of the people whose advice, feed-
back, and ideas have helped me develop my ideas at various points,
and who I haven’t mentioned yet either in this section or in the
main text: Andrew Bowie, Matthew Broome, Nick Davis, Ed Lake,
Gail Leckie, Neil Levy, Hannah Maslen, Jonny Pugh, Clemens Setz,
Nick Shea, Josh Shepherd, Mark Silcox, and Malcolm Voyce.
I’ve given more talks and interviews on this topic and written
more articles than I can remember (and I’m not great at keeping
records). I’m so grateful to those who invited me, and to those
who attended, for their interest and thoughtful comments and
questions. Off the top of my head, these have included audiences at
Oxford, Royal Holloway, Nottingham, Warwick, St. Andrews, and
the Hay-​on-​Wye. I’ve also taught this topic to third-​year philosophy
undergraduates as part of my Philosophy of Language module at
Royal Holloway, and the class discussions have been unfailingly fas-
cinating and lively. It’s difficult to spend seven years writing a book
without getting bored of the topic, but the wonderful audiences I’ve
shared my work with have buoyed me up and helped me rediscover
my interest in swearing again and again at times when I’d rather
have stuck pins in my eyes than encountered another fuck.
Finally, the process of writing this book has been fraught with
difficulty unrelated to the subject matter. When I started, I was in
dire personal circumstances, which were nevertheless way better
than they had been a few years previously. If you want details, look
up the ‘Why I took SO BLOODY LONG to write my book’ episode
of my podcast, The Academic Imperfectionist. I’ve reached the end
of the process battle-​scarred and with an ADHD diagnosis and a lot
232 Acknowledgements

of insight about myself that I’ve gained largely thanks to my ther-

apist, Sanchia Barlow, and my coach, Rumbi Moyo. For my next
trick, I’m going to write another book and complete it in a sensible
amount of time, like a normal person. There, I’ve written it down,
so now I have to do it.
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 Index

ABC Television Network, 117 speaker intentions and, 66

Adams, Michael, 165 Aristotle, 93
Advertising Standards Authority asshole, 9, 47
(UK), 10–​11 asterisks, 195–​211
African Americans. See Black people c**t, 164
Allen, Keith, 49 f**k, f***ing, f******, 3–​4, 15, 183,
American Family Association, 118 191, 195, 197–​203, 208–​210
Anderson, Luvell, 154–​155 sh*t, 3, 14
Anderson, Steve, 27 t*ts, 210
The Angel’s Share (film), 10, 49–​50, use in Judaism, Christianity, 183
118–​119, 179–​180 use in sanitizing swear words, 20,
anger-​linked swearing, 23, 37, 41, 47, 182–​183, 195–​203
84, 86–​88, 90–​91, 98, 137, 217 Atta, Dean, 156
Annual Tucker Awards for attention-​kidnapping phenomena,
Excellence in Swearing, 29 35–​36
anti-​swearing measures, 6–​19 Atwood, Margaret, 15
biases in, 16–​18 Austin, John Langshaw, 24, 121–​123,
censoring, 3, 6–​7, 10, 14–​16 127–​128, 134, 137–​138
formal measures, 11–​12 Australia
global legal measures, 11–​16 anti-​swearing measures, 12
informal measures, 6–​7 arrest for using fuck, 13–​14
in schools, 11 confusion about fuck and law, 13–​14
social contexts, 6–​7 fines for swearing in, 12
on television (TV), 9–​10 inoffensive use of cunt, 175–​176
in various professions, 11 use of the V-​sign, 135
aphasia, 30
appropriate swearing. See also Baggs, Mel, 220–​221, 224
inappropriate swearing; bastard, 8, 28n1
swearing BBC Radio, 10
anti-​swearing measures and, 18 BBFC. See British Board of Film
contexts of, 60–​61, 64–​66, 72 Classification
defined, 60, 64–​65 Bentley, Derek, 114
etiquette and, 60–​61 bias
inappropriate vs., 59–​62, 64–​65 in anti-​swearing measures, 16–​18
not swearing and, 64–​65 gut-​feeling judgements and, 136, 138
n-​word and, 188–​189 putting the brakes on, 138–​140
246 Index

Black, Filip, 13–​14 Brontë, Charlotte, 196

Black people. See also n-​word; white Brown, Penelope, 100
people Burgess, Anthony, 27
disproportionate targeting of Burridge, Kate, 49
males, 139 Buss, Sarah, 93
harsh judgement of men for Buzzfeed (website), 29
swearing, 138
inoffensive use of the n-​word by, Cambridge Encyclopaedia of the
154 English Language (Crystal), 165
King on discriminatory treatment Canada, anti-​swearing measures, 12
of, 168 Cantwell v. Connecticut court
membership in a community of decision, 90
practice, 154–​155 Carey, Stan, 176–​177
n-​word slur used by white people Carlin, George, 82n2, 108, 116,
vs., 146 166n2. See also filthy words
sanitization of “Black,” 209 comedy skit (Carlin)
speech community Celebrity Juice (TV show), 10
characterization of, 154–​155 censoring/​censorship
Stohr on deliberate disrespect of, anti-​swearing measures, 14
168–​169 by the BBFC, 10
use of boy in referring to, 168 formal/​informal methods, 6
use of spook in referring to, of Jimmy Kimmel Live, 208
161–​162 mitigating role of, 15
use of the word cunt by, 170 opting in for, 15
US/​UK incarceration rates, 16–​17 reinforcing effect of, 18
bleeps, 3, 18, 182–​183, 191, 194, 195–​ self-​censoring, 7, 26
196, 201, 208 Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire
blogging/​blog posts, 27, 29, 176, 216, decision, 90n4, 98–​99
220, 229 children. See also parents
body language delight in toilet jokes, 80
cues/​judgements related to, 15–​17 forgiving of swearing by, 56
tone, offensiveness, and, 97–​99 Iraqi Family Violence Law and, 12
Bono, 117–​118, 143 Jay/​Janschewitz, on swearing by,
brain/​brain damage, 30–​31, 111 223
Brass Eye (British TV program), parent’s swearing discussions
184–​186 with, 140
breastfeeding swearing at, 107
Argentine Mothers protest, 172 swearing by, 28, 32, 223–​224
being offended by viewing, 4, 174 swearing guidance for, 64
conscientious offence and, 72, 172 swearing in the presence of, 3, 5,
British Board of Film Classification 49, 107–​112
(BBFC), 10–​11, 49, 118–​119, China, anti-​swearing measures,
124, 143, 179–​180 12–​13
 Index 247

Christ, banning the use of, 14–​15, 40 middle-​class politeness criterion,

Civil Rights Act (U.S., 1964), 146 49, 107
Clangers (stop-​motion TV series for respecting others, 62, 71, 81
children), 207–​208 role in reaction to swear words,
A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar 2–​7
Tongue (Grose), 164 role of norms, 50–​51
Clean Airwaves Act (U.S.), 9–​10 saying fuck, 56
Clean Reader app, 15 social contexts, 17, 33, 45–​46
Clinton, Bill, 113–​114 taboos, 38
cock coprolalia, 102
cunt’s offensiveness comparison, Craig, Christopher, 114
165–​166, 170–​171 crap, 22, 85, 201, 202
sound quality of, 84–​85 Crime and Punishment
Warwick on offensiveness of, 165 (Dostoyevsky), 180
cocksucker The Crown (Netflix series), 1
in Carlin’s ‘filthy words’ comedy Crystal, David, 165
skit, 116, 166n2 cunt
homophobia’s elevation of, 166 BBFC’s role in dismantling
misogyny’s association with, offensiveness of, 180
166n3 in Carlin’s ‘filthy words’ comedy
offensiveness of, 20, 166–​167 skit, 116
politeness/​avoiding the use of, 167 Clean Airwaves Act prohibition
Cohen, Paul Robert, 13, 100n1, of, 9–​10
115–​116 cock’s offensiveness comparison,
Cohen v. California, 13, 100n1, 116 165–​166, 170–​171
community of practice, 154–​155 comparative offensiveness of, 22,
Confucius, 93 32, 84–​85
connotations ‘cunt’ and, 9, 181–​194
of “flipping off,” 134 cunting/​cunted (variations), 27
of slurs/​slur terms, 155, 161–​162 historical background of use,
of symbols, 148n1 164–​165
conscientious offence, 72, 172–​174 inoffensive use of, 49, 175
context linguistic flexibility of, 27
anti-​swearing measures and, Lydon’s use of fucking cunts, 8
10–​11 misogyny’s association with, 165–​
appropriate swearing, 60–​61, 167, 171, 174, 177–​180
64–​66, 72 most offensive rating of, 165
body language and, 16 overstated offensiveness of,
cultural environments, 38–​39, 49 176–​177
defined, 49–​50 politeness/​avoiding the use of, 167
involuntary swearing, 50 reactions to hearing use of, 2
judgement and, 15–​16, 56 reappropriation of, 176–​178
location, 36 reasons for offensiveness of, 32–​33
248 Index

cunt (cont.) emotions

sound quality of, 84–​85 anger-​linked swearing, 23, 37, 41,
strategies for reducing 47, 84, 86–​88, 90–​91, 98, 137,
offensiveness, 175–​180 217
sweary feminist’s dilemma related fuck’s expression of, 23–​25
to, 171–​174 grief-​/​pain-​linked swearing, 86,
Tucker’s use of, 29 102, 137
use in Croatian expression, 44 linguistic anarchy and, 26–​30
use in Six Feet Under, 177 offensiveness and, 23–​30, 86–​91
use of, in The Angel’s Share, 10, swearing and, 5–​6, 23–​26, 31, 37–​
118–​119, 179–​180 38, 42, 65, 84, 86–​91, 215
varied cultural offensiveness, 49 etiquette
Warwick on the offensiveness of, appropriate swearing and, 60–​61
47, 84, 165 cultural variations, 93–​94
white/​Black people, use of, 170 expressing vs. communicating, 67
curses (religious curses), 22 inappropriate swearing and, 59–​
60, 69, 91–​95
Davidson, Donald, 183–​184 manners, morality, and, 93
defecation, 36, 48, 78 moral character’s link with, 68
denotations of swear words, 33–​36, respecting others and, 62, 71, 81
41, 46, 52, 83 of taboo-​breaking, 81–​82
dick, 85 underlying norms of, 61–​63
direct vs. indirect swearing, 99–​101 euphemisms for swear words, 33,
disabled people 78–​79
Baggs on being able to treat people
rudely, 220–​221, 224 Facebook, 94, 172, 176, 201
forgiveness of swearing by, 56 Fairman, Christopher M., 13
limited ability to cause offence of, Federal Communications
224, 226 Commission (FCC), 8, 108,
problems caused by swearing at, 116–​118, 124, 143
105 Feinberg, Joel
swearing by, 220–​221 on children who hear swear
use of computerized words, 108
communication, 220 claims about swearing, 53–​55, 68,
use of slurs against, 43, 149, 151 73, 87, 147, 219–​220
discouragement of swearing, 7, 14 comment on corruption of
Dutch swearing, 41, 43 children, 108
comment on nuisances, 96–​97
Ecclestone, Christopher, 114. See comments on swearing, 30, 40
also Let Him Have It film on different senses of offence, 54,
Edmonds, David, 193 147, 196–​197
Elizabeth II (Queen of England), offence principle of, 53–​55, 68, 73,
1–​2, 182, 191 87, 147, 173, 196–​197, 203
 Index 249

on wrongful offence, 54, 68–​69, offence escalation and, 99

147–​148, 203 Prince Philip’s use of, 182–​183
feminism Queen Elizabeth II’s use of, 182
dilemma for sweary feminists, reasons for offensiveness of, 32–​33
171–​174 in Saving Private Ryan, 117–​118
UK men’s belief about, 158–​159 use in religious curses, 42
Ferdinand, Anton, 209 Fuck the Draft (jacket patch), 13,
fighting words, 13, 90–​91, 98, 115–​ 115–​116
116, 125–​218. See also Cantwell fuck you
v. Connecticut court decision levels of objectionability of saying,
filthy words comedy skit (Carlin), 103
108, 116 middle finger as, 26, 92, 134–​136
flipping off/​the finger/​middle finger, non-​sweary translation of, 99
26, 92, 134–​136 reacting to, 121
foreign languages witnessing use of to a third person,
insulting of mothers, 43–​44, 166 101
L1/​LX users and swearing, 222–​223
For fuck’s sake, 23, 41, 42 gay rights activism, 172
Fouts, Roger, 217 Geldof, Bob, 14–​15
France Germany
public nudity laws, 120 directness of communication, 100
religious swear words, 40 use of Kraut for Germans, 158
sex-​themed swear words, 42 use of slur terms for Germans, 157
slur terms for French people, 157 use of ‘son of a bitch’/​
sweary insult guide, 38n1 ’motherfucker,’ 44
Fuck film (Anderson), 27 gestures. See offensive gestures
fuck/​fucking “Get Me Off Your Fucking Mailing
in Carlin’s ‘filthy words’ comedy List” (Mazières and Kohler), 195
skit, 116 Gimbel, Steve, 27
comparative offensiveness of, 22 Goffman, Erving, 88–​89
contextual use of, 56 grief-​/​pain-​linked swearing, 86, 102,
emotion expressed by, 23–​25 137
euphemisms for, 33 Groening, Matt, 151
f-​bomb, 48 Grose, Francis, 164
FCC’s view of, 117 Grundy, Bill, 8–​9
f**k, f***ing, f******, 183, 191, The Guardian (UK newspaper)
197–​200, 210 quoting of Brontë on not using
fucker, 8 asterisks, 196
fucking brilliant, 117 reader praise for “reporting
fucking cunts, 8 without coyness,” 209
fucking fucker, 26 sanitization exception policy, 184–​
vs. fuck you, 25, 36, 37 186, 190, 192–​193, 196–​197,
linguistic flexibility of, 26–​28 201, 209
250 Index

gut-​feeling judgements, 136, 138, etiquette and, 59–​60, 69, 91–​95

140–​142 face, saving face, losing face, and,
88–​89
Haidt, Jonathan, 141–​142 forgiveness of, 101
harm principle (Mill), 53–​54 moral character and, 73–​74
Harris, Joanne, 15 by public figures, 7–​8
Hartzer, Paul, 151 self-​censoring of, 7
Harvey, Denzel Cassius, 138–​139 showing respect and, 70–​71
head injury, 30 speaker intentions and, 66–​68
hierarchy/​sexual-​themed insults, 43–​45 wrongness, offence, and, 68–​73
hierarchy-​themed insults, 43–​44 In Praise of Profanity (Adams), 176–​177
homophobia, 72, 166–​167, 172–​173, Instagram, 179
190 International Journal of Advanced
homosexuality Computer Technology, 195
being offended by, 4–​5, 72, 147, In the Loop film, 205–​206
167, 174 In the Thick of It Loop (TV show),
cultural references to, 42 205–​206
kissing gays and conscientious Iraq, anti-​swearing measures, 12
offence, 72 Ireland
Maharggs’ opposition to gay men inoffensive use of cunt, 175
in the Royal Navy, 184–​185 use of the V-​sign, 135
ongoing acceptance of, 142 Italy, slur terms for Italians, 157
protests against banning in
Moscow, 172 Janschewitz, Kristen, 24, 87, 223
honky (slur term for white people), Japan, hierarchy-​themed insults, 45
149, 157 Jay, Timothy, 24, 87, 223
How to Do Things with Words Jeshion, Robin, 158
(Austin), 24, 121–​123, 127–​128, Jimmy Kimmel Live, 208
127–​138, 134 Jones, Steve, 8
Huckleberry Finn (Twain), 188 judgements
about using fuck, 13
I’m a Celebrity...Get Me Out of Here biases related to, 18
(TV show), 8 in the Cohen v. California court
inappropriate swearing. See also case, 15–​116
appropriate swearing; swearing on competency of swearer, 29–​30
appropriate vs., 59–​62, 64–​65 consequences related to, 114
conscientious offence and, 72, context of, 15–​16
172–​174 gut-​feeling judgements, 136, 138,
contexts of, 4–​8, 62–​64, 69–​71 140–​142
dealing with, 6
defined, 63 Kant, Immanuel, 62
description/​recognition of, 4–​5, Kohler, Eddie, 195
59–​66 Korea, mental disability swearing, 43
 Index 251

legal decisions Mitchell, David, 191

Cantwell v. Connecticut, 90 Moiré, Milo, 120
Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire, moral character
90n4, 98–​99 etiquette’s link with, 68
Cohen v. California, 13, 100n1, 116 inappropriate swearing and, 73–​74
Nationalist Socialist Party of America Stohr’s comment on, 68, 73
v. Village of Skokie, 148n1 moral judgement, social
ruling against filthy words comedy institutionalist model, 141–​142
skit, 108, 116 motherfucker, 9, 10, 44, 116, 219
Tam’s trademarking of band’s mothers, insulting of, 43–​44, 166
name, 177 A Mouthful of Air (Burgess), 26
Let Him Have It film, 114
Levinson, Stephen C., 100 Nationalist Socialist Party of America
Lewinsky, Monica, 113 v. Village of Skokie, 148n1
LGBTQ+​people, 105, 149, 184 Nazis, 147–​148
Lincoln, Abraham, 159 newsworthiness of swearing, 1, 7,
Loach, Ken, 10, 49 182, 190–​191
Lydon, John, 8 New Zealand
good-​humored worker swearing,
Maharggs, Hugh, 184–​185 216
manners. See also On Manners inoffensive use of cunt, 175
etiquette. morality, and, 93 use of the V-​sign, 135
Stohr on principles of, 61–​62, 68 nuisances, Feinberg’s comment on,
swear words and, 25 96–​97
Martin, Judith (Miss Manners), Nunberg, Geoffrey, 24, 28
92–​93 n-​word
Martinez, Jenny S., 187 Atta’s opposition to
Mazières, David, 195 reappropriation of, 156
McCawley, James D. (Quang Phuc Black people’s inoffensive use of,
Dong), 25, 27 154
McConnell, Michael W., 187–​189 comparison to Black person, 164n1
McWhorter, John, 150 comparison to slur terms, 160–​163
mental disability swearing, 43 derivations of, 146–​147, 149
middle-​class politeness criterion, inoffensive use of, 150
49, 107 King’s comment on use of, 168
middle finger, 26, 92, 134–​136 McConnell’s use of, 187–​189
Mill, John Stuart, 53–​54 non-​use by whites at Lamar’s
minge, 22 concerts, 178
misogyny Obama’s use during a podcast
association with cocksucker, interview, 186
166n3 Olad’s comment on use of, 187
association with cunt, 165–​167, Oprah’s comment on use of, 187
171, 174, 177–​180 providing a trigger warning, 189
252 Index

n-​word (cont.) thumbs up, 135

reappropriation of, 154 V-​sign, 92m5, 135
Rodriguez’s use in an Instagram offensiveness (of swearing)
video, 179 accidental vs. deliberate, 101–​102
slurs for various nationalities vs., barometers/​measures of, 7–​8
157–​158 body language and, 98–​99
use of, in a community of practice, censorships mitigation of, 15
154–​155 conscientious offence, 72,
use of honky compared with, 149, 172–​174
157 context and, 56
use of tigger instead of, 150 crossing the line into, 10
warning of use in Huckleberry degrees of, 22–​23
Finn, 188 direct vs. indirect, 99–​101
white people’s claims about, ensuring a fair approach to dealing
151–​152 with, 137–​144
example, person’s name, 52–​56
Obama, Barack, 186 expressing emotion and, 86–​91
Ofcom Broadcasting Code (UK), 8–​ forgiveness of inappropriate
11, 98, 101–​102, 118, 124 language, 50, 101
offence escalation, 50–​57. See also Fuck the Draft (jacket patch), 13,
trust escalation 115–​116
community-​wide spreading of, 77 impact of repetition, 102
description, 53, 57, 77, 81–​82, 92, inappropriate swearing,
94–​95, 99, 112, 148, 166 wrongness, and, 68–​73
disliked terms and, 203 insulting of mothers, 43–​44, 166
examples, 37, 52–​53, 55–​56, 77–​79 misogyny and, 105, 165–​167, 171,
fuck/​fuck you and, 203 174, 177–​180
origins/​development of, 51–​52, mitigation via quoting and
148 mentioning, 183–​186
politeness and, 99–​100 non-​sweary offensiveness, 22, 34
slurs and, 146 origins/​development of, 51–​52,
of taboos, taboo-​related words, 148
79–​83 quoting of others, 186–​189
taboo topics and, 57 reasons for, 32–​35
trust escalation and, 216 slurs and, 149–​152
offensive gestures tone, body language, and, 97–​99
‘the bird’/​flipping off/​the finger/​ wrongful offence, 54, 147–​148,
middle finger, 26, 92, 134–​136 203
bras d’honneur (fist raising, bicep Olad, Mahad, 187–​188
slapping), 92m5, 135 On Manners (Stohr), 61–​62, 68, 93,
‘fig’ (Turkey), 135 169
moutza (Greece), 135 other/​out-​group/​unusual people,
non-​verbal, 92 swearing by, 225–​226
 Index 253

Pacifica Network, 108, 116–​117 quoting and mentioning strategy

parents. See also children (for mitigating swear words),
Iraq Kurdistan swearing 183–​186
law, 12
Parents Television Council, 118 racism. See also Black people; n-​word;
role in setting behavior standards, white people
110–​111 appropriate response to, 86n3, 139
swearing discussions with Obama’s mention of the n-​word, 186
children, 140 Stohr’s comment on, 168–​169
penis, 33, 92n5, 117, 134 use of slur terms vs. n-​word, 162–​163
Philip (Prince/​Duke of Edinburgh) reappropriation of slurs, 154,
swearing at Queen Elizabeth II, 176–​178
191 religion
use of “fucking,” 182, 198, 200 context-​insensitivity, 51
Philosophy Bites podcast (Edmonds cultural insults/​swear words, 40–​41
and Warburton), 193 curses, 41–​42
physical harm-​related swearing, 43 offensive acts, 51, 138n1
pimp (term), 158 religious-​themed swearing, 39,
Pinker, Steven, 27, 35–​37, 42, 47, 77 40–​41
piss, 9, 116 slurs, 22
politeness (in communication of symbols, 148n1
swear words) taboos, 40–​42
forgiveness of inappropriate respecting others, 62, 71, 81
language, 50, 101 Rodriguez, Gina, 179
importance of context, 56 rules/​regulations (on swearing). See
middle-​class politeness criterion, also Federal Communications
49, 107 Commission; legal decisions;
offence escalation and, 99–​100 Ofcom Broadcasting Code
reasons for offenders deviating anti-​swearing measures, 6–​19
from, 87–​88 communication ambiguities,
sanitization of swear words, 33, 78, 114–​115
182–​183 contextual factors, 50
Stohr/​On Manners on, 61, 93 discussion of linguists, 27
politeness theory (Brown and etiquette-​related rules, 62–​64,
Levinson), 100 92–​93
Postgate, Oliver, 208 guideline limitations, 115–​119
Practical Ethics blog, 229 informal rules, 50
pressure valve aspect of swearing, public nudity laws analogy,
217–​218 119–​120
prick, 47, 84, 193 radio broadcasts, 10
punishment of swearing, 12, 14–​15, in religious texts, 94
108, 132 on social media, 94
pussy, 14 TV broadcasts, 9
254 Index

Russia comparative offensiveness of, 22

anti-​swearing measures, 12 euphemisms for, 33
gay rights activism in, 172 inappropriate usage contexts, 36
inoffensive alternative for, 33–​34,
Sagarin, Edward, 40–​41 78
same-​sex marriage, 142 merde (French version), 40
sanitization of swear words, 33, 78, offence escalation and, 85
182–​183. See also asterisks reasons for offensiveness of, 32–​33
Brontë’s condemning of, 196 sanitization of, 202
comic effect of, 208 ‘Shit off ’ (British satire show), 29
Daily Mail’s sanitized list, 206–​207 shoot vs. shit, 26
Daily Mail’s Twitter account, 210 sh*t vs. shit in newspapers, 14
description, 182 use in foreign insult of mothers, 44
effectiveness/​methodology of, use in religious curses, 42
197–​202 use in sweary insult apology, 131
The Guardian’s exception policy, Shriver, Lionel, 15
184–​186, 190, 192–​193, 196–​ The Simpsons, 151, 199
197, 201, 209 Singapore, anti-​swearing measures, 12
limitations of, 205–​210 Six Feet Under (TV show), 177
methodology of, 197–​202 slurs, 145–​163
related frustrations, 197 comparison of, 159–​163
role in making things worse, connotations of, 155, 161–​162
208–​209 described, 23, 145
role in mitigating offensiveness, feeling of offence and, 149–​152
202–​203 linguistic aspect of, 38
use of, by news outlets, 182–​183 non-​offensive category of, 22
use of bleeps, 3, 18, 182–​183, 191, n-​word, case study, 146–​147
194, 195–​196, 201, 208 against people with disabilities, 43
Saving Private Ryan film, 117–​118 quotation, mention, and, 186–​189
scatological words, 41 reappropriation of, 176–​178
schools, anti-​swearing measures swears vs., 22, 26, 145–​163
in, 11 use against non-​oppressed groups,
Scotland, inoffensive use of cunt, 175 157
screw, 22 use against oppressed groups,
self-​censoring (self-​restraint), 7, 26 149–​151
self-​improvement, 142–​144 for various nationalities, 157–​158
Sex Pistols, 8–​9 varying offensiveness of, 157
sex worker, 153 Smith, Richard O., 10
shit social media. See blogging/​blog
BBC Radio 4 restriction, 10 posts; Facebook; Instagram;
in Carlin’s ‘filthy words’ comedy Twitter; YouTube
skit, 116 sound quality of swear words, 83–​85
Clean Air Waves Act prohibition, 9 Spain, slur terms for Spaniards, 157
 Index 255

Stent, Gunther S., 92–​93 in a foreign language, 43–​44, 166,

Stevens, John Paul, 108 222–​223
Stohr, Karen grief-​/​pain-​linked, 86, 102, 137
on addressing whites vs. Blacks, The Guardian’s use of, 184
169–​170 importance/​value of, 5
On Manners, 61–​62, 68, 93, 169 inappropriate contexts of, 4–​8
on moral character, 68, 73 insulting of mothers, 43–​44, 166
on rude behavior, 66 levels of offensiveness, 21–​23
on rules of etiquette, 168–​170 linguistic anarchy and, 26–​30
strokes, 30 link with expressing respect, 63
Strong Language blog, 29, 176 moral character and, 73–​75
Stroop effect, 35 newsworthiness of, 1, 7, 182,
superpower aspect of swearing, 227 190–​191
swearing. See also appropriate nonoffensive qualities of, 4
swearing; fighting words; norms/​network of attitudes of, 6
inappropriate swearing; offending others as a privilege, 5
swearing, doing things with; origins of, 77–​78
upside to swearing by other/​out-​group/​unusual
accidental vs. deliberate, people, 225–​226
101–​102 physical harm-​related, 43
anger-​linked, 23, 37, 41, 47, 84, polite communication of, 181–​182
86–​88, 90–​91, 98, 137, 217 in the presence of children, 3, 5,
brain/​brain damage and, 30–​31, 49, 107–​112
111 pressure valve aspect of, 217–​218
censoring of, 3, 6–​7, 10, 14–​16 by Prince Philip, 182, 191
children and, 28 punishment of, 12, 14–​15, 108, 132
common objection to, 31 by Queen Elizabeth II, 1–​2
comparison with slurs, religious questioning the wrongness of,
taboos, 22 75–​76
connotations of, 34–​37, 41, 46, reacting to, 121
49, 117 reasons for caring about, 1–​20
degrees of offensiveness of, 4 reasons for offensiveness of, 32–​35
denotations of, 33–​36, 41, 46, 52, role in expressing emotions, 23–​26
83 sanitization of, 33, 78, 182–​183
direct vs. indirect, 99–​101 shock power of, 32, 36, 38, 40
discouragement of, 7, 14 slurs vs., 22, 26, 145–​163
efforts at not causing offense, 3–​5 sound quality of, 83–​85
emotions and, 5–​6, 23–​26, 31, 37–​ as a superpower, 227
38, 42, 65, 84, 86–​91, 215 sweary quotation limitations,
euphemisms for, 33, 78–​79 190–​194
expressing vs. communicating, 67 taboo aspect of, 38–​47
Feinberg’s comment on, 30 taboo denotation of, 83
in films, 10 toleration/​welcoming of, 75
256 Index

swearing (cont.) sexual-​related, 43, 78

tone, body language, and, 98–​99 strategy for dealing sensitively
on TV shows, 8–​10 with, 79
upside to, 212–​217 swearing’s relation to, 38, 40, 83
user recognition of, 55 Tam, Simon, 171
vs. using swear words, 26 television (TV). See also individual
as a valuable form of expression, 5 TV shows
swearing, doing things with, 121–​136 anti-​swearing measures, 9–​10
acts, effects, intentions, f-​bomb used by British monarch, 48
predictions, 121–​125 FCC rulings on inappropriate
beyond speech acts, 134–​136 swearing, 118
sweary acts, 126–​133 rules/​regulations on swearing, 9
sweary self-​improvement, 142–​144 Terry, John, 209
Swearing Is Good For You (Byrne), 217 The Thick of It (British satire show), 29
sweary feminists, dilemma of, 171–​174 Thirteenth Amendment (U.S.
sweary quotation, limitations of, Constitution), 146
190–​194 tits, t*ts, 45, 116, 210
sweary self-​improvement, 142–​144 Today (TV show), 8
sweary sounds, 83–​85 tone (vocal tone)
body language and, 97–​99
taboo-​breaking impact of, 121, 131, 175, 206
etiquette of, 81–​82 Tourette syndrome, 30, 102
excitement/​thrill of, 32, 80 Trump, Donald, 29, 159
fun/​satisfaction from, 80–​83, 204 Trump, Melania, 159
risk factors, 81 trust escalation, 216. See also offence
role in comedy, 82n1 escalation
the taboo of, 38–​47 Tucker, Malcolm, 29, 205
taboos, taboo-​related words Twain, Mark, 188
behavioral, 38–​39 twat, 85
community-​wide offence Twitter, 29, 201, 210
escalation of, 83
contamination-​related, 43 United Arab Emirates (UAF), anti-​
defecation-​related, 78, 82 swearing measures, 12
defined/​cultural variations, 38–​43, 51 United Kingdom (UK)
development of, 39, 80, 83 Advertising Standards Authority,
forcefulness of, 42 10–​11
hierarchy/​sexual-​themed, 43–​44 African American incarceration
inappropriate formality, 45–​46 rates, 16–​17
innocent introduction of, 78–​79 anti-​swearing measures, 11–​12
non-​sweary slurs, 22 British Board of Film
offence escalation of, 79–​83 Classification, 10–​11, 118–​119,
religious-​themed, 39, 40–​41, 43, 78 124, 143, 179–​180
 Index 257

ending of ban on LGBT people in swearing’s forestalling of, 91, 217

the Armed Forces, 184 swearing’s possible escalation to,
fine for using fuck, 13 87, 123
Ofcom’s Broadcasting Code, 8–​11, verbal disagreements escalation
98, 101–​102, 118, 124 to, 89–​90
religious swearing, 49
slur terms for British people, 157 Wales, inoffensive use of cunt, 175
use of the V-​sign, 135 Warburton, Nigel, 193
United States (U.S.) Warwick, Kate, 47, 84, 165
African American incarceration Was It Something I Said? (British TV
rates, 16–​17 show), 191–​192
anti-​swearing measures, 11–​12 WhatsApp, 2, 40n3
Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire white people. See also Black people
decision, 90n4, 98–​99 arrest data vs. Black people, 16–​17
Clean Airwaves Act, 9–​10 claims of inoffensiveness of the
Cohen v. California, 13, 100n1, 116 n-​word, 151
start of confusion over fuck, 13 honky slur term for, 149, 157
upside to swearing, 212–​218 use of the n-​word in talking about
association with honesty, 216–​217 Black people, 146–​147
Byrne’s book on the benefits, 217 use of the word cunt, 170
effectiveness in supporting white supremacists, 17n4, 147
intimacy, 215–​216 whore, 43, 44, 153
pressure valve aspect, 217–​218 Winfrey, Oprah, 155, 187–​188
trust escalation, 216 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 137
U.S. See United States (U.S.) wrongful offence, 54, 147–​148, 203
wrongness
vagina, 33 fuck vs. f*** and, 203
violence inappropriate swearing, offence,
Cohen v. California decision, 116 and, 68–​73
domestic, and swearing, 8, 12 moral wrongness, 59, 69, 71, 76, 143
fighting words provocation of, 90,
115, 218 YouTube, 29
non-​violent alternatives, 91
at political demonstrations, 12 Zettel (Wittgenstein), 137