Warning: This is not my normal question of the week. This post is all about swearing. And I will link to NSFW media.
Proceed at your own risk.
Now, for the good stuff—swearing.
I have rules about swearing: never in front of a microphone and preferably in private when I’m alone.
I do have an obvious exception: when a person runs in front of me to use the handicapped stall. That’s when I say, “Fuck. Really? You have to run to prevent me from using the one stall I need?”
Recently, I’ve been discouraged about the choices our politicians have made. That means I’ve been having a tough time with the news. So I have limited where and when I consume my news. I’m writing a lot more, which is great.
And I’m swearing a ton, which feels fabulous. It releases the stress and tension I feel in ways that walking and exercise do not.
How Swearing Works for Me
I learned about the value of swearing when I first had vertigo and had trouble speaking, forming the words to get them out of my head. While I learned that hydration mattered for my balance, I did not realize I needed to stay hydrated enough to actually speak.
I sometimes suffer from dysarthria, a motor-based speech disorder that impairs my speech. If you’ve ever seen me slur or mispronounce my words, that’s the dysarthria. That’s why I drink a lot of water, even in my professional presentations.
But here’s what works best: Swearing.
You might think any of these work: hell, shit, damn, and so on. They are useful, but do not release the stress I feel. That’s because my stress is not just frustration with the state of the world but the fact that my body does not work.
My best swear is “Fuck a duck.” That’s because the first word, Fuck, is easy for me to say even if I’m having trouble speaking. F is a sound that starts with my lips, in the front of my mouth. Then, the “a” sound is in the middle of my mouth, so I don’t need much energy to say it. And Duck? Again, a sound I can make in the front of my mouth.
Front-of-the-mouth sounds are easier for me to say, especially if I’m tired or dehydrated.
But “Fuck a duck” allows me to jump-start my mouth muscles and recognize what else I might need to do to stay healthy.
So, I highly recommend swearing.
I’m not suggesting we want everyone to swear all the time. But judicious swearing can be quite useful. And that’s not just my opinion.
Books About Swearing
Melissa Mohr wrote a book called, Holy Shit: A Brief History of Swearing. This is a historical account of swearing: how it came to be and when it got really famous. (Wars, upheaval, and general population discontent have a lot to do with this.)
The other book I recommend is What the F: What Swearing Reveals About Our Language, Our Bains, and Ourselves. Early on in the book, he writes, “People with brain damage do swear. A lot.” This book does not focus on history. Instead, it offers a whole lot of fun for a book about language.
Even though I don’t have brain damage, I think of my vertigo as a brain injury. (That’s why I bought these books, to understand more about swearing.)
The somewhat disappointing fact is that most of us swear, and probably more often than we might like.
However, swearing can help you.
Three Ways Swearing Is Good for You
Here are the three ways:
- Think of swearing this way: swearing helps us react first and then think. (See Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow.) If you can swear to react and release the pressure you feel, you might have the ability to then think more clearly. (At some point.)
- Jump-start a physical reaction that’s not just stress and strain. Swearing works for me to jump-start my mouth muscles. Then, I can choose what to do next. That might be to go for a walk or do some other exercise. Again, that helps me move from reaction to thinking.
- It’s fun. Yes, swearing is a taboo, and we humans like to break some taboos. (There’s more about this in both books.)
There, those are the three ways swearing can work for us.
Now for the really NSFW part:
If you don’t believe me, watch and listen to Katie Goodman’s I Didn’t Fuck It Up. (I discovered this through Daniel Steinberg’s most recent newsletter, Off. Enjoy!) When you hear her sing, “I want to be an unfucker,” doesn’t that make you want to do something?
It does for me.
(Note: The book links are all Amazon with my affiliate code embedded.)