For F*ck's Sake: Why Swearing is Shocking, Rude, and Fun

"So this is a fun book, but also a serious book. Rebecca Roache is very much a philosopher, and this is really a book on the philosophy of language. It actually draws upon some of the ideas of J.L. Austin, who we’ve already mentioned, the ordinary language philosopher who talked about performative utterances, acts which are performed by saying words—so, for instance, launching a ship by saying ‘I launch this ship’. Or the words ‘I do’ in a marriage ceremony. These are linguistic acts. And one of the themes in Rebecca’s book is how linguistic acts are performed when people utter swear words in different contexts. It’s a very wide-ranging book, but underlying it is serious philosophy about how we communicate with one another and the value we give to different sorts of words, which might be considered taboo in one context, or maybe just commonplace and expected in other contexts. I remember when I worked in a flour mill in Crayford, years ago, the toaster broke and this old guy said, ‘oh fuck, the fucking fucker’s gone and fucking well fucked itself again.’ It was incredibly expressive and creative, an almost baroque sentence that came out very naturally and perfectly communicated what he felt. So this is a book about offensiveness, partly, and it’s a book about particular words as well. Chapter thirteen is called ‘Cunt and ‘Cunt’’—so Roache’s not shying away from using taboo words: the fact there’s an asterisk on the front doesn’t mean this and other words are asterisked all the way through. I think it’s a great book because it combines Rebecca’s obvious joy in using swear words with serious philosophy about an issue that is all around us. And I think it’s highly original, because it’s not a topic that philosophers usually address. There’s an endorsement from Stephen Fry on the back: “Finally, a book that rips the fuck out of the arseholes who claim that swearing is the sign of a poor vocabulary or unnecessary. Bollocks to them.” Many people take great joy in swearing. It reveals all kinds of things about how we relate to people and the different ways in which we can communicate, threaten, or tease. I love this book, and I’m really delighted that she’s written it. There’s no sense in which she’s straining to include philosophy – it explains so much. Indirectly, she’s made a great case for there being much more philosophy about swearing, she has shown how swearing touches on all kinds of important questions. This would make a great Christmas present for your grandparents or parents-in-law… There are. Lyndsey Stonebridge’s book on Hannah Arendt, We Are Free to Change the World, will be out early next year. Philip Goff, who wrote a book about panpsychism that got a lot of attention, has just followed that up with Why? The Purpose of the Universe , an argument for belief in a kind of cosmic shaping force to the universe, based on something known as the fine tuning argument. I don’t agree with him, but it’s another example of good accessible public philosophy. Another biographically-driven book that will be coming out before too long is Emily Herring’s – she’s writing a biography of Henri Bergson. This will be excellent, I’m sure. And in the further future, David Bather Woods is writing a book about Schopenhauer . So these are two books in the pipeline by outstanding younger writers turning their attention to this combination of biography and philosophy, the flourishing genre of the moment."