What the F: What Swearing Reveals about Our Language, Our Brains, and Ourselves

"This is the newest book on the list. It’s a really good general summary about how swearing works. It’s not so much interested in the history, although it does cover it a bit, but it’s got a big discussion of swearing and the brain. It talks about how swearing is this funny combination of left-brain and right-brain speech. The left brain is the one responsible for propositional speech—what we’re doing now, where you’re thinking of the meaning you want to convey, and finding the words. The right brain is responsible for memorised speech like song lyrics, ABCs, and, as it turns out, swear words. Right-brain speech is also more closely related to the emotional centres of the brain—the amygdala and basal ganglia. He also looks at swearing in other languages, too. Yes, it’s so fascinating. I’m personally interested in that because it happened to my grandmother, which is the story I start my own book with. She had some sort of dementia, Alzheimer’s probably, and lost the ability to speak. We were wheeling her around and her wheelchair went over a bump, and all of a sudden she went, “Shit!” It was out of nowhere. She hadn’t spoken in so long. But that part of the brain still worked; she still felt fear when she bumped and so she said “shit!” Yes! We always imagined that works—you would swear when you hit your hand with a hammer—but it was great to have that scientific confirmation. There’s the ice bucket experiment where people could put their hand in the cold water and keep it there longer if they were saying “shit! shit! shit” rather than “shoot! shoot! shoot!”. But then someone did a follow-up experiment which revealed that if you were a habitual swearer, then it worked less well. So, you have to be a judicious swearer for it to work. That’s a good question because it is a longstanding thing. You go back to the Renaissance and the very beginning of the idea of obscenity, and you have Thomas Elyot saying that the hearts and brains of children shouldn’t be exposed to this type of terrible language. Originally, it was based on the worry that these words were powerful and could lead directly to sex and violence. From reading books or hearing people talking about fucking, children would be exposed to it and then the idea would worm itself in there because these words have such power. But we want to think of children as innocent, having nothing to do with sex, or violence, or volcanic anger. Swear words are the words that most directly tie into all these taboo areas, and we don’t want to think of them in relation to our children. It’s hard to say because it varies by person. You can see lots of videos of kids swearing on YouTube and BuzzFeed and social media. Of course, there is a big subset of the population that is genuinely horrified by this, but today I think most people would find it funny if a kid turns around and says, “Ahhh where the fuck is mom?” When I hear kids swearing, I usually think it’s funny. But my nephew, when he was about five, got really angry and called my daughter a “bitch”—and he meant it—and I thought, O h my god, you cannot say that!"