Samiul Bashar Samin
A category of non-swearing taboo language is blasphemous expressions and words that are otherwise unspeakable for certain religious groups. Another category is slurs: words that deride entire groups of people, and that are often associated with hate speech. In slurring someone –you express contempt not only for the person you are addressing, but also for a wider group to which they may belong. By contrast, in yelling at someone, you do not express contempt for anyone other than the person you are addressing. The dividing line between swears and slurs is not clear-cut The line between swears and religious taboo language is similarly fuzzy; consider that we can swear using the word ‘damn’. However, there is enough of a contrast between swearing and these other categories to make it worth separating them when we consider the ethical issues.
I’ll focus here on the non-slurring, non-religious swear words that, in English and many other languages, often have a sexual or a lavatorial theme. So, what’s special about these words? What sets them apart from other areas of language?
This unique psychological role gives swearing a unique linguistic role, too. Suppose we overhear somebody exclaim ‘F**k it!’ when he accidentally spills tea in his lap. We can’t grasp the meaning of this exclamation by reflecting on the literal meanings of the words, as we’d do if the speaker had said ‘Eat it!’ or ‘Wash it!’ Someone who says ‘F**k it!’ after slopping tea in his lap is not expressing his desire to engage in a tangle of legs with tea, nor is he instructing anyone else to do the same. To understand this exclamation, we need to consider not what the speaker is referring to or talking about, but what he aims to indicate about his emotions. This makes swearing, in such circumstances, more like a scream than an utterance: just like a scream, it expresses emotion without being about anything.
In any case, focusing on swear words themselves will not enable us to explain fully why they are offensive, because the offensiveness of a given utterance of a swear word is relative to the social and historical context. Swearing at a graveside during a funeral is more likely to cause offence than swearing while in the crowd at a football match, and using ‘damn’ is less likely to cause offence today than it was several decades ago. We can’t account for such contextual variations in swearing’s offensiveness by looking solely to features of swearing that do not vary with context, such as what swear words refer to and how they sound. We must look beyond the words themselves, and consider the broader behavioural contexts in which they appear.
Swearing, then, is as offensive as it is not because of some magic ingredient possessed by swear words but lacked by other words, but because when we swear, our audience knows that we do so in the knowledge that they will find it offensive. This is why context is important: there are some contexts in which we know we will not cause offence by swearing, and when we swear in such contexts our audience’s knowledge that we did so without expecting or intending to offend helps ensure that we do not offend. This explains why we are more tolerant of swearing by non-fluent speakers of our language, such as young children and non-native speakers, than we are of swearing by competent speakers. When non-fluent speakers swear, often we do not suspect them of doing so knowing that their words are offensive. Consequently, we are less likely to be offended.