Fun & Famous
Why swearing is good for you
When I was about fourteen, there was always a ‘damn’, ‘typhus‘, or ’f***' passing by. My mother didn't think it was okay at all, but hey, I was a teenager and didn't care about the rules.
Last year I bumped at Christmas at my religious in-laws, I spilled my tea and immediately let out my first ‘goddammit’. The silence that followed was so awkward that I almost blurted out another ‘oh crap, it's Christmas, act normal and don't curse with God’, but luckily I managed to swap it for a slightly more Christian “oops, sorry” while looking straight into the eyes of my boyfriend's devout grandfather. “Uh, Merry Christmas.”
We have been taught that cursing is rude. So why do we do it anyway? I read yesterday an article in Quest where journalist Anouk Broersma investigates why we actually curse. Because no matter how hard parents, teachers, and the League against cursing try, it seems impossible to ban it from our language.
“Get all the coconuts”
Moreover, according to American research, cursing has quite a few advantages. For example, teenagers can use curse words to set themselves apart from the ‘boring’ adults (‘this music is f***ing good!’) and adults with curse words have a richer palette of words to express how serious we are about something. “Now my car is damn broken too!”
Whether you feel better afterwards is of course the question. Your car certainly doesn't get any less broken from it, but cursing is a relief. It is for me too. Especially in the case of a recently stubbed little toe. Anouk's conclusion? “We must accept that curse words will continue to exist, but let's at least keep telling each other that they are too coarse because we shouldn't want to lose our civilization and secretly those forbidden words work the best.”
The League against cursing is coming up with ‘alternative power terms’, such as ‘coconut’. How would you curse with that? Damn coconut? Get all the coconuts? Coconut loser? Children must first be punished if they use the word coconut, only then does the word become cool and young people want to use it. You do understand that otherwise, it’s not worth a single coconut, right?
