Fun & Famous
Why cursing is good for you
When I was about 14 years old, words like ‘crap’, ‘f*ck’ or ‘shit’ were part of my daily vocabulary. My mom was all but happy about it, but hey, I was a teenager with a total disregard to the rules.
Last year during Christmas, I knocked over a cup of tea when I was visiting my rather religious in-laws and the first ‘holy shit’ was out of the bag. The silence that followed was so uncomfortable that I almost spit out a ‘crap it’s Christmas, act normal for fuck’s sake and don’t take the Lord’s name in vain’, but I swallowed it back in and came out with a more Christian ‘woops, sorry’ as I looked straight into the eyes of my boyfriend’s very religious grandfather. “Ehm, merry Christmas.”
We’ve learned at an early age that cursing is rude. So why do we do it? I read an article in Quest the other day in which the Dutch journalist Anouk Broersma researched why we feel the need to curse. No matter how hard parents and teachers try to teach you to avoid cursing, it seems impossible to ban it entirely from our vocabulary.
“Go coconut yourself”
What’s more, cursing has quite a lot of advantages according to research done in America. Teens can use cursing as a way to rebel against ‘boring’ adults (‘this song is fucking awesome!’) and adults have a richer vocabulary thanks to curse words and use these as a way to imply how serious they are about something they’re saying. “My piece of shit car broke down!”
Whether you feel better afterwards is debatable. Your car won’t be less broken, but cursing relieves a bit of the negativity. As it does in my case. Especially when I bump my pinky toe onto something. Anouk’s conclusion: We need to accept the fact that curse words will always exist, but let’s just make sure to keep telling each other that they’re too harsh. Because we shouldn’t want to lose our civilization, but at the same time those forbidden words work best anyway.”
There’s a Dutch Union against cursing, which came up with ‘alternative strengthening words’, like ‘coconut’. How on earth should we curse with this? Go coconut yourself? Coconuthole? The word ‘coconut’ only becomes cool when kids would be punished for using the word and adolescents want to use it. They wouldn’t give a coconut if this weren’t the case, you know.
