1 – 11 – 18 How Not Swearing Can Make You (Sound) Smarter

The inspiration for this post is twofold: my mom getting on my case about how much I cuss, and that making me recall a pretty convincing argument my high school English teacher Ms. Schneider made about why people don't swear in Congress, parts of which I've shamelessly lifted and pasted here.

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I’ll preface this argument by acknowledging that I am no Puritan by any stretch of the imagination. I’ve recently tried to cut back on my swearing using the old rubber band method but I broke the thing after one day. So this writing is probably more so to convince myself to persevere in that effort as it is to persuade anyone else of anything.

I’ll use two examples throughout to illustrate the points I’ll try to make. The first is the most popular swear in every language which translates to “fornicate” in its literal meaning, while the second means something closer to “fecal.” Now if you’ve figured out what words I’m referring to you’ve probably went through in your head and replaced them by their literal meanings, and you’re finding that these phrases don’t make any sense, or at least that they are not really the meaning that was intended.

“How was your day?” “It was pretty fecal.” What? Unless you literally work at a waste water treatment plant this seems pretty unlikely. Also your day being fecal wouldn’t really be the way you’d say that, you might mean that it was full of fecal matter but, who cares I made my point.

“Fornicate the police” Well, some people say love and hate aren’t quite opposites but I don’t think that’s really very close to what people mean.

So the first advantage of not swearing is that you’ll actually be speaking English. Through the elimination of these meaningless words you have to say something that has a definite meaning. You’ve just elevated the floor of your communication skills by quite a bit, you might have eliminated half the nonsense from your speech. You may not think you speak nonsense but if you really closely examine how you talk we all say meaningless, worthless, time-consuming things on occasion. But at least now when you say these meaningless things, which should be less often, you’re less likely to offend people.

When we’re practicing being more informative and exercising greater control over our speech we’re literally working harder to talk. It’s an exercise in discipline and creativity. Through thinking at all about what you’re saying rather than just letting words fall out of your mouth you’ll start to be critical of more than just how much you cuss. You’ll start to see more readily where you’re not communicating effectively, and likely have some ideas on how to fix that. It’s going to make us more fluent, interesting, and specific when we speak, and through these improvements make us more persuasive and likable.

We all have situations where we get emotionally high-jacked and just spew poison at our significant others, close friends, or (yikes) people we don’t even know all that well. What happens if you can’t swear? You’re going to have to think about what you’re going to say! And what’s going to be easier to say than how you feel? You’re way more likely to externalize how you feel which should help not only your relationship with that person but your own understanding of yourself.

*Spouse/child/roommate doesn’t take out the trash* “Fornicate yourself” – Well, that’s not helpful at all. Pretty offensive but the other person has no idea what you’re mad about.

Maybe “I’m really upset with you” – We’ve shifted from “you” to “I” which is significant. Also, who gets offended by this? This is just sharing an emotion, a highly negative one but it’s not actually an insult.

Hopefully “It makes me really angry when you don’t take out the trash” - There’s a lot of information sharing here. The other person knows how you’re feeling, knows what (in your perception) has caused it, and has a pretty good idea of how to remedy the situation.

And maybe, later in the day, the person in the last case can even introspect a little and try to think of why that thing makes them so upset. If they’d just cussed the other person out they wouldn’t be thinking of their own psychological makeup, they’d probably still be mad about the trash, and the trash probably still wouldn’t have been taken out!

The last advantage I see (I’m sure there are more) is what we look like. There’s not a lot of circles, at least circles we want to impress, that find cussing to be valuable in itself. Many people might say they use it to emphasize a point but there’s two issues with that.

If you’re swearing all the time you’re not adding any emphasis because you always sound the same! No one can tell what you really care about, or at least if they could it wouldn’t be from swearing, because that’s not a variable you’re manipulating meaningfully in your speech.

Going to back to what we said about specificity and information sharing, aren’t you going to speak more persuasively if you’re more specific, respectful, and introspective? Hopefully this exercise can galvanize me in my efforts and provide some entertainment to other people.