In the halcyon, innocent year of our lord 2004, there was a minor political scandal, if you can imagine such a thing. Then-US Vice President Dick Cheney was questioned by a Democratic senator about his financial ties to a government contractor during a photo op. Cheney’s response was short but far from sweet: the inquisitive senator was told to go ‘fuck yourself’. A few years later, reminiscing happily about the moment during a radio interview, Cheney doubled down on his mot juste, saying ‘You’d be surprised by how many people liked that. That’s sort of the best thing I ever did.’
A sad state of affairs indeed, and I’m not talking about the long decline of inter-party discourse. I mean the decline of swearing, in its quality, if not quantity. Nowadays, when irate and driven to insult someone in the heat of an argument, everyone from the highest politico to the lad who shines his shoes will plump, with dreary predictability, for a few single syllables. The f-word, the c-bomb, the s-plop.
Modern swear words, you’ll agree, are a dull affair. I’m not knocking the richly versatile f-word (an intensifier, a verb, an interjection, a noun — is there any-effing-thing it can’t do?). Rather, I’m here to encourage our tongues to broaden their horizons and enrich our language. To season our sentences with the rich variety of other curses out there. Why not look back to the past, when insults had vim, vigour and class — and yet could still strip the skin off a victim’s bones? Take this epic catalogue of cuts from Shakespeare’s Henry IV Part 1: ‘You starveling, you elfskin, you dried neat’s tongue, you bull’s pizzle, you stockfish! O, for breath to utter what is like thee! You tailor’s yard, you sheath, you bowcase, you vile standing tuck.’ A Falstaffian verbal dance from Falstaff himself. Or, keeping your Olde Englishe hat on, marvel at the ability to call someone a ‘bespawling cumberworld’ (a useless person who also spits when they speak). You can’t read such mouthy magnificence and not applaud at how refreshingly lively it sounds compared to ‘piss off knobhed’. And if you don’t, I feel for your lack of soul, you bull’s pizzle.
This is what language is for: not affectless dry communication, the equivalent of a flavourless meal. No, swearing is a buffet. It shows us that we can be positively symphonic when we put our minds to it. Not spitting just a single invective, but a yowling, multi-sentence guitar solo of linguistic ire. Find the right insult to the right person at the right time, and it is a high that can sustain you all week. I say this as someone who has never reached such highs, forever tongue-tied by my anger to mutter a deflating ‘Oh just…sod off?!’
There is a creativity to the art of stringing such slang together, make no mistake. The ancient Romans knew it, and O, how they put their Latin tongues to good use. Elbowed by someone in the forum? Interrupted during a chat at the baths? Call someone a total nugator ac nebulo (trashy pipsqueak), or a ructabunde sterculinum publicum (you public lavatory, you). Conjugation never sounded better.
Not surprisingly, studies have found that people with deep reserves of insults locked in their mind are literally brainier. In one example, researchers gave subjects two sets of ‘verbal fluency tasks’: one where they were urged to come up with as many regular words as possible within one minute. And one where they were set the same task, but all the words had to be top-drawer. People with a high fluency of taboo words were found to generally be more verbally expressive and intelligent overall. Sod’s law, you might call it.
There is some urgency to this call to frigging arms. Like the magnificent Javan rhinoceros, cursing is slowly going extinct. A study into the use of swearwords in the UK between the 1990s and 2010s found a 27 per cent drop in swearing, as well as the predictable finding that the banal f-word was the nation’s favourite. To remedy matters, I urge all able-bodied citizens to bone up, and speak up. Don’t just eat your five fruit and veg a day; spit out five really spectacular insults daily.
This is homework that reclaims your humanity. It also vastly increases pain tolerance, as a delightful study titled ‘Frankly, we do give a damn: improving patient outcomes with swearing’ found. (Soon-to-be-in-labour pregnant mothers, take note). At a time when large language models (LLMs) are hoovering away our creativity and flattening language into a puddle of plastic obscurity, a really good swearword does more than let us vent; it shows we’re bloody human. Just like our foul-mouthed ancestors.
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