Before we begin, this episode is about swear words.
In the course of their discussion,
Stephen and Angela say a lot of swear words.
We've bleeped out the most objectionable ones,
but you'll still hear some unpleasant language.
So if you don't like swearing,
or you're listening with kids,
you might want to skip this one.
Now, here's our show.
Remember, I'm the one with potty mouth.
I'm Angela Duckworth.
I'm Stephen Dubner.
And you're listening to No Stupid Questions.
Today on the show, why are people offended by swear words?
Whoa, I can't believe someone said that.
So, Angie, let me start with a warning
to whoever is doing the bleeping on this episode.
You are going to be very busy over the next half hour.
This is going to be a lot of censorship.
Here's what I want to talk to you about today.
There is a lot more swearing, or cursing,
in public these days,
including words that didn't used to be spoken at all
in most circumstances, like,
motherf***er, people calling each other,
hey, motherf***er, how's it going?
Is that true, by the way,
or is that just Stephen Dubner's casual observations?
The data on more swearing?
Yeah, is that a trend?
So there are scholars who've done this.
This is one chart I'm looking at,
where they picked one, two, three, four, five,
six pretty standard words,
hell, ass, s***, damn, f***, and b***h.
This is charting essentially the frequency of words
that are found in printed sources
published between 1900 and 2019.
Hell was always higher than the others.
The second highest was ass.
Hell just kept rising,
and it's still much, much, much more common than the others.
But all of them rose what looks to be
between three and four times the magnitude.
According to the printed sources,
it can be analyzed by Engram viewer, at least.
Oh, yes, I'm a big fan of Google Engram.
I think this partly comes from
when Google is still scanning books.
Like, let's scan all the books that have ever been written,
but it's actually not just books.
So the printed word.
Yeah, and there's a 2017 paper published in Sage Open.
This is by Jean Twenge, Hannah van Landingham,
and W. Keith Campbell.
And they write,
we find a steady linear increase in the use of swear words
with books published in the years 2005 to 2008
28 times more likely to include swear words
than books published in the early 1950s.
In addition to what we think of
as those sort of cuss words,
there's also the taking of various Lord's names in vain.
Usually a particular Lord, at least in the United States.
Fucking Krishna, I don't know.
Does that happen?
I haven't heard that recently.
Maybe I'm not hanging out with the right people.
That bastard Buddha, you haven't heard those.
I'm feeling uncomfortable, Steven.
You haven't even got your question,
but already you have succeeded in making me feel a little...
I think that's a big part of it is
how a word might be comfortable in some circumstances
and not in others.
I'll give you an example.
Unfortunately, most of my examples these days
come from playing golf.
I was playing golf with a guy
who seemed like a perfectly nice guy.
He was a lawyer, but he seemed fine.
And then he missed a putt.
And he said something that
I didn't even know how to respond.
It was so horrible.
Wait, are you gonna repeat it?
Yeah.
He was talking to the ball, not going in the hole.
And he said, you fucking whore.
And I sat in the kind of very awkward silence
you are sitting in right now.
I don't know what I'm feeling, Steven.
I didn't know what I was feeling either.
It was very cringy.
It changed my opinion of this person, I'll be honest,
because it seemed like such a wrong read of the situation.
Like, first of all, it was language
that made me very uncomfortable.
Several layers of, I think, like, wrongness.
Agree.
But here's what I was saying about context.
The Sopranos, I don't know if you ever watched that show.
But in my family, some of us did.
And there's one character whose name is Ralph Cifaretto,
who is hilarious, often unintentionally.
And he's always calling people, you fucking hoo-ah.
And we repeat it over and over again
because it's his Jersey pronunciation that we find kind of-
I had never heard that particular Jersey pronunciation.
Is it hoo-ah?
It's you fucking hoo-ah.
And like you, we laugh.
There's something about it that's funny.
But what I'm saying is context matters.
And overall, there does seem to be this
societally agreed upon standard
that swearing in certain circumstances
and for certain audiences is still very much forbidden
or looked down upon.
You don't make it in a political speech usually,
I guess we should say.
Although there was an interesting political swear
caught on tape years ago
when the Affordable Care Act was being signed
and Biden was the vice president.
And he whispered into Obama's ear
but loud enough for someone to hear it.
This is a big fucking deal.
And that went down as an anomaly.
Although that's probably not that anomalous.
It just happened to be heard.
But you know, in much of the professional world
and among children
and among people who have a sensibility, religious
or otherwise it might be insulted,
swearing is something we just don't do.
On this show, for instance,
when one of us swears, it's usually you.
Today, I'm carrying the load for both of us.
I get emails about this, by the way, Steven.
Those emails are what prompted me
to wanna ask you this question today
because on this show,
we do bleep the occasional swear words.
But in one recent email, at least that I saw,
you used Jesus Christ as an expletive.
And some people wrote to say that they found
that really offensive and asked us slash you to stop.
So I have a few questions for you around swearing.
Do you think, Angela, that we should be swearing less?
Maybe we should be swearing more?
And I'm curious to know what you can tell us
about what swearing actually accomplishes.
Well, I have to tell you, Steven,
that because it was more than one email
about the episode in which I uttered the Lord's name,
in vain, I did a little looking
into the science of swearing.
So I'm not completely naive here to the research on it.
That is so Angela, I have to say.
That shows a lot of good things about you though,
not just growth mindset like you always wanna learn,
but when you have something directed at you
that maybe doesn't sit quite right,
you go somewhere empirical for an exploration.
I like that.
Freud did not say on the list of psychological defenses,
he had the immature defenses like repression and avoidance,
and then he had the mature defenses like humor
and sublimation.
He didn't say that Google Scholar was a mature defense,
but it is for me, it is where I go
when I am feeling confused and criticized.
And actually, I have to say,
I learned a lot about the science of swearing.
I'm gonna answer your question
before I get into the research,
which is, I don't know if we should be swearing less.
We, you and I, we society,
but I feel like Angela Duckworth should be swearing less.
Interesting.
So I'm gonna make the case for the upside of swearing,
but I'm also gonna say that net,
I think it's unnecessary roughness.
I cannot wait for your explanation.
I'm not gonna give this to you, totally G-rated.
Let's begin with the definition.
The world expert on swearing,
at least from psychological science,
is this guy named Timothy Jay,
who is a professor emeritus now,
but spent a good portion of his long career
studying the upside, the downside, the mechanism,
swearing in all possible facets.
Is Jay, it's his last name and it's like his nickname.
Does it stand for jackass or jackwad, jagoff?
It's just Jay.
I think it's just J-A-Y in case you're wondering.
Not a swear.
But the way Timothy Jay defines swearing,
and I quote,
swearing, defined broadly,
is the use of offensive or taboo words
to express our emotions
and communicate our emotions to others.
They have a function, these swear words.
This is a tiny, tiny door into a conversation
about a huge thing, which is language
and what it means, who it means what to,
and how language evolves.
And so I'm a big admirer of a linguist named John McWhorter.
I think you probably know his work a bit as well.
He's at Columbia.
He writes a lot of popular books.
Mostly through you because you are really a big admirer
of John McWhorter.
And in fact, John McWhorter's most recent book,
and it's one reason I wanted to ask you this question today,
is actually about swearing.
It's called Nine Nasty Words, English in the Gutter,
Then, Now, and Forever.
And I can share with you a few key insights from there
that I think are really interesting.
He describes essentially three historical eras
of what swear words were about.
So the first one was really about God and heresy.
So someone might damn you to hell
or use the name of a Lord in vain.
And that for a long time was considered the most serious,
let's say, or the most common even.
Blasphemous, right?
Deeply blasphemous.
And that connotes that religion held more leverage
than it may in the world today.
The second period he writes about is about,
as you said, the body.
So if you think about the words
that are still considered curse words,
it has something to do with the human body
and our relationship to it,
our maybe disgust with it, our excitement for it.
So there are sexual terms, there's the F word,
there's, there is when you call someone an a-hole,
there are curse words to describe
our reproductive organs and so on.
There are a number of words that stand in for penis
that are now kind of, I would call them casual curse words.
Like the one that starts with D.
Have you ever called someone and said,
oh, that guy's a real.
Oh, I'm sure.
Remember, I'm the one with potty mouth,
as my husband likes to say.
Wait, wait, wait.
So there's religion, there's the body.
If the first two are religion and the human body,
the third, John McWhorter argues,
and I find this really interesting,
is words that are meant to demean other people,
different races or ethnicities or religions,
sexual preferences.
Like ethnic slurs.
So I think he's saying, you know, in the current era,
the words against religion and against the human body
have been devalued somewhat or declawed.
Whereas the words that seem to carry the most potency
are the ones about other people that make us really stand up
and say, whoa, I can't believe someone said that.
What's interesting is that every generation
has its own taboos.
Somehow we don't move beyond taboos altogether, right?
Yeah, I did find recently a good illustration
of our current phase.
So there's a website I found called Language Please,
which describes itself as a digital journalism style guide.
So this is if you're a journalist,
if you're writing or speaking for the public
and you want to know what language is considered offensive
by different groups that you may not have
a lot of exposure to.
Their purpose, they write, is to give guidance
spanning six main categories.
Borders and populations, class and social standing,
disabilities, neurodiversity and chronic illness,
gender and sexuality, mental health, trauma
and substance abuse, and race and ethnicity.
So I found it interesting that as we're getting
more sensitive to using or abusing language
in one direction, like the word homeless
is no longer used by a lot of journalists.
Instead, it might be a person without housing
or experiencing homelessness.
The phrase drug addict, a lot of people don't say
that phrase anymore.
They might opt for something like a person
experiencing substance abuse disorder.
All these things are separating the person's condition
from the person so as not to essentialize.
Exactly.
One word that's offended me for a long time
is when people say, oh, that's insane.
Why were you offended because it wasn't literally true?
Because there are people who are literally defined
as insane and that is a mental illness.
I don't know if McWhorter has a kind of like,
this is why every generation invents taboo
or swear words, but I was pretty convinced
by what I found from Timothy J. and from others.
I think the most compelling argument
is that human beings are social
and therefore there is the need to express
and to understand other people's emotion.
Swearing enables you to communicate
and to express a variety of emotions,
most of them negative but some of them neutral or positive.
So anger, frustration, those would be the negative ones.
Think about people swearing at each other in traffic
and then there's what happens when you and I
are in conversation and I'm just surprised
and I let loose with something which apparently
is offensive to more than one person.
And by the way, Timothy J. has also pointed out
that maybe better to swear than some other things
we could do, like shove people into traffic
or hit them.
He had some line in one of his articles that said
he has recorded, I don't know, hundreds, maybe thousands
of conversations and utterances and he's not once
had evidence that swearing then led to physical violence.
So I get that there's a function of this,
but what I think of this impolite human behavior
and my ability to use other words, like why not?
I think I'm just gonna buck the trend.
I wonder if we should have a call out for listeners
and ask them to contribute.
What do you think would be the best question to ask
for listeners to send us maybe a voice memo on this topic?
I guess I might ask them, do you have a story
of a time where you swore and were glad about it
or live to regret it?
Love that question.
Okay, so listeners, if you would, use your phone,
send us a voice memo, send it to nsq at freakonomics.com.
Tell us your name if you don't mind
and maybe a little bit about yourself.
Keep it short, record it in a quiet place
and if we're entertained by it,
we will put it on a future episode.
Still to come on No Stupid Questions,
Steven and Angela discuss how swearing can lead
to intimacy and friendship.
I see a lot of young women my daughter's age,
they ask for permission to call another friend,
can I call you bitch?
Yes.
Now, back to Steven and Angela's conversation
about the ethics of swear words.
You do have one phrase that you say
when something surprises or delights you
and I love this phrase, you say holy schmoly.
That's very intentional though to substitute holy schmoly
or by the way, in lieu of the Lord's name, jeez Louise.
Also, somebody suggested to me cheese and rice.
There's also jeepers creepers, I mean, that goes way back.
There's a lot.
Mine is Jiminy Crickshaft.
I'm not quite sure where that came from.
Do you use Jiminy Crickshaft?
There's so many syllables in that.
I know, it feels so good.
I don't like to say the name Jesus Christ as a curse
or as an exclamation of distress or even surprise.
It's usually distress.
If I hit a bad golf shot,
there are two that I end up saying.
It's not intentional, these are just how my brain
has grabbed onto, because I don't like to swear publicly.
Today's conversation notwithstanding.
So I will say Jiminy Crickshaft, which is very satisfying.
And the other one is instead of saying the SH word,
I'll say sugar bear.
And I have to say that feels good.
I think I could also say OMG, which by the way,
one could argue is better or one could argue is no better.
You know, we just finished a Freakonomics radio episode
on online prayer apps.
Online prayer apps.
Yeah, it's a big business and super interesting
and a little bit perhaps troubling,
in part because the way data online can be shared.
So you can imagine that maybe there's some
confessionals that may not be as private as one may think.
One of the clergy members whose voices we added to this
mentioned, and I thought this was really interesting,
he said that when people say, oh my God,
as an expression of like you were saying,
maybe disbelief or surprise, he didn't mind that.
He said, I take it as a prayer.
It's an acknowledgement, whether you know it or not,
that you're saying, I can't do this on my own.
Like, oh my God, I'm calling in support.
Or sort of like a recognition that this is God's universe
and I can't understand it all.
I mean, there could be a variety of things
if you were trying to justify yourself.
You know, I'm Catholic, I told you I'm Catholic, right?
Yes, you have.
But you converted to Catholicism.
You were not what they call a cradle Catholic.
I became Catholic when I was 26.
The only person in my family I think to become Catholic.
But that's when you started swearing, you're saying?
No, no, no, no, no, that is not what I started swearing.
I did my Catholic conversion when I was at Oxford
and I had a PhD monk who was very patient
and so I had all kinds of questions.
I was like, why is this, why is that?
What about the people who don't convert?
Are they all going to go to hell
just because they didn't have the good fortune
to be exposed to Catholicism?
I asked all of these questions,
but I don't remember asking,
well, I certainly don't remember what the response was,
why it is that it is offensive or taboo
to take the Lord's name in vain.
It's one of the 10 commandments, that's why.
God, I should know that.
You know, in moral theory,
the theory of moral principles in psychology,
John Haidt very prominently has argued
for there being certain general principles
that underlie moral systems throughout history
and across culture and religions.
I remember reading this poem by Philip Larkin,
church going, in the poem Larkin reveals
he's more or less an atheist and he's taking a bike ride
and he pulls over at this abandoned church
and he walks in to the sanctuary.
But you know, immediately had this like hush come over him
and this is just the idea of like,
there is something sacred or pure
and so I think maybe that's the reason why
taking the Lord's name in vain,
in context in which it is just being used
to express surprise at a new fact
that Stephen Dubner let loose.
I think that's why it's offensive.
If that is creating offense
and I'm just trying to express surprise,
I think I should say something else, don't you think?
But the fact is if you take 10 different people,
they may have 10 totally different reckonings
of what is sacred and what is profane.
For some, that is a religious deity and universe
and others it might be nature,
for others it might be whatever.
And that's where I think we get into this very awkward,
public private conflict when it comes to curse words
because there is an intimacy about it too.
I can see that one purpose that swearing might accomplish
is it creates a deeper intimacy or bonding.
You kind of show your disdain
or irreverence for a shared enemy.
Let's say you hate Joe Biden.
