Every language has its taboo words (which many people use all the time). But the list of forbidden words is always changing — and those changes tell us some surprising things about ourselves. Note: The swear words in this episode have been bleeped out. To hear a version of this episode without the bleeps, go to freakonomics.com.

This episode of Freakonomics Radio is about swearing, and therefore it contains a lot of swearing.

As is our custom, we have bleeped these swear words out, so this episode contains a lot of bleeping.

If you don't want to hear those curse words even bleeped, now is a good time to find a different episode of Freakonomics Radio to listen to.

Or maybe you want to hear the curse words without the bleeping, in which case you should go to Freakonomics.com, where you will find the unbleeped version of this episode.

♪♪ Lately, I've been using my phone a lot for dictation.

I will dictate emails, texts, and occasionally a note to myself.

Like when I think of a question I want to ask in an interview for this show.

The other day, for instance, I dictated into my phone something like, talk about the first time you did such and such, but the phone didn't render my dictation as talk about, it said f*** about.

Since when did the voice recognition on my phone start using the F word?

It struck me that swearing, or whatever you want to call it, profanity, blasphemy, or curses and slurs, expletives and vulgarities, It struck me there seems to be more of it now than ever, often in places you wouldn't expect.

So today on Freakonomics Radio, is it true that there's more swearing than ever?

These are like people in the King's retinue.

We'll learn why we don't know as much about swearing as you might think.

He said, you know that swearing research you're doing is not a good idea for tenure.

We'll find out what these words are meant to accomplish.

Swear words have this very particular set of physiological and emotional effects.

This is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything, with your host, Stephen Dubner.

Let's start by hearing from a few of our listeners.

They tell my kids they need to save those words for when something really bad happens instead of saying I'm so effin happy because otherwise you have no language left to express extreme frustration or sadness or grief.

What made me reassess my language was a conversation with a Spanish boy who I was dating.

He told me that usually people that use swear words do so because they like their vocabulary to express themselves better.

I thought to myself, this mother****er tells me My English is poor.

I think it adds some oomph to your language.

I do have an 18 month old, so Sometime soon, I'm gonna have to stop cursing but for now Love you

That was respectively Kristen Olga and Rebecca Apparently none of our male listeners have ever sworn, but we did find 1 man who swears.

I teach linguistics and some other things at Columbia University.

I write a column for the New York Times, and My most recent 2 books were 9 Nasty Words about profanity and Woke Racism about race and cultural issues.

JS So, John, how would you summarize the role of cursing in language?

JN 1 thing that it's important to realize with cursing and profanity is that it isn't words in the sense that ironing board or yesterday or therefore are words.

Profanity when you're talking about real profanity, real cursing is eruptions.

There's the left side of the brain where most people process language as in the boy kicked the red ball.

The right side of the brain is more Dionysian, is more about the melody, is more about the tone, and therefore is also where profanity is generated from.

Profanity comes from such a different place emotionally than vanilla language, to the point that it often doesn't even make any grammatical sense.

Try parsing what hell is in that sentence other than just a kind of a dog bark.

And here's another expert with a slightly different perspective.

Swearing is the use of emotionally offensive language to vent our emotions and convey our emotions to other people.

Yeah, I'm a professor of Psychology Emeritus from the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts.

Would you call yourself a swearing scholar or is that too reductive?

I like to think of myself as pioneering the psychological research on American cursing, having written 6 books on this and published dozens of professional articles.

What would you say are the chief things that you've learned about swearing then?

Every competent speaker of a language knows what they're not supposed to say.

All those swears just can't control themselves.

Why does Jay call this a myth, the idea that swearing represents a loss of control?

Well, this goes back to research from the early 1980s, when Jay set out to document the use of swearing and other taboo words.

We've recorded over 10, 000 people swearing in public with different means.

In public, meaning places like schools and stores and at sporting events.

I had a cadre of research assistants and we had these pre-printed field cards.

They had categories like the speaker, the listener, their ages, what was said, and what was the emotional surround.

We've also used voice-activated tape recorders and put them in various places.

This recording and note-taking was all done covertly, without the subject's knowledge.

But Jay also asked people directly about swearing.

I've surveyed hundreds, thousands of students, having them fill out surveys on how frequently these words are used and how offensive they are.

When you started this research, I'm curious how your academic peers and or

elders responded negatively I Had a Dean pull me aside at a social event.

I'm right out of college 26 years old I've got a wife and a kid.

He said, you know, that swearing research you're doing is not a good idea for tenure.

So I switched gears for a while and I became a guru of computer-assisted instruction.

Stanley Hall Award for Excellence in Education by incorporating computers into psychology.

Now you can do what you wanted to do in the first place.

Yeah, 1 of my buddies said, Tim, everybody's doing this computer stuff.

The first analysis I did, I had a Nike sneaker box that was filled up with these cards.

I said, okay, we've got to go through and analyze all of this.

We wanted to document the whole arc of this.

You have boys and girls, men and women, emoting with, say, anger or aggression, and they're using different language.

You can make all of these age and gender-related comparisons.

They use a larger variety of swear words and more hardcore swear words.

This holds true for the internet era as well.

Men and women both swear more when in the presence of their own gender.

Preschoolers don't have the vocabulary that teenagers do.

By the time you're at 12, 13, 14, you've got a pretty adult-like vocabulary.

What happens after that depends on the setting.

Is this person in a structured corporate setting Or are they working outside as a laborer?

It becomes very contextualized after that.

As to the why, the purpose of swearing, and obviously differs from person to person, situation to situation.

Even I can think of a lot of different reasons.

You might be angry, you might be disgusted, you might be trying to elicit humor from someone else, you might be trying to bond, you might be trying to show that you are your own person and I won't be bound by society's rules.

If I ask you to give the answer to the title of this 1 book of yours, why we curse, why do we?

Stephen, you just elaborated a lot of the reasons why people swear.

Now, we're the only animal with emotional architecture in the physiological that can express our emotions abstractly with words.

I regard this as an evolutionary leap that instead of fighting tooth and nail when we're angry with someone, we can say I hate you or a variety of other words.

And what about the common belief that swearing is more popular among the less educated, the lower classes, than the upper?

Timothy Jay says that this, too, is somewhat mythical.

The data that have been collected, Tony McEnery did this in England.

That's a much more class-oriented culture than ours.

He's able to see that, yeah, there's more swearing in the working class, but they're swearing everywhere.

This class-oriented view of swearing is snobbery.

It's the way to put the working person down, the lower classes down.

Jay has seen further evidence in his own research.

We gave people a task, say all the words you can think of that begin with the letter F.

Say all the words that begin with the letter A.

Then I ask them, all right, Name all the animals you can in a minute, and then name all the swear words you can in a minute.

Which if you try to do this, you can get out about 10 quickly.

The people who generated the most swear words were the people who generated the most letter words and animals.

People that have a high vocabulary also have a high swearing vocabulary.

It really doesn't make any sense that if you couldn't think of a word because it wasn't in your lexicon you would say a swear word.

John McWhorter agrees that the class-based swearing theory is bankrupt.

John McWhorter Any notion that being a classy person is to not curse has fallen completely apart.

I would say that as a very bourgeois upper middle class person who has no interest in shocking anybody nor am I trying to take it down in order to indicate that despite the fact that I'm not poor I'm still down with everybody else I say probably a dozen times a day And I think I'm ordinary for people of my place and station.

That was not true in 1950, but that's the way it is now.

Cursing is no longer about sailors and barstools.

TDT So John, there is a sense that there is more swearing today than in the past.

I'm curious to know whether that's at all true.

Petey There is definitely today in public language more use of words that used to be considered blasphemous against God or blasphemous against the authorities that say that you're not supposed to talk about sex and excretion.

I mean, the way language is used on a TV show, even like Parks and Recreation, and then certainly in shows like, you know, The Wire, That's new.

But then on the other hand, I think a lot of it also has to do with the fact that those words just don't have the meaning that they used to.

Is there more swearing now than in the past?

Preceding my work, there aren't collections of swearing.

You have no idea what language was like in a tavern or a brothel.

But wait a minute, you just told us that swearing is not necessarily the province of the uneducated, so why wouldn't the literate swear as well?

The written documents have not included the language except maybe Chaucer, where you just have examples and those aren't frequency counts.

That's also a certain kind of bawdiness more than defaming a deity, let's say.

I remember having to read the Miller's Tale in high school and not understanding what I was reading about Absalon using the word c***.

And there's my English teacher is having us read this stuff out loud.

And I'm going like, she could go home and laugh her ass off.

Whether the frequency of swearing is up or down over time.

John McWhorter says we are currently living through the third major phase of swearing in human history.

If you call someone a f***ing idiot, your heart rate increases.

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What have we learned so far about swearing?

First, It's hard to know whether there's more of it today than before.

It's even hard to know whether swearing is a normal, albeit heightened, part of language or not a regular part of language at all.

To add 1 more complication, swearing, like all of language, refuses to sit still.

Here again is the Columbia linguist John McWhorter.

Language changes just like cloud patterns change.

It's never not changed and you just can't stop it.

Since language is always evolving, swearing is always evolving as well.

The neatest thing about the evolution of profanity is how differently people in different times feel about certain kinds of words.

And this brings us to what McWhorter describes as the 3 major eras of swearing over the history of humankind.

So it used to be that profanity was about religion.

You were allowed to swear to God if you meant it.

It was a form of signature in a society where most people couldn't write.

So I swear to God that I will do X, Y, or Z.

What you weren't supposed to do was swear in vain because that was to disrespect God.

And therefore, you had euphemisms for by God, etc., when you weren't going to do it sincerely.

It used to be that you actually were swearing to something and then it becomes shorthand for using bad words.

Okay, so phase 1 of swearing had to do with religion.

Then there comes a time around the Renaissance when there develops a sense of privacy that wasn't known before.

And along with that sense of privacy and perhaps individualism due to the Reformation, you have this new sense that what's profane is talking too freely about the body.

And so sex and excretion goes from being a giggle to being something that you absolutely don't put down in writing and that you don't use in public.

And all of this gets worse with the development of bourgeois society.

And so that's when you get the idea that s*** and f*** and the like are very, very bad words rather than just mundane things that are part of being a human being.

It's not that the God words suddenly are okay.

But it's certainly the case that throughout that time, damn and hell become less potent as profanity, while s*** and f*** become so unspeakable that as late as, you know, the Kennedy administration, there are dictionaries being published, and big ones where f*** is not in it.

Then there's a new phase that we're in where what is considered profane is slurring subordinate groups.

That's why there's such a difference between the way the N-word was used in popular culture even as recently as the 70s when sitcom characters could, within reason, use it, especially if they were black.

And today, where just the utterance of the 2 syllables in any way is often thought of as a transgression of legitimate humanity.

So we go from religion to the body to slurring against groups.

And you can see that as, and this is no disrespect intended against religion, but it's the intellectual and moral development of our society.

If we're going to be sacred about something, My personal feeling is that it's better for it to be about slurs against groups than about Jesus or Your butt.

Let me ask you so you happen to be black.

Do you ever find yourself in writing as you do quite a bit about race and racism and language.

Do you ever find yourself having to signal overtly that you are Black?

Sometimes when I'm writing about language, and especially if I'm writing about the N-word, sometimes I do feel like I have to slip it in because there are different tacit rules as far as that word goes.

As much as McWhorter cares about contemporary language, and as much as he knows and cares about language from the distant past, you get the sense that he is most tickled by the rules of language during the second of the 3 eras of swearing, when the words considered the most taboo had to do with the human body.

And you see it popping up in early Middle English, not in prose, but in names.

There were actually people taken seriously with names like Roger F*** by the Naval and Henry F***beggar, literally.

And there were places called F***ing Grove.

And you know what that was for, but it was on a sign.

It wasn't something that people said among themselves.

And then, there comes a time when you're not supposed to use the word that way anymore.

And there's all evidence that people were using it, but they weren't supposed to write it down, or if they did, they wrote it in code.

The idea being that it is a profane word, but it just started as a vulgar but common and accepted word for sexual intercourse.

So that's meant to be just a general, I think he's an idiot kind of thing?

What you see on the page is O, then a space, then D, and then f***ing Abbot.

And you think that what he's writing is old f***ing Abbot and that because it's an old document somebody smudged out the L But no there is no L smudged out what he's writing is O and he's abbreviating Damned f***ing Abbott and so for him you don't write damn because that's blasphemy But then with f***ing he puts that in with this kind of beavis and butthead snicker.

Let's hear some more about this middle era of swearing.

So there were a lot of names for plants and animals, which I think are so funny.

The English word for heron was chutereau.

I've got to figure out how to explain what I do.

My name is Melissa Moore and I'm a writer.

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540. Swearing Is More Important Than You Think