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WORK TITLE: Swearing Is Good for You
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1978
WEBSITE: https://emmabyrne.net/
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
Agent: Carrie Plitt, http://www.felicitybryan.org.uk/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1978.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Science writer, copyeditor, and scientist; commentator, Sky News and British Broadcasting Corp. (BBC).
AWARDS:Media fellowship, British Science Association, 2008.
WRITINGS
Contributor to periodicals and media outlets, including Forbes, Financial Times, Guardian, RSA Journal, eHealth Insider, and Global Business Magazine.
SIDELIGHTS
Science writer Emma Byrne is the author of Swearing Is Good for You: The Amazing Science of Bad Language, a study of the underappreciated power of creative cursing. She “is an honest-to-goodness robot scientist,” declared the contributor of a biographical blurb to the author’s eponymous home page, the Emma Byrne Website, “who, when she’s not developing intelligent systems, writes for Forbes, the [Financial Times] and Global Business Magazine.” In her popular-science book, she investigates the purposes swearing may have in human society. “Byrne suggests,” said a Publishers Weekly reviewer, “that swearing can help lessen both physical and social suffering, and that ‘stronger swear words are stronger painkillers.'” “Scientifically speaking, swearing is good for you,” Byrne revealed in a Time article. “It deadens pain and enlivens our emotional discourse. We know that its effects are physiological as well as psychological; it raises our heart rates and releases adrenaline whether we use it. And taboo language is … fundamental to the way we communicate.” “Byrne crafts an enthusiastic case for bad language,” wrote Courtney Jones in Booklist. Her “immensely readable first outing will be a real … treat.”
In Swearing Is Good for You, Byrne experiments that show swearing has real physical as well as social consequences. “Byrne begins by looking at the neuroscience,” explained Rob Ewing in the Scotsman. “Many will be familiar with the story of Phineas Gage, the 19th century U.S. railroad worker who became a different person (wilder, more sweary) after a large iron rod was accidentally shot through his head. At the time scientists didn’t know whether the brain was an undifferentiated mass, or was organised into different parts, each with separate functions; Gage’s behaviour suggested the latter.” Experiments by Richard Stephens of Keele University show that swearing helps people tolerate pain for longer periods of time. “Linguists differentiate between ‘propositional’ swearing, which works much like any other type of language, and ‘non-propositional,’ which is when we curse aloud upon stubbing a toe,” declared James McConnachie in the Sunday Times. “Neuroscientists have discovered that the latter, explosive kind of swearing is more closely linked to emotion-processing areas of the brain. In some aphasic people, who have lost speech because of a stroke or brain damage, swearing even survives when all other language is lost, lurking in the deep emotional centres of the brain like some throwback species living on in the remote areas of the jungle.”
Equally important in understanding the function of swearing is considering its social implications. The taboo words that we learn while growing up prove to be the ones most effective in relieving pain, the author discovered. In addition, swearing has different effects on men and women. “Today we are horribly still in the same place on men versus women swearing,” Byrne told Simon Worrall in an interview found in National Geographic. “Although women are still considered to swear less than men, we know from studies that they don’t. They swear just as much as men. But attitudinal surveys show that both men and women tend to judge women’s swearing much more harshly. And that judgement can have serious implications. For example, when women with breast cancer or arthritis swear as a result of their condition, they’re much more likely to lose friends, particularly female friends. Whereas men who swear about conditions like testicular cancer tend to bond.” “Although quite profane at times—understandably so—Byrne provides a refreshing, entertaining, instructive examination,” declared a Kirkus Reviews contributor, “of a ‘surprisingly flexible part of a linguistic repertoire.’
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, December 1, 2017, Courtney Jones, review of Swearing Is Good for You: The Amazing Science of Bad Language, p. 8.
National Geographic, January, 2018, Simon Worrall, “Swearing Is Good for You—and Chimps Do It, Too.”
Publishers Weekly, October 30, 2017, review of Swearing Is Good for You, p. 72.
Scotsman, December 20, 2017, Rob Ewing, review of Swearing Is Good for You.
Sunday Times, November 5, 2017, James McConnachie, review of Swearing Is Good for You.
Time, January 23, 2018, Emma Byrne, “The Absolute F-cking Best Swear Word for You.”
ONLINE
Emma Byrne Website, https://emmabyrne.net (March 21, 2018), author profile.
W.W. Norton Website, http://books.wwnorton.com/ (March 21, 2018), review of Swearing Is Good for You.
Welcome
Grinning like cat with a dairy
Emma is an honest-to-goodness robot scientist who, when she’s not developing intelligent systems, writes for Forbes, the FT and Global Business Magazine. She also frequently appears on Sky News and the BBC talking about the future of artificial intelligence and robotics.
Her interest in neuroscience led to her first popular science book: Swearing is Good for You: The Amazing Science of Bad Language (Profile (UK), W. W. Norton (USA), Anansi (Canada) November 2017).
Her pub, conference and convention talks lead to packed houses and requests for more. Emma is available for personal appearances, television, internet, and radio work.
Emma’s literary agent is Carrie Plitt at Felicity Brian associates.
Writing
My journalism experience includes:
A piece on Philip Pullman’s vocabulary for The Guardian
An article on the benefits of swearing for the RSA Journal (Issue 1, 2017)
Regular articles on Forbes about the future of business.
Over 30 articles and features for the Financial Times (free subscription required).
Several pieces for Global Business Magazine including a cover feature on social networking, two cover articles on the EU and a feature on depression in the workplace.
An expert’s view piece for eHealth Insider
My copywriting experience includes work for hire for a number of startups in the medical and financial technology fields.
My science communication activities include work that has been featured on BBC’s Horizon programme, BBC Radio 5 and a number of outlets including the Melbourne Age and the New Scientist.
I am a recipient of a British Science Association Media Fellowship (2008) .
Swearing Is Good for You: The Amazing
Science of Bad Language
Courtney Jones
Booklist.
114.7 (Dec. 1, 2017): p8.
COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
Swearing Is Good for You: The Amazing Science of Bad Language.
By Emma Byrne.
Jan. 2018. 288p. Norton, $25.95 (9781324000280). 427.09.
Let's get this out of the way. There's plenty of coarse language to be found here, especially in the
introduction, perhaps to get readers adjusted to what they'll encounter down the road. Byrne differentiates
between types of swearing, American style versus British (what's the difference between tosser, twat, and
wanker?), historical bad language (oaths, swears, and curses) versus modern "unsayables" (racist, sexist,
and homophobic language), and touches on how various taboos in different cultures create swear words.
Exploring multiple facets of swearing, including pain, workplace usage, gender (men curse as a tool and
when joking, women swear primarily as an effective device in their arsenal), and cursing in other languages,
Byrne crafts an enthusiastic case for bad language. Among the other impeccably researched topics covered,
there's a particularly touching exploration of Tourette's syndrome and how it stands apart as an executive
function disorder. For those who enjoyed What the F: What Swearing Reveals about Our Language, Our
Brains, and Ourselves (2016), Byrne's immensely readable first outing will be a real fucking treat.--
Courtney Jones
YA: Young folks looking to make a compelling argument about being able to curse at home will find a wellresearched
ally in Byrne's work. CJ.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Jones, Courtney. "Swearing Is Good for You: The Amazing Science of Bad Language." Booklist, 1 Dec.
2017, p. 8. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A519036104/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=5dd99e89. Accessed 3 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A519036104
3/3/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1520135226470 2/2
Swearing Is Good for You: The Amazing
Science of Bad Language
Publishers Weekly.
264.44 (Oct. 30, 2017): p72.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Swearing Is Good for You: The Amazing Science of Bad Language
Emma Byrne. Norton, $25.95 (288p) ISBN 978-1-324-00028-0
Science writer Byrne aims to give the practice of swearing "the respect it fucking deserves" in this shallow
study, but doesn't quite hit the mark. Attempting to show how swearing has evolved from a linguistic
"shortcut" into a "powerful instrument" with physiological benefits, Byrne describes & number of
experiments in neuroscience, psychology, and animal behaviorism. In one such experiment, volunteers were
asked to hold their hands in buckets of ice water and researchers found that swearing enabled the
participants to endure the pain for a longer period of time. Byrne suggests that swearing can help lessen
both physical and social suffering, and that "stronger swear words are stronger painkillers." She also begins
to discuss the topics of women's use of foul-language and swearing in the workplace, but fizzles out.
("Swearing really can break down barriers," she writes. "But of course, even among workmates, swearing
and abuse aren't always taken well.") Readers probably won't be surprised to find out that British women
are as likely to swear as British men, that women's use of fuck has increased fivefold since 1990, and that
swearing helps people "communicate emotions." Given the book's subtitle, the science here under-whelms
and the flippant way that Byrne handles it may have readers employing their own choice vocabularies.
Agent: Carrie Plitt, Felicity Bryan Associates (U.K.). (Jan.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Swearing Is Good for You: The Amazing Science of Bad Language." Publishers Weekly, 30 Oct. 2017, p.
72. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A514357798/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=e4f9336f. Accessed 3 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A514357798
The Absolute F-cking Best Swear Word For You
By Emma Byrne January 23, 2018
IDEAS
Byrne is the author of Swearing Is Good For You: The Amazing Science of Bad Language.
Scientifically speaking, swearing is good for you. It deadens pain and enlivens our emotional discourse. We know that its effects are physiological as well as psychological; it raises our heart rates and releases adrenaline whether we use it. And taboo language is so fundamental to the way we communicate that even potty-trained chimps can invent their own swearing.
With so many advantages, it’s not surprising that people often ask me what the most effective swear word is, and I know my answer usually disappoints them. As with so many things in science, the answer is “it depends.”
For swearing to work, there has to be a frisson of taboo about it. This isn’t just a value judgment; experiments prove that minced oaths — the “sugars” and “fudges” — just don’t work as pain relief, nor do they offer the same catharsis to people suffering from Tourette syndrome. What’s more, we have a limited window in which to learn what constitutes “real” swearing. In languages we learn before adolescence, the swear words carve deep emotional paths. Experiments show that swear words learned early are pulse quickeners, memory sharpeners and pain killers. But no matter how diligently you study a language after adolescence, you’ll never feel the same way about its strongest components.
For the same reason, the past is indeed a different country when it comes to swearing. As social mores change, taboos shift. Words that would have caused our grandparents to have conniptions now pass without remark. In my native British English, the blasphemies barely cause a twitch of the emotional needle. Conversely, racial slurs frequently appeared in my grandparents’ nursery rhymes and books, but for my generation and beyond, the emotional payload of those terms can be devastating.
All this makes it damnably difficult to pin down the power of a particular profanity. For decades, scientists have looked for something auditory or physical in the act of swearing that explains the catharsis it creates. There has been conjecture that short words, words with powerful fricatives (“F”) and voiceless velar stops (“K”), just feel better. Sadly, the research doesn’t bear this out. We can’t design a more cathartic swear word based on its sound or spelling. Strong language earns its place though use and custom. As we grow up, we note its impact on those around us, and that gives us both the yardstick and the visceral training required to truly internalize the power of those words.
The most cathartic swear word is never going to be a universal. It’s always going to be a product of the values of the people who surrounded you growing up. In particular, it depends on the emotional responses of the people whose opinions mattered most to you when you first tried out those words. For me, it was the clip around the ear I got for calling my little brother a tw-t. For you, there will be some other emotive moment that unveiled power. Without knowing it, the laughter of a friend, the disappointment of a parent, the fury of an enemy taught you how to swear.
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SWEARING IS GOOD FOR YOU
The Amazing Science of Bad Language
by Emma Byrne
In defense of swearing.
Written in an engaging and conversational style, BBC journalist Byrne’s first book touches many bases when it comes to her approach to swearing: sociology, history, psychology, neuroscience, anthropology, and more. Her quest is fairly ambitious: “Why we do it, how we do it and what it tells us about ourselves.” Swearing, she posits, is a “complex social signal that is laden with emotional and cultural significance.” Though the author is “not necessarily encouraging people to swear more…I do hope you might give it the respect it fucking deserves.” The book is divided into seven parts covering neuroscience, pain, a special look at Tourette’s syndrome (though she admits that most afflicted with the disease don’t swear), the workplace, primates, gender, and swearing in other languages. Years of medical research have demonstrated that many parts of the brain are involved in swearing, “either collaborating to help you produce swearing or working to suppress it when it isn’t wanted.” As far as the brain is concerned, swearing is a “sophisticated team effort.” Psychological research has definitively found that “swearing is a really important part of dealing with the shitty consequences of pain and illness.” Byrne’s exploration of the workplace is particularly illuminating; apparently, “the team that swears together stays together.” A group of chimpanzees who learned to sign also “learned to swear, as soon as they learned what a taboo was.” In 1673, Richard Allestree argued in The Ladies’ Calling that women who swear undergo a “metamorphosis” that makes then “affectedly masculine.” We’ve certainly come a long way, and current thinking, Byrne notes, argues that to be equal, we need to be equal in the way we express ourselves, dammit!
Although quite profane at times—understandably so—Byrne provides a refreshing, entertaining, instructive examination of a “surprisingly flexible part of a linguistic repertoire.”
Pub Date: Jan. 23rd, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-324-00028-0
Page count: 288pp
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13th, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1st, 2017
© Copyright 2018 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Kirkus Book Reviews
Book review: Swearing is Good For You by Emma Byrne
Emma Byrne Emma Byrne Rob Ewing
Published: 10:29 Wednesday 20 December 2017
The Scotsman’s monthly review of a book about health, promoted by Wellcome
About ten years ago I went to pick up my two year old daughter from nursery. When I arrived a staff member took me aside and said in solemn tones that she had something to tell me. ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘OK.’ I was led to a side room where she haltingly explained that my daughter had become frustrated when using their computer and had said, ‘For f***’s sake.’ The staff member was about to apologise – perhaps thinking it had been overheard while at nursery – when I told her, ‘Oh, she probably heard me saying that.’
I swear, and so do my kids (they are good bit older now). I do try to discourage them, but they just end up calling me a hypocrite. Sometimes with a swearword tagged on. I know: it’s not big and it’s not clever, but at least I now know that it doesn’t mean our vocabulary is lacking. As proof I will cite Emma Byrne’s Swearing is Good For You.
It’s a short book, and Byrne begins by looking at the neuroscience. Many will be familiar with the story of Phineas Gage, the 19th century US railroad worker who became a different person (wilder, more sweary) after a large iron rod was accidentally shot through his head. At the time scientists didn’t know whether the brain was an undifferentiated mass, or was organised into different parts, each with separate functions; Gage’s behaviour suggested the latter. The debate is neatly summarised by Byrne as being whether the brain is “blancmange” or “trifle.” Amusingly she writes: “If you take away a third of a blancmange you still have blancmange. If you take away one of the layers of a trifle you end up with something even more depressing then trifle.” I wish my undergraduate neurology had been taught this way.
She then looks at swearing in particular contexts: how it helps when we’re in pain, the benefits of swearing in the workplace, swearing in primates, gender and swearing, and swearing in other languages.
The last left me rather wishing for lists of imaginative insults in other tongues, though Byrne admirably sticks to her brief and just considers curse-words.
It’s perhaps unsurprising that swearing helps to reduce pain. In the context of serious illness though, things turn out to be more nuanced. Byrne shows that men suffering from cancer can find swearing cathartic, whereas women with breast cancer who swore around their female friends “tended to lose those friends... and end up more depressed,” which could be helpful information for those working in palliative care.
Byrne makes a positive case for workplace swearing (good for team-building and fitting in), though I thought that the potential negative impacts of this were rather glossed over. I’m sure many people have had the experience of being made to feel uncomfortable by a boss using offensive or inappropriate language, but if there’s any research on the matter (which there surely must be) then it doesn’t get an airing here.
At times it feels as if some of the research presented is only partially about swearing. This isn’t always a bad thing – and in Byrne’s defence, her summary history of primate sign language is fascinating in its own right – yet it did sometimes give the impression that larger subjects were being included to broaden the scope. As for the hypothesis that swearing “was one of the things that motivated us to develop language in the first place”... I’m not so sure about that, though a scene of cavepeople trying this out would make a decent comedy sketch.
Throughout the book, Byrne is an enthusiastic swearer: I did like the way she casually drops in the f-bomb near the end of her chapters, although enjoyment of this will depend on your taste for casual obscenity. I would have liked a more detailed look at swearing in different parts of the English speaking world, and particularly in the UK; also, how swearing loses its shock potential and becomes something else entirely when used as mere sentence filler. “Swearing is like mustard; a great ingredient but a lousy meal,” Byrne writes, and by the end I felt she had got the curse word count just f***ing right.
Swearing is Good For You by Emma Byrne, Profile, 240pp, £12.99
Rob Ewing is an Edinburgh-based GP. His debut novel The Last of Us is published by Borough Press. Read more at: https://www.scotsman.com/lifestyle/culture/books/book-review-swearing-is-good-for-you-by-emma-byrne-1-4643710
Book review: Swearing Is Good for You: The Amazing Science of Bad Language by Emma Byrne
Neuroscientists have discovered the surprising benefits of foul language
Review by James McConnachie
The Sunday Times, November 5 2017, 12:01am
A warning: this review contains “strong language”. So does the book. In fact, I can find only one moment where Emma Byrne ducks a rude word. Dismissing the (apparently widespread) myth that Japanese people do not swear, she observes that in Japanese, “as in so many languages, the queen of all swearwords is manko”, and that this “refers to a body part so taboo that artist Megumi Igarashi was arrested in 2014 for making 3D models of her own manko for an installation in Tokyo”.
If manko is too much, stop reading now. But you’ll miss out on the truth behind the Japanese no-swearing myth, which relies on the fact that swearwords are almost always religious, copulatory, excretory or slur-based — except in Japan, where the “excretory taboo” is almost nonexistent. As a result, you cannot really say “shit!” or “piss off!” in Japanese, at least not with the same effect. But you can swear. Just try writing kutabare in a newspaper, meaning “drop dead”.
Byrne is a science writer with a PhD in robotics and a gleefully robust attitude to language. Her academic work, for instance, includes an investigation of the “f***-shit ratio” at football matches. You can tell which team has scored, she and her colleagues discovered, by monitoring the relative frequencies of “shit”, which is always negative, and “f***”, which, curiously, can be good or bad.
She is having a laugh, of course, but also making a serious point. Swearing, she insists, is worthy of proper study, not of being dismissed or suppressed, which is how we mostly treat it. We are routinely taught two things about bad language, for instance, both of which she says are wrong. First, it is a sign of an impoverished vocabulary. Not true: people with the largest vocabularies also employ the widest range of swearwords. We are also taught that there is a “clean” alternative to every swearword. Perhaps, but not with the same visceral effect.
You might quibble with the first point. Using lots of different and interesting rude words is not at all the same thing as effing and blinding with every other word, which is what people tend to object to. But it is clear that swearwords can be wielded interestingly. And clear, too, now, due to neuroscience, that they reach parts of the brain that other words do not.
Linguists differentiate between “propositional” swearing, which works much like any other type of language, and “non-propositional”, which is when we curse aloud upon stubbing a toe. Neuroscientists have discovered that the latter, explosive kind of swearing is more closely linked to emotion-processing areas of the brain. In some aphasic people, who have lost speech because of a stroke or brain damage, swearing even survives when all other language is lost, lurking in the deep emotional centres of the brain like some throwback species living on in the remote areas of the jungle.
Swearing might be primitive in origin. Byrne tells the story of the scientists who taught chimpanzees sign language in the 1960s. An accidental offshoot of teaching them “dirty” as the sign for excreta (during their potty training) was that the chimps spontaneously learnt to swear. Before long, the sign for dirty was being employed more imaginatively: “Dirty Roger,” one chimp signed, when her trainer wouldn’t let her out of her cage.
In 2009, scientists found what might be a biological function of swearing: pain relief. They persuaded undergraduates to plunge their hands into icy water for as long as they could bear it. When permitted to swear, the students kept their hands submerged for half as long again as when restricted to dull, “table-based adjectives”. (The follow-up studies sound fun: saying “f***” gave “the greatest relief, while ‘bum’ and ‘shit’ gave less, though more than using a neutral word”.)
Most swearing, though, is propositional and social, and half the book is about workplace swearing and the differences between genders and countries. These parts are a bit impressionistic; Byrne is no sociolinguist, but she does outline how we swear to make people laugh, bond and even establish trust.
We also swear to warn off impending violence and to show toughness, aggression or masculinity. The last, though, might be changing. Swearing is traditionally a marker of the “direct register” common in male speech, and men have long been shown to use bad language more than women. Recent statistics show women catching up, though: they now account for 45% of all public swearing, up from 33% in 1986.
As for swearing’s links with aggression and violence, here Byrne’s evident love of her subject pushes her to make a claim too far. “Without swearing”, she says, “we’d have to resort to the biting, gouging and shit-flinging that our other primate cousins use to keep their societies in check.” But as many fights are provoked by abuse, surely, as are resolved by it — and she offers no evidence either way.
Byrne’s conclusion is that: “Swearing is like mustard: a great ingredient but a lousy meal.” What she does not admit is that not everyone likes mustard, and it ruins as many dishes as it brings to life. But then this book does not strive for balance. It is a lively defence of its subject. The more serious, balanced account is still to come.
No need to cuss
Swearing carries different weights in different cultures. JD Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye has 778 swear words — including, to modern ears, relatively soft words such as damn. The 1953 Swedish translation omitted 469 instances of that swearing. Surprisingly, the 1987 translation omitted 471. That, according to a local academic, is because ‘the Swedish temperament means that a little swearing goes a lot further than it does in the English of JD Salinger’.
Profile £12.99 pp232
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Swearing Is Good for You
The Amazing Science of Bad Language
Emma Byrne (Author)
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An irreverent and impeccably researched defense of our dirtiest words.
We’re often told that swearing is outrageous or even offensive, that it’s a sign of a stunted vocabulary or a limited intellect. Dictionaries have traditionally omitted it and parents forbid it. But the latest research by neuroscientists, psychologists, sociologists, and others has revealed that swear words, curses, and oaths—when used judiciously—can have surprising benefits.
In this sparkling debut work of popular science, Emma Byrne examines the latest research to show how swearing can be good for you. With humor and colorful language, she explores every angle of swearing—why we do it, how we do it, and what it tells us about ourselves. Not only has some form of swearing existed since the earliest humans began to communicate, but it has been shown to reduce physical pain, to lower anxiety, to prevent physical violence, to help trauma victims recover language, and to promote human cooperation. Taking readers on a whirlwind tour through scientific experiments, historical case studies, and cutting-edge research on language in both humans and other primates, Byrne defends cursing and demonstrates how much it can reveal about different cultures, their taboos and their values.
Packed with the results of unlikely and often hilarious scientific studies—from the “ice-bucket test” for coping with pain, to the connection between Tourette’s and swearing, to a chimpanzee that curses at her handler in sign language—Swearing Is Good for You presents a lighthearted but convincing case for the foulmouthed.
Book Details
Hardcover
January 2018
ISBN 978-1-324-00028-0
5.9 × 8.6 in / 240 pages
Sales Territory: USA and Dependencies and the Philippines.
Endorsements & Reviews
“An entertaining and often enlightening book. . . Byrne’s readers are sure to come away with a fresh appreciation of language at its most foul.” — Economist
“A poppy, comprehensive look at an often taboo topic.” — New York Post
“Shit, this book is fascinating.” — Refinery29
“Engaging and conversational. . . . Byrne provides a refreshing, entertaining, instructive examination of a ‘surprisingly flexible part of a linguistic repertoire.’” — Kirkus Reviews
“Engaging and often irreverent. . . . Byrne’s style is conversational [and] entertaining.” — Library Journal
“Byrne crafts an enthusiastic case for bad language. . . . [Her] immensely readable first outing will be a real fucking treat.” — Booklist
“A good book about bad language by a trash-talking woman? Sign me up! Swearing Is Good for You makes science feel downright celebratory.” — Mary Norris, best-selling author of Between You & Me
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Swearing is Good for You review: Emma Byrne on the benefits of bad language
Swearing is Good for You review: Emma Byrne on the benefits of bad language
By Steven Carroll
12 January 2018 — 8:46am
Swearing is Good for You. By Emma Byrne.
Profile, $29.99
Conventional wisdom has it that swearing is a sign of a limited vocabulary. Far f---ing from it, says Emma Byrne. Swearing is intelligent and powerful. And what's more, after years of research, she's convinced of its positive properties. It helps to accommodate pain and stress, and will often short-circuit violent impulses. And the workplace that swears together stays together. It also tells us what society regards as taboo, which is where its power lies. But taboo words change from place to place and time to time – curses involving bodily parts in the Middle Ages not being nearly as profane as in the Renaissance. Byrne, who likes a good swear, relishes her subject and her study of its various forms – bodily, copulatory, excretory and slur based – is playfully astute, and, she says, gives swearing the respect it f---ing deserves.
Copyright © 2018Fairfax Media
Book Talk
Swearing Is Good For You—And Chimps Do It, Too
Cursing masks pain and builds relationships at work. But if you’re a woman, letting a profanity fly can still raise eyebrows.
Chimpanzees who learned sign language also developed a way to swear.
Photograph by Cyril Ruoso, Minden Pictures, National Geographic Creative
By Simon Worrall
PUBLISHED January 27, 2018
Swearing is usually regarded as simply lazy language or an abusive lapse in civility. But as Emma Byrne shows in her book, Swearing Is Good for You: The Amazing Science of Bad Language, new research reveals that profanity has many positive virtues, from promoting trust and teamwork in the office to increasing our tolerance to pain.
When National Geographic caught up with Byrne at her home in London, she explained why humans aren’t the only primates that can curse and why, though women are swearing more today than before, it is still regarded by many as “unfeminine.”
View Images
Courtesy W.W. Norton & Company
You write, “I’ve had a certain pride in my knack for colorful and well-timed swearing.” Tell us about your relationship to bad language, and in what sense it is good for us?
My first memory of being punished for swearing was calling my little brother a four-letter word, twat, which I thought was just an odd pronunciation of the word twit. I must have been about eight at the time; my brother was still pre-school. My mother froze, then belted me round the ear. That made me realize that some words had considerably more power than others, and that the mere shift in a vowel was enough to completely change the emotional impact of a word.
I’ve always had a curiosity about things I’ve been told I am not meant to be interested in, which is why I wound up in a fairly male-dominated field of artificial intelligence for my career. There’s a certain cussedness to my personality that means, as soon as someone says, “No, that’s not for you,” I absolutely have to know about it.
My relationship with swearing is definitely one example. I tend to use it as a way of marking myself out as being more like my male colleagues, like having a working knowledge of the offside rule in soccer. It’s a good way of making sure that I’m not seen as this weird, other person, based on my gender.
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There’s great research coming out of Australia and New Zealand, which is perhaps not surprising, that says that jocular abuse, particularly swearing among friends, is a strong signal of the degree of trust that those friends share. When you look at the transcripts of these case studies of effective teams in sectors like manufacturing and IT, those that can joke with each other in ways that transgress polite speech, which includes a lot of swearing, tend to report that they trust each other more.
One of the reasons why there’s probably this strong correlation is that swearing has such an emotional impact. You’re demonstrating that you have a sophisticated theory of mind about the person that you’re talking to, and that you have worked out where the limit is between being shocking enough to make them giggle or notice you’ve used it but not so shocking that they’ll be mortally offended. That’s a hard target to hit right in the bullseye. Using swear words appropriate for that person shows how well you know them; and how well you understand their mental model.
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You were inspired to write this book by a study carried out by Dr. Richard Stephens. Tell us about the experiment, and why it was important in our understanding of swearing.
Richard Stephens works out of Keele University in the U.K. He’s a behavioral psychologist, who is interested in why we do things that we’ve been told are bad for us. For years, the medical profession has been saying that swearing is incredibly bad for you if you’re in pain. It’s what’s called a “catastrophizing response,” focusing on the negative thing that’s happened. His take on this was, if it’s so maladaptive, why do we keep doing it?
He initially had 67 volunteers, although he’s replicated this multiple times. He stuck their hands in ice water and randomized whether or not they were using a swear word or a neutral word and compared how long they could keep their hands in ice water. On average, when they were swearing they could keep their hands in the iced water for half as long again as when they were using a neutral word. This shows that the results are anything but maladaptive. Swearing really does allow you to withstand pain for longer.
Have men always sworn more than women? And, if so, why?
Definitely not! Historians of the English language describe how women were equally praised for their command of exceedingly expressive insults and swearing, right up to the point in 1673 when a book by Richard Allestree was published titled The Ladies Calling.” Allestree says that women who swear are acting in a way that is biologically incompatible with being a woman and, as a result, will begin to take on masculine characteristics, like growing facial hair or becoming infertile. He wrote, “There is no sound more odious to the ears of God than an oath in the mouth of a woman.”
Today we are horribly still in the same place on men versus women swearing. Although women are still considered to swear less than men, we know from studies that they don’t. They swear just as much as men. But attitudinal surveys show that both men and women tend to judge women’s swearing much more harshly. And that judgement can have serious implications. For example, when women with breast cancer or arthritis swear as a result of their condition, they’re much more likely to lose friends, particularly female friends. Whereas men who swear about conditions like testicular cancer tend to bond more closely with other men using the same vocabulary. The idea that swearing is a legitimate means of expressing a negative emotion is much more circumscribed for women.
I was fascinated to discover that it’s not just humans that swear—primates do it, too! Tell us about Project Washoe.
Out in the wild, chimps are inveterate users of their excrement to mark their territory or show their annoyance. So the first thing you do, if you want to teach a primate sign language, is potty train them. That means, just like human children at a similar age, that they end up with a taboo around excrement. In Project Washoe, the sign for “dirty” was bringing the knuckles up to the underside of the chin. And what happened spontaneously, without the scientists teaching them, was that the chimps started to use the sign for “dirty” in exactly the same way as we use our own excremental swear words.
Washoe was a female chimpanzee that was originally adopted by R. Allen Gardner and Beatrix T. Gardner in the 1960s. Later, she was taken on by a researcher in Washington State called Roger Fouts. Washoe was the matriarch to three younger chimps: Loulis, Tatu, and Dar. By the time they brought in Loulis, the youngest, the humans had stopped teaching them language, so they looked to see if the chimps would transmit language through the generations, which they did.
Not only that: as soon as they had internalized the toilet taboo, with the sign “dirty” as something shameful, they started using that sign as an admonition or to express anger, like a swear word. When Washoe and the other chimps were really angry, they would smack their knuckles on the underside of their chins, so you could hear this chimp-teeth-clacking sound.
Washoe and the other chimps would sign things like “Dirty Roger!” or “Dirty Monkey!” when they were angry. The humans hadn’t taught them this! What had happened is that they had internalized that taboo, they had a sign associated with that taboo, so all of a sudden that language was incredibly powerful and was being thrown about, just like real excrement is thrown about by wild chimpanzees.
You say, “swearing is a bellwether—a foul-beaked canary in the coalmine—that tells us what our social taboos are.” Unpack that idea for us, and how it has changed over the centuries.
The example that most people will be familiar with in English-speaking countries is blasphemy. There are still parts of the U.S. that are more observant of Christianity than others but, in general, the kinds of language that would have resulted in censorship in other eras is now freely used in print and TV media. However, the “n-word,” which was once used as the title of an Agatha Christie book and even in nursery rhymes, is now taboo because there is a greater awareness that it is a painful reminder of how African-Americans suffered because of racism over the centuries. In some communities, where that usage is reclaimed, they are saying that if I use it, it immunizes me against its negative effects.
That is an example of a word that has fallen out of general conversation and literature into the realm of the unsayable. It’s quite different from the copulatory or excretory swearing in that it is so divisive. The great thing about the copulatory and excretory swearing is that they are common to the entire human race.
In the digital world, you can swear at someone without actually being face to face. Is this changing the way we curse? And what will swearing in tomorrow’s world look like?
One of the difficulties with swearing in online discourse is that there is no face-to-face repercussion, so it allows people to lash out without seeing the person that they’re speaking to as fully human. But it’s not swearing that is the problem. It’s possible to say someone is worth less as a human being based on their race, gender or sexuality using the most civil of language. For example, when Donald Trump called Hillary Clinton “a nasty woman” rather than using the c-word, most of us were able to break the code. We knew what he meant but because he hadn’t sworn it was seen as acceptable discourse.
In the future, I think that swearing will inevitably be reinvented; we’ve seen it change so much over the years. As our taboos change, that core of language that has the ability to surprise, shock or stun the emotional side of the brain will change, too. But I can’t predict where those taboos will go.
This interview was edited for length and clarity.
Simon Worrall curates Book Talk. Follow him on Twitter or at simonworrallauthor.com.
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