It always happens. There I was minding my own business, carrying some boxes into the garage. So my hands weren’t free. And when I bent over to deposit the boxes on the garage floor, the spring-loaded door bounced right back and smacked me on the side of the head. And, as they say, the air turned blue.
“Jesus C—–,” I snapped, and added, “F—ing door,” as if it could hear me and feel badly for having fulfilled its mechanical function.
A few minutes later, my head had stopped ringing and I was sort of back to normal. It didn’t occur to me what role my cursing had played in all that. But then, this week, I heard a series of conversations on CBC Radio’s The Current. Anna Maria Tremonti spoke to, among others, a British psychologist and lecturer named Richard Stephens at Keele University about the link between swearing and pain. Dr. Stephens explained that often swearing helps. He recounted the anecdotal experience when his wife began cursing during the delivery of their daughter. While he felt a bit embarrassed at her outbursts, their midwife said swearing was a completely normal part of giving birth.
“There’s a phenomenon called catastrophizing,” Stephens said, “which is the extent to which a person understands that an injury they’ve had or a painful situation they’re in (threatens) their existence. So swearing is catrostrophizing.”
Then, there’s the kind of swearing comedians attempt to sneak by the censors. Back in the 1960s, George Carlin identified the “seven dirty words” you can’t say on TV or radio and made them famous. But, of course, the number of opportunities Carlin had to speak the seven dirty words was inversely proportional to the times he said them. Overnight he became persona non grata on the air.
Fifty years later, you can hear many if not all those words coming from the mouths of comedians on the “Just For Laughs” TV festivals or on any free TV broadcasting outlet, outside the United States. The only restrictions for cursing, these days, come from the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council, which forbids airing “sexually explicit material or coarse or offensive language” before 9 p.m. on TV. Mind you, the Internet can easily get around that restriction, if one surfs long enough.
I remember a couple of years ago, when comedian Amy Schumer pulled a George Carlin, by including an explicit reference to a woman’s genitalia. Surprisingly, the U.S. network Comedy Central did not bleep out the word. And the network earned universal applause from feminists and foul-language lovers, according commentator Laruen Strapagiel, since “euphemisms for the male appendage were often aired … while the slang term of female genitals was silenced.” Comedians and broadcasters alike called it “a great moment in U.S. history.”
As far as day-to-day swearing is concerned, psychologist Stephens says it’s a matter of “habituation,” meaning that sometimes we just get used to swearing around us, in sequestered boardrooms, in road rage, even in the bleachers at a sporting venue.
“The idea that we just get used to things and kind of stop seeing them and stop feeling them,” Stephens told Anna Maria Tremonti on CBC Radio, “means (we) become habituated to swearing. It’s no big deal.”
I’m not totally convinced it’s a good idea to let swearing go. I know I sometimes catch myself letting a bit of profanity go around my grandkids. And yet occasionally I have to admire the creativity of cursing. And it doesn’t necessarily come from highly produced shows, such as Just For Laughs or South Park. Often it’s right in your own backyard. I remember when I attended Ryerson in Toronto back about 1970. Several of us rented a third-floor flat in a decrepit old house on Carlton Street, right across from Allan Gardens. In that era, the neighbourhood was, shall I say, full of colourful people who loved to let fly with colourful language.
One Saturday night, my two roommates and I were up late studying or something, when a ruckus developed in the apartment below us. The couple, often inebriated on the weekends, got into yet another verbal row. On this occasion, at the height of the argument, the male spouse got up to make a physical statement about his frustration with his partner.
“All right,” he shouted and he simultaneously whipped the apartment door open, nearly pulling the door off its hinges with a bang. “I’m leaving!”
“Go right a-f—ing-head,” she shouted back.
How wonderful, I thought. I’d never considered inserting a swear word between two syllables of another word before, but I couldn’t have imagined a more satisfying exclamation mark to her anger. Her innovative curse had succeeded beyond her wildest expectations. Her unwelcome spouse was out the door and had absolutely no comeback to her unique outburst. And nobody got hurt. That’s cursing with surgical precision and personal satisfaction.