It may be the season of goodwill to all, but research shows that a burst of colourful swearing relieves stress and promotes bonding. Happy effing Christmas!
Illustration: Al Murphy/The ObserverIllustration: Al Murphy/The Observer’m sitting in a polite home in southeast London shouting, “Go piss up a rope ya fuckstick,” at a sofa cushion. This odd ejaculation is at the behest of Australian singing teacher Sam, who’s part of today’s four-woman therapeutic “cursing circle”, a group therapy trend that emerged, like all things in fringe therapeutics, on the west coast of America.
Vulgarisms form a large part of most nations’ vocabulary, though they differ in their nature and categorisation from place to place and over time. Anthropologist Ashley Montague’s classic 1967 text,distinguishes between three categories: “swearing” , “cursing” , and “oathing” .
“I’d say 30 out of 50 words uttered on the site are swear words,” he says. “What the fuck are you doing?” is, he adds, a constant refrain; small distances are measured in “cock’s hairs” and the weight of objects is “fucking heavy” or “not that fucking heavy”. “We had a fireplace to lift the other day,” he recalls, “and I asked my boss: ‘Is it heavy?’ and he said ‘Yes, fuckin’ heavy’ and that told me a lot more than knowing it weighed 25kg.
Religious profanities were common in the middle ages – as an example, Mohr offers: “God’s nails, this stew is hot!” By the 16th century, however, these words had lost their shock factor. Sexual swear words have also been sanitised over time. “Swithe” and “sard”, once obscene verbs for the sexual act, with some translations of the Gospels rendering the Sixth Commandment “Thou shalt not commit adultery” as “Thou shall not sard another’s wife,” dropped out of use in the modern period.
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