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This article appears in the March 2023 print edition with the headline “Ode to Swearing.Label An encyclopedia of swearing : the social history of oaths, profanity, foul language, and ethnic slurs in the English-speaking world Title An encyclopedia of swearing Title remainder the social history of oaths, profanity, foul language, and ethnic slurs in the English-speaking world Statement of responsibility Geoffrey Hughes Creator

Save those beautiful fucks for when you need them. And given the much-to-be-sworn-at state we’re in, and the state of the swear economy itself, I’d counsel thrift.

How much you swear, and with (or at) whom-that’s really your own thing. English people are lucky in this respect: We have recourse to the not-quite-harmless intensifier bloody-as in “I’m bloody freezing!”-which is somewhere between a fuck and a goddamn.

You can establish familiarity, even make friends, with swearing. Emotion recollected in tranquility, as advocated by Wordsworth. “And I thought to myself, Well, that’s just not fucking good enough! ” It’s very effective. I’ve never heard him swear in anger rather, he will swear fondly and retrospectively, recalling a moment when he might have gotten angry. Once, on a beach in California, with electronic beats pinging and bass belching in the air around us, a dreadlocked stranger placed his hands upon my shoulders gazed deep, deep, deep into my eyes and said (Northern Irish accent): “I don’t know who y’are … But I focking love ya.” Then we hugged, and he entered my brain chemistry forever. You can swear at your dog, and he won’t notice. You can swear at your grandmother, and experience as if for the first time the unholy power of the old words. You can overdo it, you can underdo it, and you can do it just right. Swearing is an art, like everything else. You can shoot blue bolts of language like a warlock, piercing the force field of your antagonist and pushing him backwards. You can discharge your fury or your desire, all of it, in a single puff of profanity. And this kind of swearing is marvelously intimate and alive. Between shoppers in Best Buy on Black Friday, and drivers on the Massachusetts Turnpike. And then there’s the swearing that happens between people. Because there’s cultural swearing, which is merely late-stage capitalism at work, an arousal probe, prodding us in our jaded consumer receptors, blah blah blah. Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read.

Swearing by Geoffrey Hughes