Blimey – but hasn’t our language gone to pot?

A Different View with Dave O’Connell

It’s the surest sign yet that the equality pendulum has firmly swung in the female direction – after a major British survey discovered categorically that women now swear more often than men.

Why this would qualify as an academic exercise is possibly open to scrutiny – particularly when a visit to any town centre around midnight would confirm the question for free…and that’s not because males have cleaned up their act either.

But it’s still an anthropological sea change when the potty-mouths swearing like sailors these days are predominantly of the female persuasion.

The survey – carried out by Lancaster University and the Cambridge University Press – used a sample of 376 volunteers who submitted recordings of up to three hours of their daily conversations.

And then, after accumulating around ten million words, researchers got stuck in – to find, for a start, that women’s use of the F-word (and we’re not talking about feminism) has increased by more than 500 per cent since the 1990s…to a point where they now use it more than men.

Back in the nineties, us males apparently used the F-word 1,000 times per million words and the ladies kept it to a mere 167.

However over the past two decades women’s use has increased by more than 500 per cent – so that by 2014, women use the word 546 times per million words whereas men use it 540 times.

Women are also ten times as likely as men to say ‘s***’, according to the new survey which was sponsored by the Economic and Social Research Council.

In the early 1990s they said ‘s***’ four times more than men but now that figure has doubled.

Why has this happened then? Could it be as simple as the old problem that has long been identified in too many workplaces – in order for women to feel they fit in, they have to give it as good as the rest of them?

Anger and pain are often good reasons for a blast of bad language; there are, for example, things said by wives to husbands during labour that would make your ears blush in any other circumstance.

Of course men are no angels ourselves and our language – particularly when we see red or take drink – is nothing to be proud of; there are days when it seems like you can’t get through three sentences without dropping at least one F-bomb.

And given that we can’t be angry all the time – unless of course we’re members of People Before Profit or the Anti-Austerity Alliance – there must be some other reason for this descent into the oral gutter.

Perhaps it’s a lack of imagination – we use profanities like a breather to gather a coherent thought. It can also ease a little stress or frustration – like when you hit your hand with the hammer.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.