Truth at the core when it comes to profanities

A Different View with Dave O’Connell

Good news for those who practice the art of profanity – researchers have now concluded that those who swear most are also likely to be the most honest people as well.

Just why a team of international experts would put this to the test in the first place is anyone’s guess – but the conclusions will give new status to swearers the world over.

Someone once explained swear words as not so much words at all but a concentrated lump of emotion.

Or as leading psychologist Timothy Jay put it: “Swearing is like using the horn on your car, which can be used to signify a number of emotions.”

He also reckons that swearing can be cathartic – as in clearing the decks, getting it off your chest, freeing up the anger or frustration.

As Mark Twain once said: “Under certain circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer.”

Swear words can also aid the punchline in a joke or a story, a way of emphasizing the point in a more animated way.

Conversely, if every second word out of your mouth suggests you need to tackle it with soap, then swearing can lose its lustre.

Just remember how it feels if you’re sitting beside someone on the train or the bus or in a restaurant, and they seem to have a vocabulary limited to what we used to call bad language – and you’ll get the picture.

Sometimes we use profanities because everyone else in the conversation is – and it’s not even about fitting in; it’s subliminal in that this is just speaking in the same language as everyone else.

And then there are times when it’s a reaction to something – you scald your hand with boiling water; you jump into the freezing sea; a passing car throws a puddle all over your pants; another driver cuts out in front of you at a junction.

All trigger a knee-jerk emotional response – and unless you’re purer than driven snow, you’re more than likely to throw in the odd f-bomb into the verbal onslaught.

Occasionally of course it is forced, because you’re in company where you want to fit in – and in the same way as you have something in you that makes you want to top the other guy’s funny story, if they’re all swearing like sailors you want to be the captain of the ship.

But it’s this new claim that swearing and honesty are intrinsically intertwined that provides food for thought.

Read Dave’s full column in this week’s Connacht Tribune.