regret, or pain or anger. It seems to be the most expressive means to show your emotion

This is CrowdScience from the BBC World Service. I’m Anand Jagatia, and this edition is all

about the stuff you can’t normally put on the radio: bad language..

It’ll come out automatically without me even thinking about it, and I’ll feel better

immediately.

I’m a nice person, I don’t curse a lot!

CrowdScience is the show that runs off your curiosity.

And it turns out that swearing is something that a lot of you are interested

in!

A few weeks back, we mentioned we were making a show all about swearing, and since then

our inbox has been flooded with your stories - and quite a bit of profanity.

I used to play sports. And definitely, I think a lot of swearing used to come out there.

And I wouldn't always swear as other players because you can, you know, get sent off for that

so…!

I don't swear a lot. I think if you use it a lot, it kind of loses strength. You want

to save it for when it's really useful.

Thanks to everyone who got in touch - we’ll be hearing more from you throughout the show.

But first, let’s hear from the listener who started this off with his question - Gadi

Shalom, from the UK.

I want to know why it feels so good to use bad language.

So Gadi your question, can you sort of put that feeling into words,

Yeah, so it is rare. But in a stressful situation, or when something happens, that is unexpected,

it seems to be like a reflex to swear. And it sort of feels good in a way! It's also

the feeling after, so after you've stubbed your toe, for example, and you've used some

bad language, it sort of diffuses the situation a little bit. But how and why? And that's

what got me thinking…

Gadi says he doesn’t swear much himself, and of course there are people - maybe you’re

one of them - who never swear - even if you’ve been cut up in traffic,

locked out of the house or shut your fingers in the door.

But many of us will relate to what Gadi’s talking about - that sudden sense of release

when uttering bad language, the feeling that certain words are charged with an extra layer

of energy...

So how and why do these words work? To help us figure it out, we turned to Dr. Emma Byrne,

an expert on expletives who’s written a whole book about them, [called Swearing Is

Good For You.]

First things first - what is swearing?

Swearing is very, very tricky to pin down. We decide what swearing is by consensus. And

a lot of that consensus is to do with what's taboo in that particular

culture. Some places are very offended by parts of the body, some by animal names, some

by illnesses, some by certain bodily functions and not others. So what I ended up landing

on was that swearing is something that is by its nature taboo, in order to have that

emotional impact, you've got to be playing with a taboo. And

it's the kind of language that you would consider not using in certain circumstances, for example,

in a job interview or meeting your partner's parents for the first time. And it is the

kind of language that we use either in shock, amazement, elation, to be funny, to be offensive,

but as it's a cultural phenomenon, it is very, very hard to pin down an exact definition

of what swearing might be.

Right, okay. So it's emotive, it's generally something taboo.

And something which we've immediately run into, obviously, in

this programme is that we it's quite tricky to talk about swearing, without actually swearing.

I mean, we can just bleep them. If I say ****, that's now been bleeped. No one knows what that word

was. Or maybe we can just say like the F word, which is an English word lots of people be

familiar with, or maybe we could agree on some substitutes, like flip and sugar...

Yeah, I mean, the problem with using completely arbitrary substitutes is that they don't have

the emotive impact of a real swear word. So they're okay is sort of code to let people

know what it is we're talking about, but it is very hard to know how to use swearing in

broadcast is because you know, it's going to have an emotional impact, you just not

entirely certain what that emotional impact will be, particularly on a service like the

World Service where you're speaking across so many cultures, that the the opportunity

to give inadvertent offence is so great.

And maybe somebody who can help us navigate these tricky boundaries is our producer,

Cathy, so you're on the call Cathy, what are we allowed to say what we're not allowed

to say?

Yeah, I have got the BBC guidelines in front of me. And they're very detailed.

But they start off by saying that different words cause different degrees of offence in

different communities, as well as in different parts of the world. So like Emma said, we've

got listeners in all parts of the world. So we don't want to alienate anyone. But saying

that, judging by our inbox, the CrowdScience inbox, it's something a lot of our listeners

want to know about and are very interested in. It is gonna depend on the

context each time, so just do your best to not offend anyone.

Okay, so we can use we can talk about bad language, but we can't take the **** basically.

Watch it. Anand you *******

STOP IT

Now we've got that out of our systems. And I mean, there are clearly special social rules

and BBC guidelines. But Emma, what happens in our own heads when we use them? I mean,

do we process them differently in the brain?

Yeah, I mean, this is one of the most interesting things that I came across,

particularly at people who’ve had something called a hemispherectomy

where you remove one hemisphere of the brain. If damage to a single hemisphere is so extensive

it’s sometimes easier to just remove that entire hemisphere and you can live with one a single hemisphere of the brain.

Speech tends to be very strongly lateralized to one side of the brain or the other.

However, when you take somebody's left hemisphere, or somebody's left hemisphere is very

badly damaged to stroke, and they lose the majority of their language, what you tend

to find is that they will still be able to swear. And it seems we lay down very strong

emotional connections to certain types of language and that that is stored separately

from the rest of our language, you can remove the entire of a left hemisphere, and completely

negate somebody's ability to use language in a way that is sort of deliberative and

planned like I'm doing now. But they can still spontaneously swear. Swearing is so profoundly

connected with emotions, that the muscular movements required to utter swear words are

stored in multiple places. So we have backups for when we need them.

Wow. Okay, so I guess that speaks to kind of how deeply embedded

swear words are in our in our brains. And what listener Gadi is really interested

in is specifically about how swearing provides this almost magical, physical effect

these words that can actually make you feel better when you're in pain where

if you stub your toe. And so to that end, I've got a bucket of ice here, which Cathy

asked me to procure, foolishly, I perhaps thought this would be for something fun, like

maybe, maybe champagne. But I think that was hopelessly optimistic. So I've got the ice

in front of me here, what what are we doing this Emma?

So this is a reproduction of one of my favourite experiments. In fact, the one that got me

into the whole subject of swearing.

So what we're going to do is see whether or not a swear word allows you to keep your hand in

that ice cold water for longer than a neutral word. So we’re going to contrast the word

soft and the world BLEEP. Sorry Cathy busy on the beep key.

So you're going to pop your hand in ice cold water and start the timer at same time. And

when you feel like you need a little help, you can use the word BLEEP.

Okay. 123 go. Hoo! Not warm.

No.

Yeah, I can it's actually quite painful..

There’s not much here that we’re allowed to broadcast, so while I’m freezing my hand in ice cold water

let’s go to the person who came up with this experiment.

Hi, I'm Dr. Richard Stephens, a senior lecturer in psychology at Keele University. And I run the Swear Lab at the University.

The Swear Lab that's quite cool. So I mean, you're the perfect person to talk to.

What made you interested in the impact of swearing?

This relates to just personal experience, doing DIY, having accidents, hitting myself

with a hammer, swearing, thinking, why would I do that. And then when my daughter was born,

there was a lot of swearing during the labour. And the medical staff said, this is a completely

normal part of giving birth. So that kind of brought the idea of swearing and pain together

in my mind, And I thought, I wonder if there's any point to swearing when you're in pain,

I wonder if it helps at all?

Before Richard carried out his studies, one theory doing the rounds was that swearing

made pain worse. Bad language, the thinking went, was a form of catastrophizing - it put

you in a frame of mind where you imagine the worst possible outcome. Like stubbing your

toe and thinking you’d have to get your whole leg amputated.

But catastrophizing would actually make things feel more painful, and that didn’t chime with

Richard’s gut feeling about things. So he decided to investigate with the ice water test I just

demonstrated with Emma, called the cold pressor test. Though - not initially on himself.

For the first few years, I'd never actually done the cold pressor

Classic experimental psychologist! Being mean to people not doing experiments on themselves

I sort of thought I'd be quite good at it, I was terrible at it, I felt the pain really

quickly! And what we found across all our studies, it's replicated really well,

it’s always worked. We always see an advantage - more time spent in the ice water for swearing

versus neutral word.

Now before Richard explains why swearing might help people cope with pain, I want to bring

in a couple of our listeners who’ve got some first hand experience in this area. First

up, Colin.

I don't usually swear. But a few years ago, I had to be rescued from a mountain after

an accident. I’d badly dislocated my shoulder. And I had to be put on a sled to come down

the mountain. Every single bump was agony. And all I could do was mouth expletives all

the way down the mountain. No other words seem to do.

Medics are probably used to their patients swearing at them - whether that’s up a mountain

or in a hospital, like listener Rebecca, a radiographer and swearing enthusiast.

If somebody comes into my X ray room, and they are in a lot of pain, a lot of people

will jump straight to swearing at me, which I encourage. Or if people seem to be feeling that it’s impolite I will say no, no, no, it's okay. You swear away

it helps with the pain. I read it in a magazine once. People seem to really go for it. And

it's a bit of relief. It gives them a bit of a chuckle as well.

The pain-relieving power of swearing in full force there - but why exactly might it help Colin

and his dislocated shoulder or Rebecca’s X-ray patients? Another finding from Richard

Stephens’ ice bucket test might give us a clue.

We usually see an increase in heart rate in the swearing condition as well compared with

the neutral word. And that seems to indicate some kind of emotional response to the swearing

and we know that swearing is kind of emotional language. So our kind of working hypothesis

has been that when people swear in pain, they're actually ramping up their stress levels, and

bringing into play a phenomenon called stress induced analgesia, which is part of the wider

fight or flight response.

It’s a bit like soldiers on the battlefield who don't notice their injuries because they’re

so flooded with adrenaline. Maybe the emotion of swearing helps you get into that pumped

up state, and that reduces the pain?

Well, further studies have suggested it’s more complicated than that.

We were interested, if swearing brings about fight or flight response, it should make you

stronger. So we ran a study, where we looked at swearing again, the same thing repeating

the swear word, compared with a neutral word. And we did show as we predicted that swearing

makes you stronger. However, there was no sign of the fight or flight response, so we

had the effects we predicted, but not by the mechanism we predicted. So that tells us there's

something else going on, and that's kind of where we are now, trying to pick up what that

mechanism might be.

And that means I get to swear for science again...

Put your hands underneath each thigh, right hand and your right thigh obviously left undone

to your left thigh. Yep. Push down, straighten up your arms

so that you're lifting your feet off the floor and you're behind off the seat.

Okay, so you're supporting all of your body weight on your hands on the chair.

okay.

So while you're doing this task, I would like you to repeat the word BEEP at normal speech

volume and same pace once every two seconds. So when you're ready, go.

OK. My arms are shaking quite a lot.

You’ll just have to imagine what popular English expletive I’m using,

it features high up on the BBC’s offensive

word list.

But it did seem to help - I could almost feel a little blip of release when I swore.

People in the next room are going to be wondering what kind of interview I'm doing.

This went on for quite a long time….

Do you work out Anand? As well as swearing while weightlifting, Richard