Hey there, it's Stephen Dubner. This episode of Freakonomics Radio is about swearing, and therefore it contains a lot of swearing. As is our custom, we have bleeped these swear words out, so this episode contains a lot of bleeping. If you don't want to hear those curse words even bleeped, now is a good time to find a different episode of Freakonomics Radio to listen to.
Or, maybe you want to hear the curse words without the bleeping, in which case you should go to Freakonomics.com, where you will find the unbleeped version of this episode. As always, thanks for listening. Lately, I've been using my phone a lot for dictation. I will dictate emails, texts, and occasionally a note to myself, like when I think of a question I want to ask in an interview for this show.
The other day, for instance, I dictated into my phone something like, talk about the first time you did such and such, but the phone didn't render my dictation as talk about, it said, f*** about. Since when did the voice recognition on my phone start using the F word? It struck me that swearing, or whatever you want to call it, profanity, blasphemy, curses and slurs, expletives and vulgarities, it struck me there seems to be more of it now than ever, and often in places you wouldn't expect. So, today, on Freakonomics Radio, is it true that there's more swearing than ever?
And, if so, what does it mean? We will hear a little history. These are like people in the King's Renew. We'll learn why we don't know as much about swearing as you might think.
He said, you know, that swearing research you're doing is not a good idea for tenure. We'll find out what these words are meant to accomplish. Swear words have this very particular set of physiological and emotional effects. And we'll ask the big question, should we all be swearing even more?
This is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything, with your host, Stephen Deppner. Let's start by hearing from a few of our listeners. I tell my kids they need to save those words for when something really bad happens, instead of saying I'm so effing happy, because otherwise you have no language left to express extreme frustration or sadness or grief. What made me realize that my language was a conversation with a Spanish boy who I was dating.
He told me that usually people that do swear words do so because they like their vocabulary to express themselves better. I thought to myself, this mother f***er tells me my English is poor. Needless to say, we're no longer dating. I f***ing love cursing.
I think it adds some oomph to your language. I think that s*** is awesome. I do have an 18-month-old, so sometime soon I'm going to have to stop cursing. But for now, f***ing wee!
Love you. That was, respectively, Kristen, Olga, and Rebecca. Apparently, none of our male listeners have ever sworn, but we did find one man who swears. Okay.
My name is John McWhorter. I teach linguistics and some other things at Columbia University. I write a column for the New York Times, and my most recent two books were Nine Nasty Words about profanity and Woke Racism about race and cultural issues. So, John, how would you summarize the role of cursing in language?
One thing that's important to realize with cursing and profanity is that it isn't words in the sense that ironing board or yesterday or therefore are words. Profanity, when you're talking about real profanity, real cursing, is eruptions. There's the left side of the brain where most people process language as in the boy kicked the red ball. The right side of the brain is more Dionysian, is more about the melody, is more about the tone, and therefore is also where profanity is generated from.
Profanity comes from such a different place emotionally than vanilla language to the point that it often doesn't even make any grammatical sense. If I say, what the hell is that? Try parsing what hell is in that sentence other than just a kind of a dog bark. And here's another expert with a slightly different perspective.
Swearing is the use of emotionally offensive language to vent our emotions and convey our emotions to other people. His name is Timothy Jay. Yeah, I'm a professor of psychology emeritus from the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. Would you call yourself a swearing scholar or is that too reductive?
I've been called worse. I like to think of myself as pioneering the psychological research on American cursing. Having written six books on this and published dozens of professional articles, yes, I'm a scholar. What would you say are the chief things that you've learned about swearing then?
It's a normal behavior. It's not abnormal. It's part of language. Every competent speaker of a language knows what they're not supposed to say.
One of the myths comes up about control. All those swears just can't control themselves. Why does Jay call this a myth, the idea that swearing represents a loss of control? Well, this goes back to research from the early 1980s when Jay set out to document the use of swearing and other taboo words.
We've recorded over 10,000 people swearing in public with different means. In public, meaning places like schools and stores and pet sporting events. I had a cadre of research assistants and we had these pre-printed field cards. They had categories like the speaker, the listener, their ages, what was said, and what was the emotional surround.
Was this joking? Was it anger? We've also used voice-activated tape recorders and put them in various places. This recording and note-taking was all done covertly without the subject's knowledge, but Jay also asked people directly about swearing.
I've surveyed hundreds, thousands of students having them fill out surveys on how frequently these words are used and how offensive they are. When you started this research, I'm curious how your academic peers and or elders responded. Negatively. I had a dean pull me aside at a social event.
I'm right out of college, 26 years old, I've got a wife and a kid. He said, you know, that swearing research you're doing is not a good idea for tenure. So I switched gears for a while and I became a guru of computer-assisted instruction. Wow, that is a big gear switch.
Eventually, I won the G. Stanley Hall Award for Excellence in Education by incorporating computers into psychology. And about the same time, I got tenure. Now you can do what you wanted to do in the first place.
Yeah, one of my buddies said, Tim, everybody's doing this computer stuff. Nobody's doing the taboo word research. The first analysis I did, I had a Nike sneaker box that was filled up with these cards. I said, okay, we've got to go through and analyze all of this.
We wanted to document the whole arc of this. What happens in the preschool years? What happens in the school years? Certainly there are age differences.
There are gender differences. You have boys and girls, men and women, emoting with, say, anger or aggression. And they're using different language. You can make all of these age and gender-related comparisons.
Okay, here are a few comparisons. First, gender. Men do curse more often than women. They use a larger variety of swear words and more hardcore swear words.
This holds true for the internet era as well. Men and women both swear more when in the presence of their own gender. And what about age? The arc is adolescence.
Preschoolers don't have the vocabulary, the teenager's doob. By the time you're at 12, 13, 14, you've got a pretty adult-like vocabulary. What happens after that depends on the setting. Is this person in a structured corporate setting?
Are they working outside as a laborer? Are they playing sports? It becomes very contextualized after that. As to the why, the purpose of swearing, and obviously it differs from person to person, situation to situation, even I can think of a lot of different reasons.
You might be angry. You might be disgusted. You might be trying to elicit humor from someone else. You might be trying to bond.
You might be trying to show that you are your own person and it won't be bound by society's rules. If I ask you to give the answer to the title of this one book of yours, Why We Curse, why do we? How answerable is that question? You just answered it.
Stephen, you just elaborated a lot of the reasons why people swear. Now, we're the only animal with emotional architecture in the physiological that can express our emotions abstractly with words. I regard this as an evolutionary leap that instead of fighting tooth and nail when we're angry with someone, we can say I hate you or a variety of other words. Okay.
And what about the common belief that swearing is more popular among the less educated, the lower classes, than the upper? Timothy Jay says that this too is somewhat mythical. The data that have been collected, Tony McEnry did this in England. He collected phone conversations.
That's a much more class-oriented culture than ours. He's able to see that, yeah, there's more swearing in the working class, but there's swearing everywhere. There's swearing in every class. This class-oriented view of swearing is snobbery.
It's a way to put the working person down, the lower classes down. Jay has seen further evidence in his own research. We gave people a task. Say all the words you can think of that begin with the letter F.
Say all the words that begin with the letter A. Then you give them a minute to do that. It's a measure of fluency. Then I ask them, all right, name all the animals you can in a minute.
And then name all the swear words you can in a minute. Which if you try to do this, you can get out about 10 quickly. The people who generated the most swear words were the people who generated the most letter words and animals. It's the opposite of what people think.
People that have a high vocabulary also have a high swearing vocabulary. It really doesn't make any sense that if you couldn't think of a word because it wasn't in your lexicon, you would say a swear word? That doesn't make any sense. John McWhorter agrees that the class-based swearing theory is bankrupt.
Any notion that being a classy person is to not curse has fallen completely apart. I would say that as a very bourgeois upper middle class person who has no interest in shocking anybody, nor am I trying to take it down in order to indicate that despite the fact that I'm not poor, I'm still down with everybody else, I say f*** probably a dozen times a day. And I think I'm ordinary for people of my place and station. That was not true in 1950.
That's the way it is now. Cursing is no longer about sailors and barstools. So John, there is a sense that there's more swearing today than in the past. I'm curious to know whether that's at all true.
There is definitely today, in public language, more use of words that used to be considered blasphemous against God, or blasphemous against the authorities that say that you're not supposed to talk about sex and excretion. I mean, the way language is used on a TV show, even like Parks and Recreation, and then certainly in shows like The Wire, that's new. That's public language. But then on the other hand, I think a lot of it also has to do with the fact that those words just don't have the meaning that they used to.
I asked Timothy J the same question. Is there more swearing now than in the past? Unanswerable question. Preceding my work, there aren't collections of swearing.
So there's no way to tell. History is written by the literate. You have no idea what language was like in a tavern or a brothel. Wait a minute, you just told us that swearing is not necessarily the province of the uneducated, so why would the literate swear as well?
Censorship. The written documents have not included the language except maybe Chaucer, where you just have examples and those aren't frequency counts. That's also a certain kind of bawdiness more than defaming a deity, let's say. Yes.
I remember having to read the Miller's Tale in high school and not understanding what I was reading about Absalon using the word Q-U-E-N-T-E, and there's my English teachers having us read this stuff out loud and going like, she's got to go home and laugh her ass off. Whether the frequency of swearing is up or down over time, John McWhorter says we are currently living through the third major phase of swearing in human history. That's coming up after the break. Also, what does swearing do to you?
If you call someone a f***ing idiot, your heart rate increases. I'm Stephen Dubner, this is Freakonomics Radio, we will be right back. What have we learned so far about swearing? First, it's hard to know whether there's more of it today than before.
It's even hard to know whether swearing is a normal, albeit heightened part of language or not a regular part of language at all. To add one more complication, swearing, like all of language, refuses to sit still. Here again is the Columbia linguist John McWhorter. Language changes just like cloud patterns change.
It's never not changed and you just can't stop it. Since language is always evolving, swearing is always evolving as well. The neatest thing about the evolution of profanity is how differently people in different times feel about certain kinds of words. And this brings us to what McWhorter describes as the three major eras of swearing over the history of humankind.
So it used to be that profanity was about religion. It was about God and Jesus. You were allowed to swear to God if you meant it. It was a form of signature in a society where most people couldn't write.
So I swear to God that I will do X, Y, or Z. What you weren't supposed to do was swear in vain because that was to disrespect God. And therefore, you had euphemisms for by God, etc. when you weren't going to do it sincerely.
That's why we say swearing. It used to be that you actually were swearing to something and that becomes shorthand for using bad words. And what are some of those euphemisms? Gadzooks.
Okay, so phase one of swearing had to do with religion. Then there comes a time around the Renaissance when there develops a sense of privacy that wasn't known before. And along with that sense of privacy and perhaps individualism due to the Reformation, you have this new sense that what's profane is talking too freely about the body. And so sex and excretion goes from being a giggle to being something that you absolutely don't put down in writing and that you don't use in public.
And all of this gets worse with the development of Boers' Royal Society. And so that's when you get the idea that shit and fuck and the like are very, very bad words rather than just mundane things that are part of being a human being. So that phase lasts for a while. It's not that the God words suddenly are okay.
You have two layers. But it's certainly the case that throughout that time, damn and hell become less potent as profanity while fuck and fuck become so unspeakable that as late as the Kennedy administration, their dictionaries being published and big ones where fuck is not in it. Then there's a new phase that we're in where what is considered profane is slurring subordinate groups. That's why there's such a difference between the way the N-word was used in popular culture, even as recently as the 70s when sitcom characters could within reason use it, especially if they were black.
And today where just the utterance of the two syllables in any way is often thought of as a transgression of legitimate humanity. So we go from religion to the body to slurring against groups. And you can see that as, and this is no disrespect intended against religion, but it's the intellectual and moral development of our society. If we're going to be sacred about something, my personal feeling is that it's better for it to be about slurs against groups than about Jesus or your butt.
Okay, let me ask you. So you happen to be black. I happen to be, yeah. Do you ever find yourself in writing, as you do quite a bit, about race and racism and language?
Do you ever find yourself having to signal overtly that you are black? Yeah, sometimes I'm writing about language, and especially if I'm writing about the N-word. Sometimes I do feel like I have to slip it in because there are different tacit rules as far as that word goes. As much as McWhorter cares about contemporary language, and as much as he knows and cares about language from the distant past, you get the sense that he's most tickled by the rules of language during the second of the three eras of swearing, when the words considered the most taboo had to do with the human...
for instance oh is amazing and you see it popping up in early middle english not in prose but in names there were actually people taken seriously with names like roger by the naval and henry literally and this is not in some funny poem these are like people in the king's retinue and there were places called grove and you know what that was for but it was on a sign it wasn't something people said among themselves and then there comes a time when you're not supposed to use the word that way anymore and there's all evidence that people were using it but they weren't supposed to write it down or if they did they wrote it in code the idea being that it is a profane word but just started as a vulgar but common and accepted word for sexual intercourse you write about a monk in 1528 he's talking about an abbot he calls him a abbot so that's meant to be just a general i think he's an idiot kind of thing what you see on the page is o then a space then d and then abbot and you think that what he's writing is old abbot and because it's an old document somebody smudged out the l but no there is no l smudged out what he's writing is o and he's abbreviating damned abbot and so for him you don't write damn because that's blasphemy but then with he puts that in with this kind of beavis and butthead snicker let's hear some more about this middle era of swearing so there were a lot of names for plants and animals which i think are so funny you had a plant called couture there was a heron the english word for heron was shiro oh yeah and then windfucker that was a good one windfucker was a bird a kestrel that is melissa moore and i am a writer i gotta figure out how to explain what i do i'm a writer my name is melissa moore and i'm a writer moore is the author of a book called holy a brief history of swearing she had planned on being an academic and she got a phd in medieval and renaissance english literature but somehow she got sidetracked by swearing yes so when i was getting my phd i was reading a lot of medieval and renaissance texts obviously as one does as one does and i noticed that the swearing was really different and the kinds of language that people were getting upset about was you know religious in nature and the kinds of language that they weren't getting upset about were the things we do get upset about and so i you know got interested in how and why that transition happened if you've been paying attention you will notice that melissa moore is now talking about the same transition that john mcward was telling us about a new taboo on words concerning sex and excretion now why did this new taboo arise moore thinks it was driven not only by the newfound personal privacy but by the technologies that made such privacy increasingly possible so you know the bedroom actually needed an innovation in fireplace technology before we got a bedroom because in the time of beowulf you just had a big central fire pit and people slept in the hall ate in the hall tea and defecated in the hall under the straw i mean it was really it was like a barn and eventually 12 13th century you got better fireplaces aristocrats could get bedrooms and it just took a long long time before people had a sense of space that they could sort of you know be private originally even pretties weren't private you'd have multi-seat pretties and just go in there together actually solitude was a sort of suspicious thing like what were you doing by yourself it's like you and the devil if you're not with other people in her book moore cites a pamphlet written in 1530 by the philosopher and theologian desiderius erasmus advising young boys that it is impolite to greet someone who's urinating or defecating court regulations from the same era said quote one should not like rustics who have not been to court or lived among refined and honorable people relieve oneself without shame or reserve in front of ladies as people got wealthier you could become solitary and it started to be you know not such a bad thing and once you could be solitary you could take care of your bodily functions in private meanwhile there was a change in the practice of religious oath-taking what john mcwarder had described as i swear to god that i will do x y or z melissa moore argues that the spread of trade and capitalism meant that this sort of oath-taking was no longer practical or necessary by the 17th century these oaths were just coming so thick and fast that you couldn't you know it's like one you swear this no no you swear that and as trade spread and people became involved in more and more transactions with people who they hadn't grown up with as people moved and commerce opened up what became the guarantee of your honesty was not your swearing but the fact that you continued to do business this decline in oath-taking may have even helped boost the taboo index of all those newly dirty words about the human body and then came the victorians yes so the victorian era was the sort of high point of power for the obscene words that are you know based in body parts and actions so trousers for instance was a very taboo word because i mean it sounds ridiculous but it really was because if you pulled them down you were naked and they had kind of revealed the shape of your leg and so you couldn't say trousers and so there are all these crazy euphemisms for trousers that people would use like et cetera's inexpressibles it's easy to laugh now from this distance at the notion of trousers being a taboo word among those long ago prudes but we maybe shouldn't laugh too quickly john mcorder again people back in the 20s and 30s thought that it was profane to say belly he's talking about the 1920s and 30s in the movie musical 42nd street there's a lyric where there's a reference to with a shotgun at his belly and then she changes it to tummy instead of saying belly despite the fact that belly rhymes with nelly on the next line you just kind of weren't supposed to say it coming up after the break these days while belly in other words become accepted a long list of long accepted words is being challenged yeah can't say wait yeah i'm steven dubner this is economics radio we'll be right back when we swear what are we trying to accomplish here's a clue in 2017 an international group of researchers ran a series of experiments to analyze the relationship between profanity and honesty they found that people who swear are perceived as more authentic here again is john mcorder part of becoming close to people part of becoming part of a group is to be able to let your hair down is to show that you don't think you're better than other people and one of the best ways to do that is to use salty language that is normal human behavior and here is timothy jay on the various uses of swearing it's humor it's bonding it's defending yourself it's putting people down it's self-denigration it's storytelling jay has written about swearing research that shows physiological benefits as well melissa moore is also a fan of this research well yeah so it's basically if you're swearing or hearing swear words your skin conductance response changes so you know the way your skin conducts electricity there's a famous ice bucket challenge where you can stick your hand in ice water longer if you're using a swear word than if you're not using a swear word someone also did a grip challenge you can you know hold a gripper with more strength and for longer if you're swearing that's interesting it'd be fun to try that with current swear words versus the more toothless old swear words what do you think is more common over time for words that are taboo to become less taboo or vice versa that's an interesting question you've got this kind of euphemism treadmill that steven pinker talks about where it starts off as a bad word but then people use it more and more and then you get used to it and then it falls away and then you need to come up with another bad word and you've seen that with the religious words we're seeing it with but on the other hand homeless person becomes taboo yes right now we are in a new new victorianism in that way and of course that's very culturally specific in the united states like among my relatives in wisconsin who didn't go to college they're not going to say the unhoused you know but in academia and cambridge it's yeah can i share with you this story something i think just illustrated where we are now i happen to play golf so i hope you don't judge you hate golf and i belong to this club very nice people and i was up there not long ago and there were these three ladies getting ready to tee off and one of them was describing this tournament that they're playing in was one where you could play the 18 holes anytime you wanted and register your score so in other words you could choose when to play it based on the conditions the weather and so on but also based on where on a given day the holes were cut on the green because they move around and some days they seem easier and some days harder so she was describing how the two women she was playing with that they would like gain the system to like drive up to the course one day and if they saw the flag from a bad place they would choose not to register their score that day and so she was describing how they were being a little bit like you know strategic or sneaky was the word she was using but as she was saying she's saying well these sneaky ladies and she's like oh wait i can't use that word these sneaky gals oh no i can't say gals these sneaky mother in what world is like mother now okay but it was wow so what does that mean yeah that is really funny well i don't think that the whole world will move in that direction but yeah people are preemptively worried about causing offense like i'm sure no one would have been offended by ladies but you want to just make sure that whatever you say has no possibility of offending anyone did you see the stanford university it list of words oh no that people couldn't say yeah it was meant to make technology more inclusive i had very good aims but it was you know don't say american use u.s citizen because if you say american you know there are so many countries in the americas you're disrespecting them don't say i'm seeing i looked it up now you can't say white paper white paper right yeah because can't say white yeah so what do you think of that use do you think it's a good idea that word be restricted i don't think it's a good idea i don't know it is funny i know don mcguarda is a very powerful advocate for you know not bowing to these wins i think i probably quietly bowed to the wins yeah i think we overdue it today and that is the unbowing john mcguarda the idea that somebody can lose their job because they use the n-word and this is the important thing we're losing the difference between using it and referring to it for somebody to lose their job because they talk about the n-word that's going into treating that sequence of sounds as taboo which is frankly the way people acted about the excretion words and i think we could get beyond that but you know when did people not overdo things and in general if we are going to be pious about something for it to be about disrespecting minority groups i fully get that that's an advance that's a moral advance but because this is language we're talking about things are always changing and there are always complications we often talk about how groups can denature a slur by taking on themselves but that doesn't mean that the sting doesn't remain when it's applied by people from the outside you can witness this with the n-word you can witness this with the word i think it's one thing for women to use it as an in-group term but for the rest of us to casually use it when we happen to be upset with someone who's a woman that was much more common in say the 70s or 80s than now that's a good thing we need to stop that now what's your position on bleeping curse words is it just a charade yes or is it a good idea the only ones that should be believed are the slurs against groups however that's just me and i know many people would rather their children not hear the salty words at least not until a certain point i frankly disagree because i think we're living in a different world if your children around the age of nine are going to start hearing pop songs that are full of shameless profanity and i have now watched that happen with my two little girls i'm not sure why they should ever have listened to anything where words were bleeped out because i think we don't give kids enough credit for understanding context very early on my girls noticed that daddy says they instantly knew he does that that's funny but we're not supposed to do it and i cannot prescribe for other people how they raise their kids but my kids have been raised listening to fluent profanity not the slurs but the other ones since birth i may be reading too much into what you just said but it sounds as though you're saying that profanity can help develop a sort of linguistic sophistication in that it's a set of words that one is allowed or even encouraged to use in some circumstances probably private ones and not in others probably public ones and so on can you talk about that notion whether profanity really does help us become better at our language frankly yes because the way profanity is used is often not just colorful and it's not just independent eruptions but there is subtlety to it there is wit to it you have to learn when to hit the note not to hit the note too many times it's one way of being articulate which curse word in english would you say is the most flexible is astonishing give me the first like seven sentences that come to mind with serving as different functions everything's in there what's that get your hands the off of me i don't have any more left to give he didn't do all i am broke as this person the other person or mother and you're not really talking about at all melissa moore is also fairly fluent with the effort you can see in the middle of words that's absolutely not gonna work intensifier that's amazing it can be a person you're dumb i never cease to be amazed by how many different ways you can use it and how the people who use it the most often are considered inarticulate vulgar lazy when really a grammarian could spend days feasting at figuring out exactly what each usage of was doing what the is it doing there what's the meaning of that what about realms or precincts in which swearing profanity is still really not welcome i guess i'm thinking mostly public realms i mean look there are some people who just don't swear and don't like it right we agree on that but then like in politics for instance you're pretty much supposed to not swear still what do you think about that i think that in all languages there is a high kind of language that might be about religion it might be about you know battle cries so if joe biden says when obamacare is being said this is a big deal it's going to be considered remarkable we're not going to be a society with no sense of ceremony and profanity amid ceremony is always going to seem a little bit out of place except very judiciously applied so for instance you would not be in favor of biden let's say during a televised address to the nation saying look america vladimir putin is a real it would sound trivializing yeah i wouldn't find it immoral i would not clutch my pearls but i think there would be better ways of explaining what a terrible force he is that would have a gravitas other than using a foul snapping word it's interesting you say trivializing doesn't it have a power that could convey some usefulness the problem with toll or the related mother in that usage is that we tend to use those terms for everyday sorts of things you get cut off in traffic somebody takes the last slice of pizza whereas with putin we're talking about somebody who's monstrous you want to bring out words that can note that he's not cutting you off in traffic that he's committing an atrocity as grave as genocide that's not an asshole with putin it's beyond so what you're saying if i'm hearing it right is that profanity performs a lot of different roles but among them are that there's a playfulness but also a sort of triviality to it and if i'm reading you right then i'm gonna go the next step and say and that probably means we should all be swearing a little bit more than we do is that logical conclusion not quite it is and that's where we're dealing with this dividing line between salty and profane because we're using those salty words more it's a more honest rendition of how we actually feel about life but we're using them so commonly that we can't say that we're profaning against anything now how that's going to play out in terms of our slurs against groups that's going to be interesting where the next angle of profanity is going to go but where you've got things that are especially on that fine line between salty and and profane and even when they're profane you're going to use them sometimes and it's part of the general toolkit of being a whole human being i also asked melissa more if perhaps we should be swearing more so for obscene words like should we be swearing more i mean they can be useful it's funny that some studies though that even the people who have done ice bucket study you know that says you can keep your hand in longer if you're swearing if you're a habitual swearer that effect goes away so i wouldn't say we should be swearing more i think you should swear an appropriate amount but if you swear constantly it kind of loses its oomph and i asked timothy j same question we should all be more aware of what swearing is where it's valuable where it's harmful think about your toolbox i'd rather somebody swear at me than ram me with your car or pull a gun on me i had a guy threw a hammer at me once in a car why i passed him so he got angry because i passed him i thought he was driving too slow and then he got a hammer and threw it off i'd rather you just give me the finger before we go let's hear from a few more of our listeners here first is allison a lot of women especially don't like using the c word but i decided to embrace it because i had a former friend that really did me wrong and so i started calling her you're gonna want to believe and it really made me feel good it was cathartic to call her that and i did for many months and then i realized one day that i did not need to use that word anymore i didn't have a need for it and i think being able to express that anger through the use of that swear word was really helpful to me and here's alex finally a male listener who at least knows what swearing is and isn't when my mother was 100 years old we were all sitting around the table one night talking and someone said something very interesting and my mother looked up and said shut the front door we have no idea where she learned that expression but we laughed for hours and with the final word here's jennifer when i was a teenager i was not the nicest to my mother and one morning when i was rushing to leave the house she became very upset with my attitude and said i needed to stop being a little witch which surely was not her best parenting moment but i heard a b instead of a w and i turned around and screamed no you're the bitch and proceeded to slam the door right onto my pinky finger and broke it so in the end i learned that karma is a bitch not my mom thanks to all our listeners for sending in tape and thanks to john mcwarder timothy jay and melissa moore for so capably walking us through the thorny and fascinating landscape of swearing coming up next time on the show you ever wonder why all of your projects are always late over budget over time over and over again and why do we procrastinate oh god what's the primary root cause of procrastination i'm like it gets the heart of everything i've thought about for the last 15 years in one question why your projects are late and what to do about it that's next time on the show until then take care of yourself and if you can someone else too freaking out radio is produced by stitcher and redbud radio this episode was produced by katherine moncure and mixed by greg rippon with help from jeremy johnson our staff also includes zach lipinski morgan levy ryan kelly helena cullman rebecca lee douglas julie camphorne sarah lily eleanor osborne jasmine clinger daria clennert emma turell lear bowditch and elsa hernandez the freaking radio network's executive team is neil caruth davriel roth and me steven dubner our theme song is mr fortune by the hitchhikers all the other music was composed by louis i don't know if swearing was invented for golf or golf was invented for swearing what's your favorite on course curse it starts out like oh jesus god damn and then mother me it depends on how bad it is and who i'm with the freakonomics radio network the hidden side of everything stitcher