How much bad words are there

If your child keeps swearing, or you want to help your child learn about swearing, you can try talking with them about their choice of words. You can also say that there are some words that are not OK for children to say, even if they hear other people saying them. Older preschoolers might get some good from simple explanations of what swear words mean. If you think your child is ready for this, you can start by asking your child what they think the word means.

If you want your children to avoid swearing, you and the other adults in your home need to avoid it too. Here are more ideas to encourage respectful speaking and reduce swearing in your family:. Preschoolers and some toddlers can be intrigued by private body parts and bodily functions. Children often like to try out words they hear or make up. Swearing to fit in socially If you think your child is swearing to fit in socially, try talking with your child about why they think their friends swear.

You could talk about other ways your child can feel accepted. It might not be realistic to expect your older child not to swear around their friends, but you might be able to help them understand which words are less offensive. You might need to help your child calm down from strong emotions like anger or frustration.

Then you can teach your child other ways of managing strong feelings like counting to 10, taking deep breaths or talking about difficult feelings. School-age children can get some good from simple explanations of what swear words mean. If you think your child is ready for this, you can ask your child what they think the word means. Or you could explain that the word is racist, sexist or disrespectful of particular groups of people.

If you want your children to avoid swearing, you and the other adults in your home need to avoid it too. Here are more ideas to encourage respectful speaking and reduce swearing in your family:.

While hundreds of papers have been written about swearing since the early s, they tend to originate from fields outside of psychology such as sociology, linguistics, and anthropology. When swearing is a part of psychological research, it is rarely an end in itself. It is far more common to see strong offensive words used as emotionally arousing stimuli — tools to study the effect of emotion on mental processes such as attention and memory. Why the public-versus-science disconnect?

Is swearing, as a behavior, outside the scope of what a psychological scientist ought to study? Because swearing is influenced so strongly by variables that can be quantified at the individual level, psychological scientists more than linguists, anthropologists, and sociologists have the best training to answer questions about it.

Another explanation for the relative lack of emphasis on this topic is the orientation of psychological science to processes e. Arguably, a more domain-centered approach to psychological study would better accommodate topics such as swearing and other taboo behaviors. Regardless of the reason for the relative lack of emphasis on swearing research per se inside psychological science, there is still a strong demand from outside the scientific community for explanations of swearing and associated phenomena.

Courts presume harm from speech in cases involving discrimination or sexual harassment. The original justification for our obscenity laws was predicated on an unfounded assumption that speech can deprave or corrupt children, but there is little if any social-science data demonstrating that a word in and of itself causes harm.

A closely related problem is the manner in which harm has been defined — harm is most commonly framed in terms of standards and sensibilities such as religious values or sexual mores.

Rarely are there attempts to quantify harm in terms of objectively measurable symptoms e. Psychological scientists could certainly make a systematic effort to establish behavioral outcomes of swearing. Swearing can occur with any emotion and yield positive or negative outcomes. Our work so far suggests that most uses of swear words are not problematic. We know this because we have recorded over 10, episodes of public swearing by children and adults, and rarely have we witnessed negative consequences.

We have never seen public swearing lead to physical violence. Most public uses of taboo words are not in anger; they are innocuous or produce positive consequences e. No descriptive data are available about swearing in private settings, however, so more work needs to be done in that area. Therefore, instead of thinking of swearing as uniformly harmful or morally wrong, more meaningful information about swearing can be obtained by asking what communication goals swearing achieves.

Swear words can achieve a number of outcomes, as when used positively for joking or storytelling, stress management, fitting in with the crowd, or as a substitute for physical aggression. Recent work by Stephens et al. This finding suggests swearing has a cathartic effect, which many of us may have personally experienced in frustration or in response to pain. Despite this empirical evidence, the positive consequences of swearing are commonly disregarded in the media.

Here is an opportunity for psychological scientists to help inform the media and policymakers by clearly describing the range of outcomes of swearing, including the benefits.

The harm question for adult swearing applies to issues such as verbal abuse, sexual harassment, and discrimination. When children enter the picture, offensive language becomes a problem for parents and a basis for censorship in media and educational settings.

Considering the ubiquity of this problem, it is interesting that psychology textbooks do not address the emergence of this behavior in the context of development or language learning.

Parents often wonder if this behavior is normal and how they should respond to it. Our data show that swearing emerges by age two and becomes adult-like by ages 11 or By the time children enter school, they have a working vocabulary of offensive words. We have yet to determine what children know about the meanings of the words they use. We do know that younger children are likely to use milder offensive words than older children and adults, whose lexica may include more strongly offensive terms and words with more nuanced social and cultural meanings.

We do not know exactly how children learn swear words, although this learning is an inevitable part of language learning, and it begins early in life. This etiquette determines the difference between amusing and insulting and needs to be studied further. Through interview data, we know that young adults report to have learned these words from parents, peers, and siblings, not from mass media. Is it important to attempt to censor children from language they already know? While psychological scientists themselves do not establish language standards, they can provide scientific data about what is normal to inform this debate.

It is true that we are exposed to more forms of swearing since the inception of satellite radio, cable television, and the Internet, but that does not mean the average person is swearing more frequently. In our recent frequency count, a greater proportion of our data comes from women the reduction of a once large gender difference.

We interpret this finding as reflecting a greater proportion of women in public e. Our forthcoming research also indicates that the most frequently recorded taboo words have remained fairly stable over the past 30 years. The Anglo-Saxon words we say are hundreds of years old, and most of the historically offensive sexual references are still at the top of the offensiveness list; they have not been dislodged by modern slang.

Frequency data must be periodically collected to answer questions about trends in swearing over time. When this question arises, we also frequently fail to acknowledge the impact of recently-enacted laws that penalize offensive language, such as sexual harassment and discrimination laws.

Workplace surveillance of telephone and email conversations also curbs our use of taboo language. We can answer this question by saying that all competent English speakers learn how to swear in English. Swearing generally draws from a pool of 10 expressions and occurs at a rate of about 0. However, it is not informative to think of how an average person swears: Contextual, personality, and even physiological variables are critical for predicting how swearing will occur. While swearing crosses socioeconomic statuses and age ranges and persists across the lifespan, it is more common among adolescents and more frequent among men.

Swearing is positively correlated with extraversion and is a defining feature of a Type A personality. It is negatively correlated with conscientiousness, agreeableness, sexual anxiety, and religiosity. These relationships are complicated by the range of meanings within the diverse group of taboo words.

Some religious people might eschew profanities religious terms , but they may have fewer reservations about offensive sexual terms that the sexually anxious would avoid. We have yet to systematically study swearing with respect to variables such as impulsivity or psychiatric conditions, e. These may be fruitful avenues along which to investigate the neural basis of emotion and self-control. Taboo words occupy a unique place in language because once learned, their use is heavily context driven.

While we have descriptive data about frequency and self reports about offensiveness and other linguistic variables, these data tend to come from samples that overrepresent young, White, middle-class Americans. A much wider and more diverse sample is needed to better characterize the use of taboo language to more accurately answer all of the questions here. There are some new swear words in the younger generation.

My father, a tee-totling christian could swear louder and longer than anyone I knew… without using a swear-word. We knew he was swearing, he knew he was swearing. If you were really that learned and sophisticated, you would not need to use those words in public sometimes with a tongue-in-cheek attitude. Many today would like less pollution of dirty language and anger—because there is always an element of anger in these words, even if it is hidden.

It only gives fuel to more smut. That is not objective at all. Where is this hidden element of anger you assert is always there? The article shows that it substitutes aggression among other positive effects. How can you conclude that it hides anger if the evidence shows it substitutes violence and reduces stress? I think you are steering a little bit away from measurable evidence here on this.

I do agree though with many people not needing to swear, but that could be from so many other reasons. Perhaps they have other methods and habits of stress management? Maybe the group of friends they are with also happen to swear less?

Maybe the geographical area swears less? Who knows. There are so many other clearly measurable bad things than to waste time with that. Profanity is the diction of the indolent, unburdening the perpetrator of lexical exertion. The syntactic versatility of the curse is boundless, conveniently obeying regular rules of inflection.

Like a furtive vandal, the obscenity nestles effortlessly anywhere into any sentence, destroying its nuance. Hardly a brain cell need be inducted to create an offending phrase. Rather than expend energy selecting the precise noun, verb, or adjective that accurately embodies intent, the debauchee resorts to the makeshift swear. Swearing ruins language and stains those engaging in it with the mark of sloth and doltishness. For this research, I think it is important to understand, not only the meaning of the word, but also the sound of it.

The shape and movement words bring into our minds can affect the way we feel about it. Many people can easily become desensitized to the words, whereas others might cringe to them the same way they cringe to certain undesirable sounds. It would be an interesting study to see the effects of different sounds on the brain and its relation to language. Nice point about the sounds…tone, texture, rhythm, etc. I been thinking bout this for a long-a time….

It would be interesting to study whether people who are more sensitive to sound are also more negatively effected by swear words. Could these two tendencies—a trend toward having just one syllable and another toward that one syllable being closed—be part of what makes profane words sound profane?

We can start to answer this by splitting our data in a different way—based not on how many letters a word is spelled with but on how many syllables it has and whether those syllables are closed.

When we do that, we find that not just the three- and four-letter words are closed monosyllables; so are seven of the sixteen five-letter words, like balls, bitch, prick, and whore, but not Jesus or pussy. In all, thirty-eight of the eighty-four words on the list are one syllable long, and thirty-six of these or 95 percent are closed. How does this ratio compare to the words of English more generally? It turns out that whereas 95 percent of our profane monosyllabic words are closed syllables, that number drops down to 81 percent when you look at nonprofane words, which is significantly lower.

You can probably find some profane open monosyllables. Like, potentially, ho, lay, poo, and spoo. These are good candidates. Maybe you can come up with one or two more.

But consider: boob, bung, butt, chink, cooch, coon, damn, dong, douche, dump, felch, FOB, gook, gyp, hebe, hell, jap, jeez, jizz, knob, mick, MILF, mong, muff, nads, nards, nip, poon, poop, pube, pud, puke, puss, queef, quim, schlong, slant, slope, smeg, snatch, spank, spooge, spunk, taint, tard, THOT, toss, twink, vag, wang, and wop.

Run the numbers again with these new open and closed monosyllabic words, and you still have upward of nine out of ten profane monosyllables that are closed.

Do English speakers think that closed monosyllables sound more profane than open monosyllables? There are different ways to figure this out. When English speakers invent new, fictional swearwords, do they tend to be closed?

For instance, when English-speaking fantasy and science fiction writers invent new profanity in imaginary languages, what do those words sound like? Not all are monosyllabic, but they all end with closed syllables. Just by way of speculation, the open syllable might have been selected because the target audience of the movie appears to have been quite young it was rated PG , and so a more profane-sounding fictional profanity could have felt too strong.