by Emma Byrne
One afternoon on the packing line, Stuart was suffering under a barrage of insults from Ernest. Ernest kept insisting that Stuart was a lightweight and that he, Ernest, always managed to take on far heavier duties.
“Well, fucking get on with it then, you lazy cunt,” Stuart shot back.
The workers around them made the kind of noise usually associated with mechanics and plumbers—the noise that is the universal signal for “this is going to cost you.” Ernest muttered an expletive-laden insult but walked away. Anyone unfamiliar with Janet Holmes’s research might have advised Stuart to watch his step after that, but instead he found himself being invited to the pub that very evening and from that point on he was part of Ernest’s “in group.”
Swearing really can break down barriers. But of course, even among workmates swearing and abuse aren’t always taken well. What really matters is whether or not the joke has a “side” to it. Barbara Plester describes this type of swearing as a “barbed message.” For example, when one of the participants in her study, Kara, didn’t buy Alf tickets for a company cinema trip he was upset at being left out. He burst into the room with the words, “You’re a bitch,” and later when he left repeated, “Karl came through for me [with tickets], but you’re still a bitch.”
The thing that sets Alf’s outburst apart from the other banter—the reason why Kara might have felt offended by it even though she reveled in being called the evil remote-control woman by Alf—is because Alf genuinely was upset with her and wanted to let her know. By disguising his outburst as just part of the usual office joking he not only vents his anger, but also is able to wave off any comeback by claiming that he’s “only joking.” Barbara says that these outbursts are a way of the complainer trying to eat their cake and have it too, linguistically speaking.
We do that here in the UK, too. Dr. Michael Haugh from Griffith University in Australia and Dr. Derek Bousfield from the University of Central Lancashire compared what they called “jocular mockery” between British and Australian groups of men.4 Brits in particular use pointed swearing to puncture what looks like an inflated ego.
The Importance of Taking the Piss
As Kate Fox observes, in her funny and incisive work of social observation Watching the English:
In most other cultures, taking oneself too seriously may be a fault, but it is not a sin—a bit of self-important pomposity or overzealous earnestness is tolerated, perhaps even expected, in discussion of important work or business matters. In the English workplace, however, the hand-on-heart gusher and the pompous pontificator are mercilessly ridiculed—if not to their faces, then certainly behind their backs.5
This type of ridicule usually consists of “taking the piss”—a particular kind of barbed mockery that is meant to stop people getting too cocky. In the UK, boasting about your achievements is in extremely poor taste. The only socially acceptable way to draw attention to your triumphs is with a bit of self-directed piss-taking. If you don’t do that, rest assured that your mates will. In a transcript that Haugh and Bousfield call “Media Whore,” they document the taking down a peg or two of a colleague who managed to get himself on television. This colleague, Simon, took part in the Great North Run dressed as one of the Three Musketeers. His two colleagues—the other two musketeers—were also interviewed with him, but only Simon got a repeat broadcast. He makes the mistake of bragging about this.
“Fucking four times on the fucking telly,” he laughs. His mates laugh too and his colleague David replies with an incredulous but appreciative “Fucking ’ell.” But then Simon goes on and commits the faux pas‡ of making himself out to be a bit special:
“An’ they only played my bit. They didn’t play the lads’, did they?” Big mistake.
“You big-headed bastard,” breaks in David, making the lads laugh. “You big-headed fucking bastard.”
Simon joins in the laughter at this point and realizes he has to qualify his boast. He decides to take a clever route, simultaneously saying that it was the message, rather than himself, that was so popular, and making his colleagues feel the glow of a bit of regional patriotism:
“Yeah ’cos I were all like that ‘Good old North East.’” The lads laugh and the crisis is averted.
Banter can be silly and inclusive or it can be barbed and meaningful. The fun kind is generally accepted, it would seem, but Barbara’s research shows that some people don’t respond well to banter even when it doesn’t have a barbed edge. Cultural differences can cause big problems.
With forty-five employees, the company that Barbara calls “BytesBiz” in her paper was the largest of the three that she studied.§ Of the three it was also the one that had the most gentle banter. It still wasn’t gentle enough for new employee Brenda. At the very beginning of her time there she took a colleague, Cathy, to task for telling a customer he was “being a wanker today.” Apparently the customer and Cathy both thought this was hilarious—it was part of their ongoing, jokey-friendly relationship—but Brenda was furious. She gave Cathy a telling off for behaving in a way that, to Brenda at least, was completely unacceptable.
Cathy, who’d been with the company for three years at that point, took umbrage at being reprimanded by a newcomer. The incident is so well preserved in BytesBiz employee legend that five different interviewees independently told Barbara how pissed off (or “perturbed” as Mr. O’Connor would prefer) they’d been that Brenda had dared to criticize their way of interacting with each other. In the end, Brenda left the company. She described her time there as being “a square peg in a round hole” and described the company as a “zoo.” Even though Brenda was never the butt of the jokes, she found the whole atmosphere toxic. As Janet Holmes discovered, resisting the swearing culture of an organization can really mark you as an outsider.
In her research, Barbara Plester also found that insults and humor only circulated in earnest among the general staff—managers didn’t usually join in with that sort of jocular abuse. The problem, explains Barbara, is that if you have a superior insulting or swearing at a subordinate, that’s where the trouble really starts. They could make self-deprecating jokes, but the danger of making a joke that seriously insults someone (or worse, that nobody finds funny) was seen as too big a risk to take.
A study from the United States in 1982 showed the opposite effect, however. Managers made jokes about their employees with impunity but employees were much more circumspect. I asked Barbara whether she thought this difference was due to the distance between Antipodean and North American management styles, or because times have changed over the last thirty years.
“I think maybe things have changed. Some of the managers I spoke to were so careful they were scared to abuse their power with their employees so they encouraged their employees to joke but yeah . . .” She trails off. Managers, it seems, don’t have the same liberty as their employees.
Nevertheless, managers do seem to have an influence on the boisterousness of a workplace, even if they aren’t setting a direct example. One of the three companies was run by two men who were, Barbara says, much gentler and quieter in their own interactions than the managers of the other two companies. People still took the piss, but they did it in a way that wasn’t as profanity-strewn or raucous as the other two companies.
Getting Your Damn Point Across —Swearing as Rhetoric
So swearing, when used reciprocally and in good fun, might help to bond a team, but does swearing really help you get things done? In their paper “Indecent Influence,” Dr. Cory Scherer and Dr. Brad Sagarin from the Northern Illinois University decided to test the use of a single, mild swear word on the way in which a message is received.6
Scherer and Sagarin knew from previous research carried out in the 1990s that—at least when we hear a message we disagree with—we tend to react with disgust and reject both the messenger and the message. They wondered whether the same effect held true for a message that the audience was sympathetic to. They showed a video of a speech to eighty-eight o
f their undergraduate students individually. The speech was about lowering tuition fees at a neighboring university. What the students didn’t know was that each person saw one of three different versions of the speech at random. One version included a mild swear word (“Lowering of tuition is not only a great idea, but damn it, also the most reasonable one”), one opened with it (“Damn it, I think lowering tuition is a great idea”), and one had no swearing at all. The actor delivering the speech did his best to keep every other part of his delivery the same between speeches.
The students who saw the video with the swearing at the beginning or in the middle rated the speaker as more intense, but no less credible, than the ones who saw the speech with no swearing. What’s more, the students who saw the videos with the swearing were significantly more in favor of lowering tuition fees after seeing the video than the students who didn’t hear the swear word.
Research published in January 2017 suggests that the students might have been making a snap decision about the speaker’s honesty: swearing is positively correlated with honesty.7 Dr. David Stillwell, a lecturer in Big Data Analytics at the University of Cambridge, together with colleagues from the Netherlands, the United States, and Hong Kong, studied the relationship between swearing and lying in two ways. Firstly, they asked 276 people to list all the swear words that they knew and used, and also gave them a test called “the Lie scale.” The Lie scale is a 12-question form that asks for yes or no answers to questions like, “If you say you will do something, do you always keep your promise no matter how inconvenient it might be?” and “Are all your habits good and desirable ones?”
According to Dr. Stillwell and colleagues, “In these examples, positive answers are considered unrealistic and therefore most likely a lie.” Honest people tend to score quite poorly on the questionnaire, because, let’s face it, who among us has only good and desirable habits? The team found that people who said they swore less, and who claimed to know fewer swear words, were also likely to be either surprising paragons of virtue or pretty big fibbers.
But maybe these participants were just lying about their swearing use as well as their saintly habits? To rule that out, the team turned to social media. They studied over 73,000 Facebook profiles and found that people who swore more on their feeds also tended to use linguistic constructions that indicate honesty.8 For example, research shows that we use “I” and “me” far less often when we’re being deceptive. We also prefer simpler words, because lying takes up valuable mental processing. Dr. Stillwell and the team compared the rates of profanity on Facebook profiles against the likelihood of a person using dissembling language. The greater the frequency of swearing, the less likely it was that a person would use dissembling language.
However, if you ask people what they think about swearing, they tend to insist that it diminishes the speaker’s credibility and persuasiveness, especially if the speaker is a woman. Doctors Eric Rassin and Simone van der Heijden at Erasmus University in the Netherlands quizzed seventy-six people to see whether they thought someone was more or less likely to be telling the truth if they swore, without giving them examples. Of those that expressed a preference, more than twice as many said that swearing makes people sound unreliable.9
I asked James Saunders, solicitor managing director at Saunders Law Limited, whether this was an effect he’d come across in his line of work:
A lot of people who later come to be tried are quite grumpy at the point of arrest. It’s always a matter of some amusement for a well-educated counsel to say, “I put it to you, Fred Jones, that you said, ‘You’re a fucking cunt . . .’” In my experience, the police don’t mind that being read out in court—in general they think it works to the disadvantage of the defendant.
But are they right? Rassin and van der Heijden followed up their questions about swearing and reliability with some examples. They crafted testimonies from “witnesses” and “defendants” in an imaginary robbery. They gave the following statement to thirty-five women in their early twenties and asked them to rate it from 1 (unbelievable) to 10 (convincing):
No, God damn it. As I have stated ten times, I have nothing to do with that. What is this all about? I have been here in this shitty room for almost two hours now. I want to go home, or I want to be allowed to talk to my attorney. What a fucking mess.
They then gave a different group of women an almost identical statement:
No. As I have stated ten times, I have nothing to do with that. What is this all about? I have been here in this room for almost two hours now. I want to go home, or I want to be allowed to talk to my attorney. What a mess.
The denial that contained the swearing was rated as significantly more believable than the denial without swearing. Is this the intensifier effect that Professor Holmes talked about? Or is it simply because we imagine ourselves also swearing up a storm if we were ever wrongfully arrested? The researchers tried again with statements from the imaginary victim of the crime, one with swearing as shown below, and one without.
That asshole pulled my bag out of my hands, and ran away. He even dragged me several meters, because I would not let go of my bag. God damn it. And who is going to pay for all that? I suggest that Mister Dirtbag does.
This time a group of fifty-four college-age men and women rated the statements and again the statement with swearing came out as being more strongly believed. How does this square with the experience of James Saunders, that swearing in a courtroom doesn’t tend to do anyone any favors? When I read James these examples, he said they sounded nothing like the kinds of testimony that a jury would actually hear. For a start they are too fluent.
“What you got to realize is that people talk rubbish most of the time. Just listen to tape recordings; the most commonly used word is ‘uh.’ The statements in the study sound very artificial to me.” It turns out that the kind of swearing that college professors invent in the safety of their own lab is very different from what you or I might say in the stressful environment of a police interview room.
I ask James whether he’d ever encourage a client to let a little artful swearing slip into their indignant protestations of innocence. It turns out that watching courtroom dramas is poor preparation for a meeting with someone at the top of the legal profession as he puts me right in no uncertain terms:
I certainly don’t allow my clients to swear when giving evidence in court. Judges and magistrates have to live in the real world where words are used that they’d hope not to hear in their own living room, but a courtroom is an artificial environment. I advise my clients that yes, it’s an artificial environment but they should respect it on its own terms: wear trousers with a crease in and a shirt and tie, for example.
As James patiently points out, however, trials cost a lot of money and in reality judges tend not to call them to a halt for a bit of bad language: “If you use bad language you get ticked off by the judge: ‘Please moderate your language, Mr. Smith.’”
Going too far the other way can be worse:
There’s a danger if people put on airs and graces—this is something that happens particularly with young coppers who try to come across like butter wouldn’t melt in their mouths. But if [what you say] sounds a bit false then that’s not a good impression to make on a judge or a jury. If you’re caught out once, there’s a high probability that they won’t believe another word you say.
That’s not to say that members of the legal profession have never reciprocated. When a repeat offender told Her Honor Judge Patricia Lynch QC, “You’re a cunt and I’m not,” she replied, “Well, you’re a bit of a cunt yourself. Being offensive to me doesn’t make things better at all.” After spending nearly five months deliberating the case, the Judicial Conduct Investigations Office finally decided that Ms. Lynch wouldn’t face disciplinary action, given that she had made an unreserved apology and promised never to do it again. Which I think is a shame because, to me at least, her response felt like a bit of honesty among all the ritual.
Mr. Saunders doesn’t think that swearing in court will catch on, no matter what we learn from studies within the narrow confines of the psychology lab. When it comes to swearing, James thinks we should focus on the message and not the manner: “I’m not convinced that swearing makes anything more or less believable. Everybody knows some people swear—[whose] every third word is ‘fucking.’ People don’t automatically think, ‘I don’t believe him,’ but I think it’s a shame that people don’t focus more on content rather than expletives.”
James has a point. We tend to be emotionally affected by swearing—in fact, later chapters will show that our brains are wired so that we can’t avoid being emotionally affected by it. But quite often swearing is a coded message; it either tells us that something is a joke, or warns us that we’ve overstepped a mark. As we’ll see in the next chapter, this is probably something we’ve been doing since we first developed speech.
This emotional impact might explain why Ginette, the Power Rangers’ team leader, was so extremely successful as a manager. She knew that a good dose of swearing can keep people on their toes or pull them back into line. She knew that when her team swore she shouldn’t take it personally. She also knew when not to swear; her individual discussions with her team showed that she was an ally and she never used swearing to whinge about her team to other managers. We know that fluency in swearing is positively correlated with fluency overall: contrary to popular belief, people who can confidently use the widest range of vocabulary also tend to know (and deploy) the most swear words.10 Ginette is a brilliant example of this: she is fluent in three registers: English, Samoan, and swearing. If we want to be successful when attempting persuasion or bonding we should all learn to be as adept at swearing as she is.