Is swearing bad language?

BBC guidelines say:

"language that causes most offence includes

• sexual swearwords,
• terms of racist abuse,
• terms of sexual and sexist abuse or abuse referring to sexuality,
• pejorative terms relating to illness or disabilities,
• casual or derogatory use of holy names or religious words,
• words for defecation

Swearing is said to have started as "a form of 'word magic', connected to religion, in early civilisations. People were more likely to believe in divine beings who had the power to punish them. So people called on divine beings in order to curse people they didn't like. This became a tabooed use of language, and sometimes, just saying the name of the divine being was tabooed." (Paul Baker, Lancaster University)

Certainly swearing relies on being forbidden, a taboo. Whether the word refers to the genitals, a religion or to someone's race or colour, the intention is to shock and to offend. Exceptions to this are:

• the stimulus response swearing such as when we hurt ourselves (where the response is an outlet for our anger or pain)

• by speakers who habitually pepper their speech with curses to such an extent that the power to shock has been lost.

• people suffering from Tourette's syndrome seem to have damage to the part of the brain which inhibits them from swearing and beaving anti-socially.

Historical uses such as "'sblood" (God's blood), "blimey" (God blind me), "struth" (God's truth), "the devil take you" have lost their power but many remain, often described as "low colloquial" in dictionaries of historical slang.

I do not list current swear words here because I prefer to follow the custom and practice of using asterisks (f***ing c**t) to represent such words rather than offend readers. In fact most people seem to know these words already so 'the asterisk convention', employed even by early editions of Partridge's great "Dictionary of Colloquial and Unconventional English," is slightly absurd. Nevertheless, swearing has a powerful linguistic and emotional role in expressing shock and to repeat such offensive language paradoxically both reduces its power and risks offending readers.

Gratuitous swearing such as that by Gordon Ramsay in his TV series Hell's Kitchen (it is said he swore at least 5,000 times during the series) seems unnecessary to many, offensive to some yet Ofcom declined to uphold viewers' objections. It seems that the series traded on its notoriety and considered viewers should simply switch off if they didn't want to hear him swear.

The traditional phrase "sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never harm me" may be a helpful playground riposte, but it is clearly untrue. Words describing other colours, races and creeds may be "just descriptions" to the speaker yet may be highly insulting to the receiver. And it is in this that the power of the language lies. "Black" or its variations "negro" and "nigra" may accurately describe dark skin, but hurled with the clear intention of insulting someone with black skin it is painful abuse - and abuse of each other is not tolerated in a civilised society.

One interesting example is the word "bugger." Amongst its several meanings the SOED (1973) describes it as "a coarse term of abuse" and The Penguin Dictionary of Historical Slang (based on Partridge 1961) gives "a strong expletive." However the word, originally from "Bulgarian" and meaning "sodomite" is now in more common use. A series of education books for teachers is titled "Getting the Buggers to ..." (Learn, Write, Behave etc - Continuum publishing) and its acceptability was actually testing in court and found to be appropriate. Similarly, The Times of June 28th 2006 has on the front page of its Times 2 supplement the headline "A Place in History? Bugger History," quoting Denis Healey, and echoing the alleged last words of George V. Again, if we apply the test of intention, we find it forceful but not obscene. See this article from The Register about bugger as a mild profanity.

Sometimes a group adopts a term of abuse as a badge of courage and defiance. 'Quaker' 'gay' and 'black' were originally insults, yet were adopted by those groups to describe themselves. The name "The Old Contemptibles" was adopted by British troops in 1914, supposedly following a comment made by the German Kaiser, Wilhelm II when, hearing that German forces were being held up in France exclaimed his exasperation of "Sir John French's contemptible little army."

Describing a woman by using a word for her genitals diminishes her as a person because it reduces her to a sexual organ; referring to a person by a disparaging word for their race may help focus anger during war (The Hun, the Bosch, Ities, Japs and Nips) but is unlikely to gain their respect during peace. Indeed during war the simplification of national stereotypes is designed to perpetuate antagonism well after war has finished.

So swearing is usually insulting, certainly discriminatory and abusive, and is designed to show how little we care about the subject. Mostly it is unnecessary, best kept for the really emotional or painful moment instead of overused at every speech act. In that sense it is "bad language" because it is intended to hurt the listener.

On the other hand, from a purely linguistic perspective all we can do is to observe and describe it, because whether the language is "bad" or "good" involves a value judgment which is social rather than linguistic. The language here is doing the job it was intended to do - to hurt, insult and stir up anger. We may not like it, we may decrie it, but linguistically it is very effective.