July 31, 2023
Roache, a philosophy lecturer at Royal Holloway, University of London, debuts with an incisive investigation into how swearing “gets its power” to shock and offend. According to Roache, the “extent to which swearing is objectionable depends on context,” including tone of voice, the words that precede and follow the profanity, and the swearer’s identity (an average person’s curses are less likely to shock than an authority figure’s). Not all expletives are created equal; some are laden with connotations that render them especially insulting, including cunt, which historically “escalated to the status of swear word” because “women’s genitals... were regarded with distaste.” Later, she digs into such forms of censorship as sanitization, or using asterisks to obscure some or most of the letters of a swear—a practice that, she explains, serves as a mark of respect from writer to reader—and advises readers to more fairly judge others’ curses by “identify individual factors that make more or less offensive and... do not refer to swearers’ race, gender, accent,” as identity biases can skew perceptions of a swear’s egregiousness (for example, studies reveal that people are “more likely to view swearing as threatening when the swearer is a Black man compared to when the swearer is not a man or not Black”) . Marshaling a wide array of examples, from Bono’s use of “fucking brilliant” in a 2003 Golden Globes acceptance speech to Paul Robert Cohen’s 1968 imprisonment for wearing a jacket emblazoned with the words “Fuck the Draft,” Roache skillfully probes the complexities of profanity use and its relevance to decorum, identity, and power. This will intrigue linguists and potty-mouthed laypeople alike.