She doesn’t live in Dunedin where you can do this just by coming home to a cold house. Instead of swearing, she reckons she had to stop and think about how she actually felt because the feeling was usually more complicated than just a single word you could scream. She never went back to it and claims not swearing is, for her, a way of controlling her thoughts, trying to find the good.
"If you say, I’m going to make a point to find the good and to talk about the good, it very quickly becomes the truth of your life, that there is that goodness in your life," says Ann.
Well, let me share the things I learned when I stopped swearing.
Are you kidding?! Of course I didn’t stop f…... swearing. Swear words are a vital part of communication. We need them to properly express ourselves. Without swear words it would be impossible to clearly describe the rage you feel as a ratepayer when you see a councillor with menstrual pads stuck to his face sitting around the table responsible for the governance of the city.
Without some judicious expletives, I’d struggle to articulate my emotions when I see the Yorkshireman has used every teaspoon in the house and washed none of them. It’s completely impossible to talk about Trump without swearing, or people who call bird flu a "plandemic" and say the government will soon be rolling out "Jabcinda".
People who swear are more honest. In fact, a 2017 study found a link between people who used profanity and those who lied less. I once dated a narcissistic drug addict. He gave up swearing so his daughter wouldn’t learn any bad words. It was utterly performative. Every time he said "fudging" or "shoot" it was designed to make people think he was a good guy when he was really a manipulative, lying, stealing asshat with a mouth full of rotting teeth who’d sell his mother’s kidneys for a bag and probably already has.
Some people consider swearing to be vulgar and a sign of low breeding, when the real sign of low breeding is taking away women’s wage equality and not giving a stuff about nature. I always find the kind of people who do a wee moue of disgust when you drop an excellent swear are the same people for whom you have to clench your jaw together to stop yawning in their company.
Swearing is a sign of intelligence - being able to string together a double or even triple barrelled insult isn’t for dummies. Swearing shows verbal superiority. The English upper classes are brilliant at swearing even if they are by and large toffee-nosed, flat cap wearing perverts spawned by decades of incest.
Dropping an F-bomb improves pain tolerance, which is why I do it all the time on bike rides. It’s science. Cussing produces a stress response, increasing heart rate and breathing, prepping muscles for fight or flight. Simultaneously, there is another physiological reaction called an analgesic response, which makes the body more impervious to pain. However, doing too many swears lessens the effect, so save them for the hill climbs.
Swearing is responsible for all the beauty we see around us, as it’s centred in the right side of the brain, the creative side. Botticelli swore like a trooper.
Australians swear to greet their friends instead of saying "Hello". Some people swear for safety reasons.
Swear for good. Give people the finger. Let’s face it, swearing stops you from hitting people.
Look for the good in swearing and you’ll find it will become the truth of your life. Just don’t swear at work, "ferk" is for work. Shirt yeah I swear, just not there.
