Terry Prone: From Ivana Bacik to Donald Trump, salty language has its place in the lexicon

When she said sorry, she also said she was “sick of taking insults on cycling and abuse on cycling from deputies who believe that God above is in charge of the weather and who have no record of taking the climate crisis seriously". 

Go Ivana.

Not suggesting she should continue to do a Joe Biden (remember his “Oh, shut up, man” to Trump in a debate?) but letting fly makes her much more exciting and interesting, as opposed to reasonably stating her opposition on an issue.

Coincidentally with Ivana’s apology, the Examiner informed me about the ticking off letter, which had been handed in at the paper’s HQ. When you’re as long in journalism as I am, you’ve received many of what used to be called “green ink letters” telling you that God will strike you dead for whatever you have most recently written. For some reason, the senders, who tended to pseudonyms and failure to include their address, tended to use green ink. This particular letter did not. Plus it was signed, had an address and an email address. It was also brief and to the point. I was to stop being profane in my columns.

In one recent column, I used the F-word, carefully putting asterisks between the first and last consonants. I am assuming, because we didn’t converse about this, that the subeditor decided it was ridiculous to put little stars into a word to — what? Confuse the reader about what was actually intended?

Quite rightly, the asterisks were amputated and the F-word stood proud, thereby infuriating one reader into hand-writing and hand-delivering a letter of reproof, for which I thank them and assure them that due consideration was given to the issue.

Could I have removed the word? Well, it wasn’t my word. I was quoting someone who had used it and it gave a an authentic flavour to the quote. 

Fifty years ago, no journalist would have included it, even if its excision somewhat falsified a quotation. But fifty years ago, the F-word offended more people than it does today.

An early introduction to swearing

The first time I encountered it was when I joined the Abbey Theatre School of Acting at 16. I walked into a wall of swear words, including from an aspiring actress who described her errant boyfriend as “a shit on a swing-swong”. 

The director of the school, an appalling person, started mad every day and was volcanic by coffee break, constantly yelling “For Chrissakes!” at us students. 

Since he had no teeth due to his habit, when binge-drinking, of first putting his false teeth in his pocket and subsequently adding a lit pipe which reduced the dentures to pink lumps of distorted plastic, this verbal evaluation sounded like a snorkel-swimmer shouting through a sponge. Inevitably, we imitated him mercilessly and, just as inevitably, the “dirty words” we were hearing surfaced in our conversations at home.

This got me into trouble with my mother, whose view was that “using dirty words” was not something upwardly-mobile middle class people did, according to behaviour authorities like Nancy Mitford. The implication was that if you swore, you were less educated.

Classist myth about swearing

In fact, this class-based assumption isn’t true. 

It was disproven by a linguistics researcher in the UK named Robbie Love. At Lancaster University, Love, in a big study, looked at the connections between swearing and — inter alia — class/education. As an exercise in tedium, this one’s up there with the worst, because he measured the number of dirty or swear words used in more than 10,000 conversational words and didn’t find much difference between middle class and working class subjects. The people most likely to turn the air around them blue were university students, who swore a lot more than either of the other two groups. This isn’t the only study finding that graduates at managerial level are the group most likely to swear.

My mother never swore and was appalled whenever I did in her hearing. She always believed that people who swore did so because they had an impoverished vocabulary, although the Lancaster University research just mentioned was later to prove her wrong. But even back then her belief was questionable when applied to actors, who, even though they’re often as thick as planks, nevertheless tend to have words at will, those words borrowed from Shakespeare, Shaw, or Wilde, who, you will acknowledge, are pretty good for stealing from.

In her new book, Polite: The Art of Communication at Home, at Work and in Public [Welbeck, 2024] University of Nottingham associate professor of sociolinguistics Louise Mullany explodes the myth of impoverished vocabulary as causative of swearing.

“Swearing on account of language poverty is a powerful stereotype,” she writes, “and one that frequently appears as a form of classism and intellectual snobbery in popular media. It is most often used as a form of prejudice to denigrate and dismiss lower-class speakers, particularly working-class men. However, when we look at the scientific research and evidence, there is no data to support this argument whatsoever. Instead, what we find is a much more complex picture of swearing, taboo and politeness.

“US psychologists Kristin Jay and Timothy Jay found that speakers with the greatest language fluency tend to swear more, with a wider range of vocabulary, as swearing acts as a useful form of self-expression. 

Those people who did not score highly on language fluency also scored poorly on their ability to swear.

How that applies to Donald Trump, we don’t know. 

Donald Trump has been described by The New York Times as “The Profanity President” after the newspaper did its own counting exercise on one of his relatively short speeches, finding in it a “hell”, an “ass”, and a pair of “bullshits”. He once addressed the nation of China as “you motherfuckers” and called El Salvador and Haiti “shithole countries”.

Stephen Fry has the last ****ing word 

El Salvador and Haiti no doubt found this as offensive, if not more offensive, than my correspondent found the language in my column, but the fact is that the Trump faithful would have loved it, seeing him as a man who talked to them in their own language, rather than talking down to them — or past them — using more abstruse terms.

Trump and Stephen Fry couldn’t be less like each other, yet both swear, and Fry comes out fighting when the old “impoverished language” trope is used.

“The sort of twee person who thinks swearing is in any way a sign of lack of education or a lack of verbal interest,” he maintains, “is just a fucking lunatic.” No asterisks…