The psychology of swearing as an act of love. Is swearing a sign that you actually care about people??
"You utter bastard." "You daft cunt." "You absolute twat." "Cock!"
Said to the right person, in the right tone and in the right context these aren't insults at all.
They're some of the warmest, most human things you can say to someone. And it turns out there's a body of psychological research explaining why.
Here at Damn Fine Greetings, we think a lot about how to use swear words with love and we build that into our greetings cards and gifts.
We write a lot about the history of swear words on this blog and we love how language evolves.
This time we wanted to look at something a little different: what's actually going on in our heads when swearing isn't an act of aggression but is an act of affection.
What does the psychology say about swearing and closeness?
The starting point for most researchers in this field is a simple observation: swearing is a taboo, and taboos carry risk.
If you say a forbidden word in front of someone, you're taking a small social gamble. You're trusting them not to be offended and take action, whether that's rejecting you as a potential friend, or reporting you to HR.
A major 2022 review of the field, published in the academic journal Lingua by the psychologists and linguists Karyn Stapleton, Kristy Beers Fägersten, Richard Stephens and Catherine Loveday have decades of research on exactly this.
Their conclusion: swearing's offensiveness is precisely what gives it social power.
Because it's forbidden, swearing around someone becomes a strong signal. The message being, 'I trust you enough to swear in front of you.' The researchers describe this as a way of marking informal, relaxed and closer relationships where social distance has already been reduced.
Other linguists describe swearing between close friends or partners as a kind of 'verbal handshake'. It's an act of linguistic risk-taking that only makes sense, and only lands well, between people who have bonded and already trust each other.
Is swearing actually a sign of honesty?
Here's a genuinely surprising strand of research.
In 2017, a team of researchers from Stanford, Cambridge and Hong Kong, Gilad Feldman, Huiwen Lian, Michal Kosinski and David Stillwell, published a study called 'Frankly, We Do Give a Damn: The Relationship Between Profanity and Honesty'.
Across three separate studies (a lab experiment, an analysis of over 70,000 Facebook posts, and a look at integrity indexes across US states) they found a consistent pattern: people who swore more tended to lie less.
"We found a consistent positive relationship between profanity and honesty; profanity was associated with less lying and deception at the individual level, and with higher integrity at the society level."
Their theory was that swearing is often simply an unfiltered expression of genuine feeling. And if you're not censoring your language, you may also be less likely to be censoring the truth.
In fairness, this finding hasn't gone unchallenged.
A group of psychologists published a formal comment shortly after, arguing that part of the original study's method - measuring 'honesty' via a personality questionnaire's built-in lie-detection scale - may have been measuring something closer to 'unfiltered' than 'honest'.
It's a good reminder that even well-publicised psychology findings are rarely the final word. But the broader idea that dropping the polite filter of 'proper' language can go hand in hand with dropping other filters too. And the people we're most emotionally honest with are usually the people we swear in front of.
Think about it. Who do you swear in front of?
We bet that you have been at your most vulnerable with these people, that you trust them deeply, and that you have a close connection with them.
Why swearing together can bring people closer (and even help with pain)
Some of the most well-known research on swearing comes from Dr Richard Stephens at Keele University. After a memorable incident with a hammer and a garden shed, he decided to study what swearing does to us physically.
In the famous 2009 study published in the journal NeuroReport, Stephens and colleagues found that people could keep their hand submerged in ice water for significantly longer while repeating a swear word than while repeating a neutral word, and reported feeling less pain while doing it.
The likely explanation is that swearing triggers a small fight-or-flight response. That shared vulnerability (wincing through pain, or a stressful moment, together, and reaching for the same forbidden words) is itself a bonding experience.
It's the same reason swear words show up so often in shared jokes, shared crises, and the shared retellings of terrible days: they mark the moments that we went through something painful together.
The affectionate insult: when a swear word becomes a term of endearment
If you've bought our sweary greetings cards or read our other articles on individual swear words, you'll have noticed a pattern.
Almost every swear word, from arse, bastard, bellend, bugger, cunt, twat, cock and many more have second lives as terms of affection.
'You lucky bastard', 'Queen of Cunts', 'Glorious Bellend', 'Cockwomble' are all friendly terms. In Australia and New Zealand, 'good cunt' is apparently a genuine compliment.
Linguists call this kind of thing a 'positive politeness strategy'. This means using an act that looks, on the surface, rude or threatening, is actually doing the very opposite. It's signalling closeness, membership of a group and a shared identity.
The 2008 paper 'The Pragmatics of Swearing' by psychologists Timothy Jay and Kristin Janschewitz, published in the Journal of Politeness Research, is one of the foundational pieces of research here.
Their key point is that the very same swear word can express insult, affection, humour or simple emphasis. And that working out which one is happening depends entirely on the relationship between speaker and listener, not on the word itself.
That's really the heart of it.
A swear word doesn't carry a fixed emotional charge. It's a blank, powerful bit of language that takes on the shape of whoever's using it, and who they're using it with.
From a stranger, swear words can wound. From someone you love, swearing can be one of the most disarming, funny, unpretentious ways of them saying that they see you exactly as they are, they love you and that they're not going anywhere.
Which is, if you think about it, most of what a greeting card is trying to do anyway. We just skip the flowery, shit design bit and get straight to 'You glorious bellend'.
And then you send the swears to the people you love. It's science!!
We hope this article and others we have written helps you understand why swearing isn't necessarily a bad thing, the psychology behind it, and why words matter.
More from the Damn Fine Greetings team about words and linguistics
Bellend - a history. The youngest swear word in the family?
Arse - a history. Is it the oldest swear word still standing?
Bollocks - a history. Is it the hardest working swear word in use today?
Why do British people swear so much more than Canadians (and many other countries)?
What are the origins of swear words / curse words? And why are some words taboo?
The Damn Fine Greetings Swear Word Quiz
Lost for words - what to write in a greetings card when you don't know what to say