This past Fourth of July, I had an interesting experience. I was sitting with a group of girls at an annual family party. We were exchanging stories and enjoying the beautiful weather when one of the girls spilt her drink all over the table. Out of surprise and frustration, she dropped an exacerbated F-bomb right as our friend’s adorable grandmother, dressed head to toe as the Statue of Liberty, was shuffling past us. The girl proceeded to apologize profusely for using such disrespectful and foul language in front of her. Her response? ”F*ck it!”
After the hysterical laughter subsided from hearing Mrs. Sullivan, a 75-year-old woman dressed as the Statue of Liberty drop the F-bomb, she went on to explain why “you should never, ever, ever, apologize for swearing in front of me.”
In the early 1960’s, she participated in a study on women swearing. The study required her to use profanity, specifically the word f*ck, daily to test its effects physically and socially. Before she started the study, she had never sworn before because it was unbecoming and frowned upon by the nuns at her Catholic high school, nevermind swearing daily and in public. What was concluded from the study was that the blood pressure and stress levels of the girls who refrained from swearing were higher than those who swore. However, she got “so much sh!t from my mother,” who was appalled by her language, but Mrs. Sullivan never turned back. Her parting advice was to never apologize for swearing in front of her again.
Growing up in a more conservative atmosphere, I tried my damndest to avoid using profanities. My parents however, never abstained from swearing in front of my brother and I (after a certain age, of course) but I still did everything I could to work around using those words. It wasn’t until the end of my sophomore year of high school that I began to slowly integrate swearing into my vocabulary. At first it felt foreign and unnatural, awkward even, to swear out loud, but eventually, swearing became second nature. I added them in unnecessary places, at first to enhance my point but eventually they just became sentence fillers.
Now, I find my vernacular is laced with profanities. I drop an F-bomb when I stub my toe, think that being called a bad@ss is high praise, refer to my friends as my b*tches, and more often than not, you can find me looking at my to-do list and muttering “sh!t” under my breath. For me, these words no longer hold the emotional weight that they carry for some people, which is why I can use them so freely.
I know there is a time and a place for certain types of language, but as a college student who spends the majority of my time surrounded by like-minded young adults who swear just as much or more than I do, I find that swearing is a part of our natural language. Using profanity does not mean that I have a weak or limited vocabulary, or that I am too narrow-minded to express my feelings with a more descriptive word choice, it just means that I am a product of my generation and we f*cking love swearing!