Cursing and the bloody class struggle
Or, who swore it better
The bleeding has stopped. According to a recent analysis of how the British swear, use of the adjective bloody in everyday speech has dropped 80% since the 1990s. What was once England’s most frequently used curse word has been supplanted by the F in WTF.
What explains this clotting of the national artery? Transatlantic homogenization is an obvious answer. To Shaw’s suggestion that England and America are two countries divided by a common language, today’s speakers respond: eff that. The sheer versatility of the f-bomb levels all competitors, as Malcolm Tucker has proven.
And who’s doing today’s cussing? Age-wise, it’s pretty much as expected: Profanity peaks in early adulthood. What better way to show that you’re no longer a child than to use adults-only language? Once you have kids, though, the vulgar tongue gets rolled up. So the fact that parenting years are happening later than they used to is why modern swearing continues into the early thirties.
More interesting is the socio-economic shift in verbal obscenity. The difference between the working class and the middle class was once how they spoke. Dockworkers spoke like, well, dockworkers (something about that salty air, perhaps) while no matter how annoying the printer jams, the Dilberts of the world have to keep it buttoned down.
However, this research suggests the blue collars no longer speak in blue streaks, while the white collars are dingier than they used to be. In a chart, you can see the first two pink bars are about equal:
Dr. Robbie Love, the researcher behind this work, was at a loss to explain why this might be. “For the working class frequency to be so low in the 2010s data is unexpected and difficult to explain based on the wealth of research on the use of swearing among this group,” he wrote.
Because this comes from the country that invented the class system, it’s worth looking up the ladder. When viewed through the lens of the “social grade” system, Love reports that junior managers traditionally swore less than manual workers — and less than the senior managers and executives above them. The rationale, as per previous research, is that they want to “appear closer to what they perceive to be the norms” of executive behaviour. They don’t realize that occupants of both the boardroom and the warehouse are speaking a coarser language.
Which calls to mind The Gervais Principle:
The philosophy behind this trenchant corporate analysis is well worth reading in full, but the nut of it is that the middle layer is the worst place to be. The full exegesis uses the characters of The Office to explain the system and the logical read is that, if you can’t run the place, being a “loser” in the context of the cubicle is actually the best role. Losers actually have rich outer lives; they don’t care about the mission-vision-values-BS of a company that in turn, doesn’t care about them.
So here’s a Marxist theory of how Old Blighty swears: It used to be that low-status jobs rewarded you with the freedom to talk dirty, but in the last 20 years these workers have softened their language to be more like their mid-status neighbours. Meanwhile, the rich have continued swearing like the cast of Succession.
As income inequality grows, so does insult inequality — and that’s a bloody shame. The solution: More profanity across the classes, a universal basic invective. Otherwise, the workers of the world will have no effs left to give.
Quick quips; lightning
“A footman may swear but he cannot swear like a lord. He can swear as often, but can he swear with equal decency, propriety, and judgment?”
— Jonathan Swift
“Take not God’s name in vain; select a time when it will have effect.”
— Ambrose Bierce
“A foreign swear word is practically inoffensive except to the person who has learned it early in life and knows its social limits.”
— Paul Theroux
And speaking of...
The vulgar rich:
Creative insults:
Like all previous issues, GWQ No. 119 can be safely read to young children and/or dockworkers. Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting is “just the book to give your sister if she’s a loud, dirty, boozy girl,” as Dylan Thomas memorably said of Flann O’Brien’s At Swim Two-Birds. Swear an oath on the❤️ below.