Cursing — is it bad or good? Depending on how, where and in what environment. It has been proven that in certain situations the use of swear words is good for the psyche and even helps in communication with other people. How?
Do you fight while driving? And when the mobile slips out of your hand and falls to the floor, or if the last bus left in front of your nose? I do. Moreover, I am ready to justify why in some situations it is much safer to swear and forget about the situation that caused anger in a minute than to keep feelings in yourself.
Of course, the code must be honored, as Ostap Bender said. And it is always important to express yourself according to the speech situation. Simply put, it is not customary to speak publicly about taboo words in society. But, in addition to profanity, there are enough other curses in the language. So, what gives us the use of swear words?
1. Release tension
We know that repressed emotions can harm the psyche and health. Moreover, bypassing awareness, they manifest themselves in actions. What does it mean? For example, a person got angry, suppressed his anger and decided to cook a salad. But the body is in tension, the hand with the knife makes an unnecessary movement — and a cut. Or someone held back his rage at the driver who cut him off, and the tension went into his leg — and pressed on the gas harder than necessary, hit someone’s bumper.
At the University of Kiel, an experiment was conducted with volunteers who held their hands in ice water. It turned out that those who were allowed to use swear words in the process could endure longer than the participants who endured the pain in silence.
Interestingly, no substitutions and false curses had such an effect. The psyche cannot be deceived, only certain words help to get rid of tension, the meaning of which is really perceived by us as “abusive”.
From childhood, we know that it is not good to pronounce them. Perhaps the relief that we feel after such an expression of emotions is connected with the sweet feeling of sin, violation of the taboo. We were driven out of ourselves, and we did not just express our experience: “Oh, how angry I am!”, But we performed some kind of aggressive action, choosing strong expressive words for this.
But don’t overuse it. Citing a recent study, clinical psychologist Lauren Soeyo argues that too much use of swear words in everyday life reduces their «therapeutic» effect. Simply put, if a person “talks obscenities”, then at an emotional moment these words will no longer help him get rid of excess negativity.
2. Express emotions
An experiment was carried out in 1966. The baby chimpanzee was raised as a deaf-mute child, teaching him sign language. In particular, by pointing to the primate’s feces, the researchers were able to teach it a word with the conventional meaning «dirty.»
After some time, in situations where other chimpanzees threw poop in anger, this male made do with a gesture to show the experimenter his displeasure. That is, he realized that it was possible to express anger without getting into a potentially dangerous fight.
We are higher primates and in the development of language we have advanced much further than this chimpanzee. We have a speech, and in the language of any nation there are abusive words and expressions. Perhaps it’s not bad at all that in many conflict situations, we can use them to indicate our feelings, rather than waving our fists and throwing excrement.
3. Feel close
Strange as it may sound, such an effect is also possible. Most still do not allow themselves to swear in front of strangers. And this means that if a friend in some situation allowed himself an uncharacteristic word for him in front of you, he in a sense opened up, showed the strength of his emotions. And your consent will allow him to feel that he is understood and accepted even with such “bad” feelings.
The Russian language is really rich, and in the vocabulary of everyone who speaks it from birth, there are words that help express irritation, annoyance, anger and other feelings. And almost everyone has their favorite word or expression. Their use is sometimes useful, but should be reasonable and appropriate to the situation.