Why Swearing in Other Languages Feels So Good

In the kitchen with a thousand brown-roasted devils

Photo: Gregory Garretson

A Warning to the Prim: This piece, being about swearwords, contains a lot of them. If you are the sort of person who becomes distressed upon encountering swearwords, then maybe this isn’t the best essay for you. I would recommend “The Beauty of Elsewhere, the Beauty of Home” as a nice alternative that contains no profanity whatsoever.

Earlier today, I caught myself shouting “Minchia!” in my kitchen. This was prompted by my overturning a bowl of sesame seeds. I had toasted too many and, unsure of what to do with the rest, I left them in a little red bowl to await their fate, like refugees on Lampedusa. When the bowl flipped, the hapless little seeds did their best to seek freedom, some of them reaching impressively distant corners of the kitchen, and some of them taking refuge in my slippers.

Photo: Gregory Garretson

The point of this story is not that I am a klutz (though this may be true), but rather that I chose to express my displeasure with the situation by using an Italian swearword originating from the Sicilian dialect. Technically, minchia means “dick/prick/cock”, but it is used on Sicily and elsewhere in Italy the way English speakers might say “Fuck!”

Now, I’ve never even been to Sicily, and my Italian is mediocre. But lately in the evening I have been watching the Detective Montalbano series based on the novels of Andrea Camilleri. (I call this research rather than goofing off, since it relates tangentially to a novel I am currently writing.) Among the many pleasures of watching this series is the fact that I have learned a lot of Italian swearwords.

Screenshot of the Detective Montalbano series.

Now we get to the point: Why would I want to swear in Italian, when there are plenty of perfectly good oaths in English? The answer, or at least a partial answer, lies in something that I have long observed to be true: People love to swear in foreign languages.

Back when I lived in Sweden, I noticed every single day that younger Swedes used English swearwords roughly as much as Swedish swearwords, with very young speakers seeming to use English ones even more than Swedish ones. For example, here is a sentence I once heard a young woman say on a train:

Det måste nån göra innan klockan tio, och det är mitt fucking problem!

“Someone has to do it by ten o’clock, and it’s my fucking problem!”

I wish I had written down whether she used the English or the Swedish pronunciation of “problem” (accented on the initial or the final syllable), but I didn’t. It might seem easier to stick with English after the insertion of “fucking”, but the fact that she actually used mitt instead of “my” leads me to suspect that the noun phrase as a whole was conceived of as being in Swedish, so she probably went back to the Swedish pronunciation when she got to the head noun. (Yes, this is how linguists talk. Sorry if you find it a drag. I’ll stop now.)

Photo: Gregory Garretson

I remember another occasion when I gave a lecture in English for a couple hundred Swedish high school students who were visiting the university, and during the question-and-answer session, one of them—a girl of about 17—used the expression “What the fuck?” I was stunned by the lack of sensitivity about where and when it is appropriate to use this word (I mean “fuck”, of course—“what” is pretty safe in most contexts). I was tempted to reply, “You mean you would seriously say that in a formal setting to a professor you don’t know? What the fuck?!!”, but I realized that this would not exactly hit the pedagogical nail on the head, so I simply let it go.

If you have traveled around Europe (or probably the whole world) enough, you might have noticed a gradual increase in people swearing in English. This is partly one of the side effects of the popular culture that America broadcasts around the globe, with its cop shows and rap music, but it is linked more importantly to the increasing English fluency of people in countries where English isn’t traditionally spoken. It makes perfect sense that, as people learn to do all sorts of things in English, they also learn to do swearing in English.

Photo: Gregory Garretson

But of course it can go both ways. I, too, seem to have developed the habit of swearing in other languages. The other day, I was sitting in my car at a traffic light, when I saw a truck narrowly miss a bicycle that was crossing the intersection after the light had turned red. Unable to intervene in any way, I reacted only by shouting “Å fan!” This is Swedish for “Oh devil!”, and is used in much the way we might say “Holy shit!” or even “Oh fuck!” in English. The interesting thing here is that my reaction was completely automatic and unconscious. I had not been speaking or thinking in Swedish that day, but when it came time to express my dismay, somehow the Swedish curse came out naturally. I have also been heard to say “Carajo!” (Spanish for “dick/prick/cock”) when dropping something on my foot. (Hmmm, my clumsiness seems to be a leitmotif of this essay.) And now that I speak Portuguese on a daily basis, I have found myself increasingly inclined to use expressions like “Foda-se!” (“Fuck!”) when telling stories, though this has yet to cross over into use while I’m speaking English.

Photo: Gregory Garretson

This brings us back to the central question of this essay: Why would people want to use swearwords from a language they are not currently speaking?

I believe that the main reason is this: Swearing in other languages feels less offensive than swearing in our native language. Because all cursing is violent in its own way, we frequently look for means of reducing the perceived force, or level of violence. The most obvious of these is euphemism. We say “dang” instead of “damn”, and “gosh” instead of “god”, and “heck” or even “H-E-double-toothpick” instead of “hell” (yes, my foreign friends, I have heard this said several times). We say a movie was “freakin’ awesome” when what we really mean is that it was fucking awesome.

Photo: Gregory Garretson

The American fear of censorship is such that even here on Substack, serious, educated adults write “f@ck” instead of “fuck”, as though this were somehow saving their reputation. Personally, I am a bit mystified by the American obsession with controlling swearwords. I mean, you wouldn’t allow your son to say “damn”, but you would give him a rifle for his birthday? I just can’t understand the thinking there. What if we were to model kindness rather than police the words coming out of people’s mouths? But I digress. Let’s get back to the main point.

The main point is that when we learn a language as a non-native speaker, the words in that language—including the swearwords—do not have the same emotional impact on us as the words in our native language. This means that we have another tool for reducing the perceived force of swearing: doing it in another language. I suspect that the young Swedes I referred to above would be horrified if the things they say in English were translated into Swedish and read back to them. For another example, if I hear filho da mãe in Portuguese, it can sound inoffensive to me (“son of the mother”, what’s wrong with that?), when in fact it means “son of a bitch”. So I could potentially develop the habit of saying filho da mãe instead of “son of a bitch”, because it feels ever so much nicer. I hope that I won’t, though.

Photo: Gregory Garretson

There is another dimension to swearing which makes all this even more complicated and interesting. Very generally, there are three main content areas that languages tend to draw on for swearing: sex, defecation, and religious profanity—i.e., “fuck”, “shit”, and “hell”.¹ Different languages seem to have slightly different preferences among these areas. English and Italian are good examples of languages in which frequent use is made of words relating to sex and sexual organs (motherfucker, dickhead, cazzo, minchia, cornudo, etc.). Meanwhile, German, with its love of Scheiße, including compounds like Scheißkopf (“shithead”), Scheißkerl (“son of a bitch”), and Scheißegal (used like “don’t give a damn/shit/fuck”), seems to have a preference for scatological swearwords. And then we have Swedish, which is more of a religious profanity language; some of the most common swearwords in Swedish are fan (“devil”), jävlar (“devils”), and helvete (“hell”). I remember reading once, in a very old Swedish book, the oath “För tusen brunstekta jävlar!”, which translates to “For a thousand brown-roasted devils!”

Photo: Gregory Garretson

What this means is that, depending on the preferences of your native language and the language you are swearing in, there may be an even greater emotional separation between what you say and what you feel. If you come from a background in which the worst oaths are those having to do with gods or devils or the Virgin Mary, then it might seem “light” to use expressions about fucking. And of course, the reverse is equally true.

I want to end with another question: Is there any harm in doing this? If I choose to use swearwords in another language, does it hurt anybody? I would argue that yes, it can be problematic.

It all depends, of course, on who hears you swearing. If I am alone with my bowl of sesame seeds or a pair of overturned chicken breasts, then it’s probably fine for me to swear in any language I like. After all, we swear in part to regulate our own emotional responses to things. But whenever I swear in public, I run the risk of upsetting or offending someone. To an extent, this is true for any language I might be speaking, but there is a real danger deriving from the fact that we are all less sensitive to the effects of swearing in other languages.

Photo: Gregory Garretson

If I go around saying “fuck” in America, I have a pretty good idea of who I am going to offend. But when young kids in Europe go around saying “fuck”, they have no idea. Here in Europe, I have often been in the presence of people using English swearwords in a way that even I did not feel comfortable with. It follows logically that if I swear in another language (pardon my French!), I will not understand the potential discomfort I am causing to those around me.

So for fuck’s sake, be careful, stronzo!

1. This is definitely not the latest in profanity research, which is not my area. But if you want me to direct you to academic works on the subject, just let me know.