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Moral Maze
The Morality of Swearing

Michael Buerk:
Good evening.

Some time last century I made a television documentary about my years as a BBC correspondent reporting on
the final meltdown of apartheid in South Africa.

It contained a long and terribly explicit sequence of a black man being butchered to death in front of me.

The BBC didn’t bat an eyelid.

It also contained the F-word a dozen times or so—powerfully in context, we thought.

The bosses went through agonies. One F they might tolerate, but eleven! Meeting after meeting, as the highest
panjandrums, the biggest editorial brains, bent themselves to the moral question of that day: What was an F
too far?

How things have changed. We have become markedly and measurably more foul-mouthed.

The British Board of Film Classification has just done a survey that suggests most of us now regularly use bad
language—up 30% since 2017, with young people five times more potty-mouthed than their parents.

Words that if overheard would have caused my aunt to faint are now routinely used as noun, adjective, verb
and adverb, sometimes all in the same sentence.

Mind you, my aunt would have cheerfully used the N-word, not just about people of colour, but about the
shade of her sweater or the name of her Labrador.

Is swearing vulgar, corrupting and stupid? Or powerful and linguistically enriching, and perhaps even good for
us? What are we to make of the constantly shifting vocabulary of offence and the total lack of consensus on
what is acceptable, even in what was once known as “polite society”?

That’s our moral maze tonight.

The panel:
⁃ Melanie Phillips, social commentator at The Times;
⁃ Mona Siddiqui, professor of Islamic and Interreligious Studies at Edinburgh University;
⁃ Anne McElvoy, senior editor at The Economist; and
⁃ the priest and polemicist, Giles Fraser.

First, a four-letter word—mind, as in ‘mind out’: given the nature of the discussion, there might be the odd
word slipping out that some people, at least, might still find offensive.

Giles, this is in the news today with the publication of these messages between Dominic Cummings and Boris
Johnson. Pretty replete with swear words, aren’t they? What do you make of it all?

Giles:
Listen I… Well, my view on all of this is that this is a battle between Roundheads and Cavaliers about language.
I’m on the more expressive side of the argument. I actually think there is some value—within context, to the
right people and so forth, with the right intent—of swear words as expressing what it is that you feel, and they
have iconoclastic value.

Michael Buerk:
Melanie, are you a Roundhead or a Cavalier?

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Melanie:
I’m not sure I would fit either category, but I do know that in 1965 when I was 14, I was not allowed to know
the word that Ken Tynan apparently was the first person to say on late-night TV (it began with an F). But I do
think that society has been going to hell in a handcart ever since.

Michael Buerk:
Anne? Anne McElvoy?

Anne:
I’m with the Cavaliers on this. I was brought up in a household where swearing only happened if someone was
very, very angry and people got very cross if you dropped even a mild swear word. I fear I may have gone a bit
to the opposite extreme in compensation, but I do associate it, as a result, with freedom of expression, within
boundaries, but I’m with occasionally just letting rip.

Michael Buerk:
Mona?

Mona:
Well, this maze for me is really quite exploratory, because I think so much of our language is about control and
measure, and for me the interesting aspect of this is what does swearing actually add to our personal relations
and our public life?

Michael Buerk:
Panel, thanks very much indeed.

Our first witness is Peter Hitchens, the author and columnist for the Mail on Sunday.

Peter, six out of ten of us are comfortable regularly using bad language apparently. Does it matter do you
think, or is it one more sign of the world going to the dogs?

Peter:
Well it matters in several ways. One, I think people who swear a lot get less good at expressing themselves
because they use these words instead of trying to be inventive with language.

Er, more importantly I think that swearing is one of those barriers between normal behaviour and danger. It’s
a warning of violence and trouble and it should be reserved for that and like all taboos, we keep it for a reason.
It’s something we hold back on because once you’ve started doing it, you’ve changed the whole atmosphere of
the circumstances you’re in.

There are places where swearing has to happen. I come from a naval family. I have absolutely no doubt that if
anybody in the Royal Navy had been standing on the bridge on one of His Majesty’s ships and the person next
to him had his head taken off by a shell, it would have been seen as perfectly reasonable to do a bit of
swearing. But on the other hand, the same person would almost certainly never have done so in front of
women or children, because it was not the right time or the right place for it.

Michael Buerk:
Okay.
Giles?

Giles:
Um. Are you, to use your words, inventive with language, when you hit your thumb with a hammer?

Peter:
I try to be, yes, actually.

Giles:

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That sounds… Really?

Peter:
I don’t see why you… You shouldn’t be… I try not to use the obvious expressions. If you discipline yourself
when you hit your thumb with a hammer then you’re more likely to say something useful and more likely not
to say something stupid when you’re in a public place. I…

Giles:
Isn’t there a function…? Sorry, that seems curious to me because…

Peter:
I don’t hit my thumb with a hammer very often, I have to say. So far, I’ve managed to avoid doing that.

Giles:
But you understand what I’m getting at, Peter. So the… What I’m really trying to say is that there is this
function of language which is expressive which, you know, you talking about it’s not very “clever” to swear and
I’ve heard that quite a lot, but isn’t actually … part of the function here not to go through some, sort of, filtered
cultural, sort of, sophisticated North London linguistic turn and actually just come out with it?

Peter:
Well, maybe so. Oddly enough, I think that when things get really bad, the best response we can have is to stay
completely calm. I was always impressed by the story of King Edward VII who when a chair collapsed under his
very considerable bulk said only “Bless my soul”—which most people would probably have gone further
than—because he’d been trained from his earliest youth to restrain himself in what he said. But… Staying clam
when you’re in circumstances of danger or pain is a good thing to do. Why not?

Giles:
I’m trying not to make this personal, Peter, but that sounds a bit—

Peter:
Oh do! Do please make it personal!

Giles:
I’m trying to be polite here—

Peter:
No, don’t do that either! That is not the point of this programme.

Giles:
Hang on. Let me come out with it. It sounds a bit buttoned-up.

Peter:
Well I am buttoned-up, and I don’t actually think there’s anything wrong with that. I’ve seen society unbutton
itself during most of my life and it’s got coarser and less pleasant to live in as a result. I think people who are
buttoned-up are the people you very badly need, especially when things are not going too well.

Giles:
But buttoned-up people generally find it very difficult to talk about their emotions or to talk about some of the
sort of personal things that actually seem to be terribly important for our mental health.

Peter:
I don’t think we find it difficult to talk about them, it’s just we don’t think it’s necessarily terribly useful. It’s
often rather boring for other people to have to listen to it. It’s just a wholly different attitude towards life. I
promise you Giles, that if I swore at you, which I am quite capable of doing and I have a reasonably inventive
filthy vocabulary, you’d know…

Giles:

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I’m pleased to hear it.

Peter:
It would be a strong signal that you had gone too far.

Giles:
Yes.

Michael Buerk:
Okay. That’s a good place to stop you.
Anne McElvoy?

Anne:
I was interested, Peter, in the idea that it was sometimes appropriate to swear and sometimes not, and you
drew the line in some places now that other people might disagree with. One was sort of swearing in front of
women. Well, I suppose a lot of people might say, “’Sauce for the goose, sauce for the gander’. We should all
be able to swear equally.” Do you agree with that?

Peter:
No. In my upbringing, there was a definite distinction made and not just in mine. If you had gone to the now
vanished pit villages of Yorkshire in the 1970s, men who swore extremely inventively and volubly during their
working life down in the [synth scene?] would come up and when they went out on the Friday evening with
their wives, they would never emit a single one of these syllables because they simply thought it was wrong. I
happen to think that wasn’t a particularly bad arrangement.

Anne:
Well, that’s a matter of opinion, isn’t it? You “happen” to think. As you say, and you’re absolutely entitled to…

Peter:
It is an opinion.

Anne:
I think… Yes of course, but I’m just trying to say, is there any sort of moral dividing line here, or is it a kind of
hypocrisy? In a sense I also practice a hypocrisy of my own: sometimes I just feel like being very sweary, and
then when one of my children drops a word–either one I don’t like or it’s in the wrong context (it’s at the
dinner table or in front of someone older), I really pick them up on it, and I suppose I’m just enquiring whether
we are being a bit hypocritical or just having a double standard around the whole idea of swearing.

Peter:
No. [I see it as?] we’re choosing what kind of society we want to live in. I think fundamentally swearing is
about violence. It’s about a warning of impending violence and when I was taught to swear in Russian—when I
learned a bit of Russian before I went to Moscow—um, my Russian teacher, who’s a woman, refused to teach
me the words, and deputed the job to a male colleague, and he, after he’d solemnly described and explained
all these words and expressions to me, said: “Now, you must solemnly promise me never to use any of them at
all, because you’re bound to get it wrong”. The whole question of swearing in Russian is all about power and
violence and if you make a mistake about who you swear at you’ll get yourself killed. It was that important. I
think that is an illustration of just how powerful this form of language is. We don’t necessarily take it as
seriously as we should here anymore, but I think we should, and we devalue it by not taking it seriously.

Anne:
We seem to be suggesting, or the suggestion is already in this debate to explore as we go along, that things
have got worse on that, that we swear more, and indeed the research seems to say so, that we swear more
strongly. And yet funny enough, I was just looking back at Luther and his use of language, which as you know is
extreme and is imaginative, but he also swears an awful lot. In fact, he introduced a lot of what we consider to
be modern swear words into the discourse from sixteenth century Germany onwards, whether it was about
things to do with your bottom and defecation, “the prostitute of heretics” he says at one point, and that’s
even missing out the bits that he built around it for extra impact.

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Peter:
Well, I’m not sure people swear more strongly because they swear more often as you said to begin with. In
fact, I think that’s the big distinction. I think swearing has become much weaker because we do it so much
more. I have heard a seventy-five-year-old lady, a tiny bird-like woman, use the words ‘go away’ with enough
force to scare away the devil himself, far more than if she’d used the F-word, and I think people underestimate
the power of ordinary language when used, and if I say ‘excrement’, actually I think it has a much more potent
effect in the conversation than if I use the incessantly used word beginning with S which everybody uses
instead.

Anne:
But it was Luther that started it. It didn’t happen when society went to hell in a handcart some time in the
seventies.

Peter:
Well, I’m not quite in the hell in a handcart position, but I think there has absolutely, definitely been a very
strong decline in manners.

Michael Buerk:
Peter! Peter Hitchens, thanks very much indeed.

Our next witness is Rebecca Roache who’s a senior lecturer in philosophy at Royal Holloway, currently writing
a book about swearing and learning Welsh at the same time. (I could get into real trouble here, couldn’t I?)

Um. Er. Rebecca, you’ve got plenty of good words to say about bad words I gather. How so?

Rebecca:
Yeah. I mean it’s interesting hearing the discussion that’s been going on so far. I think that, you know, sort of,
Peter is, while condemning swearing, this idea that swearing is a resource that is scarce and should be used
with care—I mean, that’s actually implicitly acknowledging that swear words have great value, that they have
the power to express when we need them and that if we overuse them we’re going to lose some of that
power.

Michael Buerk:
Melanie?

Melanie:
Can I ask you more specifically what it is about these words that gives them the power to shock and offend so
much?

Rebecca:
So I think what it starts out as is you just get a set of words in a community that are just disliked for whatever
reason. Um. That reason might have to do with taboo or to do with, sort of, what values we have in society.
And then, over time, using those words causes people to react negatively because they don’t like them. But I
think from there, it kind of snowballs, because it’s one thing to use a word that you know your listener dislikes,
but it’s quite another to use a word that you know that your listener dislikes and they know that you know that
they dislike it, and so on. So what we end up with is that by swearing in a polite context, you know, a context
where swearing would not normally be appropriate, for one thing we’re uttering a taboo word, but for another
thing, we’re signalling something beyond the word we use. We’re signalling something like: ‘I know that you
don’t like me doing this and I’m going to do it anyway’, which is a, you know, a quite strong mark of disrespect
and contempt. So I think, you know, with swearing, it’s not just about the words, it’s to do with the context in
which we utter them, and the inferences that our listeners can make about them when we use them.

Melanie:
Do you think that, uh, the, uh, use of swearing has a coarsening effect on society at all?

Rebecca:

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I mean, it’s interesting. So, some of the most commonly expressed worries around this, such as the worry that
some people express that people swear because they have a limited vocabulary, those sorts of concerns have
been debunked—you know, psychologists have looked at this and they’ve found that if you’re fluent in
swearing, you’re likely fluent in the rest of language too. Um. But I think these sorts of concerns are so
pervasive that it’s interesting to look at what’s behind them, and I think that part of it is exactly what you
express, that there’s this, um, I mean, and you expressed it earlier at the beginning by saying, you know, sort
of, um, er… your… you talked about your first encounter with the F-word and society’s been going to hell in
hand basket ever since, and then Peter too talked about, you know, the value of being dignified and buttoned-
up, and I think there is this idea that, erm, certain norms of politeness are important to us, and that includes
swearing, you know, the norm that it’s inappropriate to swear in certain contexts, and so I think when people
do swear a lot, there is a, sort of, panic response in some people, you know, a sense of, if we allow this, what
else is going to follow from it?

Melanie:
Well it’s not just panic, is it? I mean, let me put it to you, er, that this issue that was raised earlier by Peter
Hitchens of self-restraint: self-restraint in language is associated with self-restraint in behaviour. I mean, in our
society, you know, we’ve gone back, in my view, to kind of, you know, medieval standards of public behaviour.
We now quite commonly have public urination—not just public urination, but public defecation—and public
copulation. Doesn’t language affect the way we behave?

Rebecca:
I think there’s another way to look at this. Self-restraint doesn’t happen in a vacuum. There’s… This sort of
goes back to this old Freudian idea that where you repress certain strong emotions they come out in other
places, and so, you know, there’s a line of thought that by using swearing to relieve pain and express strong
emotions, that enables us to have a release valve, a kind of benign release valve, a non-violent release valve,
which might ensure that we’re more well-balanced and don’t go on to do anything worse.

Michael Buerk:
Yep. Okay.
Mona?

Mona:
I’m interested in the moral dimension of swearing or bad language as I would say. Do you think that swearing
serves any moral purpose?

Rebecca:
I think it can do. Well, I think, swearing’s capacity to express strong emotion can have an important moral
value. There are certain situations where it is appropriate to condemn very strongly somebody’s behaviour, if
they have done something very wrong—you know, if they’re a bully or something like that.

Mona:
But you can condemn in strong language certain behaviours without resorting to swearing, and so, my concern
in all of this is that, as a society, it’s right, isn’t it, that we still have norms and boundaries around acceptable
language, for example, you wouldn’t swear in front of your students would you?

Rebecca:
Er… Maybe. Depends what I’m teaching.

Mona:
Okay, so if you’re teaching the discipline of swearing, that’s one thing, but if you get angry with them or
frustrated at something, would you swear in front of them?

Rebecca:
No, I wouldn’t. That’s actually a really interesting example. I think there is an important distinction between
just, sort of, undirected swearing, you know, just, sort of, uttering swear words at nobody in particular, and
swearing at somebody, using a swear word as a form of attack, especially in the sort of situation you’ve
described, where there’s a power imbalance. So we might think there is something unethical about that.

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Mona:
Yes, so let me push that. If we go down the road of saying that actually swearing is actually quite benign, it
doesn’t really affect people, it’s not really related to violence and bad behaviour, it’s just part of language,
then what if it were bilateral—students swearing in front of you, you swearing in front of students?

Rebecca:
I wouldn’t say it’s “just” part of language, it’s “just” words. Words have power and they’re part of behaviour. I
think what I’d say is that the context matters. So yes, it would be inappropriate for me to swear at one of my
students, but there’s plenty of other things it would be inappropriate for me to say to my students too—sort
of, talk in depth about my medical problems or whatever it might be. And all this is just governed by a set of
norms of what it’s appropriate to say and do in certain situations. Now, when we break those norms, we might
be worried about that, depending on the situation, but I think it’s an overreaction to think that’s just one step
on a slippery slope towards violence and going to hell in a handcart.

Mona:
I’m not saying that it leads to violence necessarily, but I’m just asking as to who decides then what is
acceptable anymore?

Rebecca:
The words that we find offensive tend to track the values that we have in society, and they tend to, sort of, rise
and fall. So the, sort of, sexual swear words which in English are among the rudest words that we have today, I
mean, they’ve been around for centuries, but until relatively recently, you know, sort of, maybe Victorian
times, they weren’t as rude as we take them to be now, so, you know, sort of, medieval street names that
contain the C-word, and that word also, there’s an instance of, I think, a fourteenth century surgery textbook
that contained that word, but over time, you know, that’s changed. In English, or English-speaking countries at
least, we’ve seen a decline in the shock-value of religious words, so the word ‘damn’ isn’t remotely as
offensive or shocking today as it used to be, um, and on the other side, we’ve seen this, sort of, increase in the
offensiveness in the sort of more sexual and lavatorial terms.

Michael Buerk:
Rebecca Roache, thanks very much indeed.

 F-word  appropriate  disrespect

 moral  upbringing  utter
 bad  opinion  swearing
 vulgar  violence  effect
 polite  expressions  worries
 word  power  vocabulary
 offensive  taking  norms
 expressing  weaker  associated
 cross  force  swearing
 bad  manners  strongly
 inventive  condemning  society
 behaviour  power  frustrated
 time  power  context
 place  community  offensive
 public  taboo  rudest
 linguistic  react  shock-value
 swore  listener
 filthy  appropriate

 appropriate  associated  bad

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 behaviour
 community
 condemning
 context
 cross
 disrespect
 effect
 expressing
 expressions
 F-word
 filthy
 force
 frustrated
 inventive
 linguistic
 listener
 manners
 moral
 norms
 offensive
 offensive
 opinion
 place
 polite
 power
 public
 react
 rudest
 shock-value
 society
 strongly
 swearing
 swore
 taboo
 taking
 time
 upbringing
 utter
 violence
 vocabulary
 vulgar
 weaker
 word
 worries

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