Swearing as a Response to Pain: Assessing Effects of Novel Swear Words

Effects of Swearing on Pain

• Some report that conventional swearing (“fuck”, etc.) genuinely helps with acute pain, consistent with the paper’s findings.
• Others say swearing makes pain feel worse or keeps them mentally “stuck” on it; they prefer neutral acknowledgments (“ow”, “that hurt”, “wow”) to move on faster.
• Commenters link to related research on pain catastrophizing vs. neutralizing and on swear words boosting strength and performance.

Alternatives: Humor, Distraction, and Novel Words

• Humorous or elaborate insults (e.g. creative metaphors at the offending object) are used as cognitive distraction, breaking focus on pain.
• The study’s result that fake words (“twizpipe”, “fouch”) don’t work is seen as evidence that emotional history and taboo status matter, not just sound.
• Some wonder if different-sounding fake swear words might work better, given that many real swear words share similar phonetic “feel”.

Evolutionary and Neurological Angles

• One thread links human swearing to primate alarm calls: a few basic vocalizations for threats may have evolved into modern expletives.
• Another suggests swear words tap older brain circuits related to sex, excretion, and strong emotion, which might explain their persistence in dementia when other language is lost.

Linguistics, Multilingual, and Fictional Swears

• Long digression into German compound swear words and whether writing-without-spaces makes them “one word” versus English compounds with spaces.
• Russian is praised as especially rich for swearing due to morphological flexibility, allowing many nuanced forms from a few roots.
• Fictional or euphemistic swears (from TV shows, old-fashioned English, or invented like “sugarplum fairies”) are enjoyed for humor, but acknowledged as weaker for genuine pain relief.

Social Norms and Parenting

• Anecdotes about kids swearing, parents managing it by context (e.g. “go downstairs and yell once”), and teaching when swearing is or isn’t appropriate.
• Debate between those who see casual swearing as harmless emotional regulation and those who view it as poor manners or bad parenting.
• Several note that overuse blunts impact; reserving strong words for rare occasions preserves their expressive and analgesic power.