“Did you see that s#- awesome car?” I overheard one student tell another while walking from the USF St. Petersburg parking garage. “It’s amazing as f#-.” As the students continued their conversation, I realized I still didn’t know what the car looked like based on their description.
That afternoon, I considered the limits of profanity. The student’s use of profanity weakened his description of the car.
Freedom of expression is a crucial part of democracy. I would never suggest that legislation should eliminate profanity. Instead, I question the individual choice to use profanity rather than other descriptive words.
It is true profanity has powerful psychological effects on its users. In a study published in the NeuroReport Journal, college students placed their hands in cold water. Students who chanted profanity kept their hands in the water for about 40 seconds longer than students who repeated words other than profanity. Richard Stephens, a psychologist at Keele University, even encourages people who hurt themselves to swear, because of profanity’s suggested positive effects on emotion.
But Stephens also says overuse of profanity lessens the power of the word. This is the problem: We use the same few “offensive” words as adjectives, adverbs, nouns and verbs, as if there are no other words in the English language to prove our point.
There are more than 1,013,913 words in the English language, according to a Global Language Monitor estimation in January 2012. It seems impossible that out of all these words, a profane choice is the most descriptive.
The American workplace acknowledges the limits of profanity. Fifty-four percent of U.S. employers said swearing at work makes an employee seem less intelligent, according to a nationwide CareerBuilder study conducted in May and June 2012. If American citizens believe this within the workplace, they must also believe it outside the workplace. Yet people considered “smart” still choose profanity.
As a student journalist aspiring to become a novelist, language is important to me. I’ve been advised to use profanity in Creative Writing pieces to make my characters sound forceful. To me, profanity feels lazy. I want to use descriptive, powerful language, but profanity seems to restrict what I want to say.
I want to see the fire red Mustang, sparkling from a fresh wax job. Don’t just say the car looks like “awesome f#-.” Be more descriptive by avoiding profanity.
Jennifer Nesslar is a junior majoring in mass communications and assistant news editor. She can be reached at jnesslar@mail.usf.edu or on Twitter @jnesslar.
