owlsoulsfield: Swearing- "Why do educated people use bad words?

The ability to communicate with other people is a valuable life skill. Through communication people reach some understanding of each other, learn to like each other, influence one another, build trust, and learn more about themselves and how people perceive them. The process of verbal interaction is important in maintaining one’s health and well-being. By discussing our experiences with each other, we provide opportunities for sorting out our often complex and confusing lives. When we share our experiences and feelings sincerely, we come to realize that all of us experience emotions, but that each of us experiences them in his/her own way. Thus, by sharing our experiences and the feelings that go along with them, we can recognize the similarities among human beings as well as the individual differences. Effective communication exists between two persons when the person for whom a message is intended interprets the message in the same way that the person who sent the message intended it. Failures in communication happen when the receiver understands the meaning of a message differently than it was intended.

Failures in Communication:

“Why do educated people use bad words?” How do they choose what word to use and when?

People make choices about which word to use depending upon the company they’re in, and what their relationship is to that company, as well as the social setting. They’re more apt to use less offensive terms in mixed company or in settings where more offensive swear words might result in recrimination (such as work). For instance, people are more comfortable and are more likely to use technical terms for sexual references in mixed crowds, and to reserve the taboo words for same sex crowds or with their sexual partner. Most people feel uncomfortable saying, “Fuck” in a business or public crowd, instead falling back on less offensive words like, “Damn it.”

Using bad words is a way of speaking that some people use to express their feelings of anger, annoyance, and frustration, or when they want to hurt someone else's feelings. It's like the horn on your car, you can do a lot of things with that, it's built into you.

Swearing is beneficial in ways that people may underestimate or take for granted. Swearing is often cathartic — it often frees us of the feelings of anger or frustration we hold and allows expression for them. It can also be a useful substitute to physical violence.

Swear words can also be used in a more positive manner, in the form of jokes and humor, storytelling, self-deprecation or even social commentary. Imagine when you want to emphasize how great you feel something is, a swear words emphasizes the positive feelings you have for that object, situation, person or event (“This concert is fucking awesome!”). Sure, we could just say “This concert is awesome,” but the addition of the swear word emphasizes the emotional reaction we have toward it — and easily conveys that emotional reaction to others.

Virtually all people swear, and people swear pretty consistently throughout their lifetime — from the moment they can speak to the day they die. Swearing is almost a universal constant in most people’s lives. Research, according to Jay(2009), has shown that we swear on average from 0.3% to 0.7% of the time — a tiny but significant percentage of our overall speech. Swearing is more common than you might think. But personality research suggests that people who swear more, score higher on traits such as extraversion, dominance, hostility and Type A personalities. Swearing is not just for the uneducated or people of a lower socioeconomic class — it knows no social boundaries in its expression.

Swearing is a natural part of human speech development. We learn which words are taboos and which words are not through our normal childhood development. We also learn that not all swear words are equal, as Jay (2009) notes — “Fuck you! represents a greater level of anger than crap!” We then learn that we may be able to say a swear word in one social context, but not another.

The Flip Side of the Coin: