Thinking About Swearing

Recently, I've been thinking a lot about swears and how they are used effectively. What got me thinking about the topic was this song by local band Vundabar.  At one point in the song, lead singer Brandon Hagen drops the F-bomb, and I think he does it very effectively. Not only have I never heard him swear on any of his songs before, I don't even think I've ever heard him swear before.

That's the first lesson here: scarcity is the key to swears maintaining their power. It sounds obvious, but I think it's a lesson worth repeating. Too often, I think, you hear a song (as much as I hate to single out certain genres, this really happens more with rap) or hear someone on the street trying to sound tough and they use more swears in their sentence than they do regular words. That doesn't make you sound tough or edgy, it just makes you hard to understand (as is probably rather obvious, this sort of behavior sort of aggravates me). On top of that, it sounds really immature, like you've just discovered the word and are overusing it out of novelty.

The other important part of making your swearing effective is for it to sound authentic. A bit less scientific than just counting how often you swear, this is more about context. The swear should fall at the height of your speech/song/writing, not at the bottom. If you keep the number of swears down, the amount that each swear sticks out increases. It marks the section that it falls in as important or somehow different from every other section, and if the section isn't somehow different or important, the swear would sound way out of place. Another way to indicate this is a change in the surroundings of the swear. This is demonstrated really well in the song I linked above, where the swear is accompanied by a snare hit and a moment of silence from the guitar. This helps the swear stick out and land that much harder.

Really, using a swear is just the same as using anything else of any power: moderation is best, and pay attention to the context.