WARNING:  This post contains strong language.  Reader discretion is advised.

Yesterday, I underwent an outpatient medical procedure meant to diagnose some issues I am having with my bladder. As it involved the doctor looking inside my bladder with a tiny camera attached to a scope, and as there is really only one way to accomplish that without surgery, I’ll leave it to your imagination where he inserted his equipment.  I was fully conscious, and a local anesthetic was used.  If I’m honest, it wasn’t painful; but it was uncomfortable.

To begin, the nurse, a man named Jorge, had to “prep” me, which involved me lying on a table naked from the waist down while he took my penis in his hand, disinfected it by applying iodine, and then numbed it with lidocaine. 

As always, it worked a charm!  I developed this methodology during the last twelve years of residency in two different assisted living facilities for when a handsome caregiver gives me a shower; ask me about Luis sometime.

Then the doctor came in, we exchanged brief pleasantries, and he inserted his scope thingy.  I began to hyperventilate, not so much from pain as just conceptualizing what was being done to me.  Jorge told me to breathe slowly through it and I was able to slow the pace of my breathing, taking deep breaths then slowly exhaling them.  As the scope passed my prostate, which we already know is enlarged and contributing to my urinary tract problems, I felt what I can only describe as an unpleasant sensation, and the word just came out of me.  I didn’t pause to consider the best vocal reaction; I didn’t weigh several options as I often do when writing.  I just blurted out…

fuck.

I regretted it immediately.  I’m not a sweary person.  I’ll throw a few “hell”s or “Christ”s around now and then, but usually to express emphasis or surprise respectively, as in “what the hell are you doing?” or “Christ, look at the price of those bananas!”  In English, we have two reliable sources of offensive language:  (1) the body, especially its parts and cruder functions; and (2) religion.  Our word for offensive language, “profanity,” comes from the latter, which differentiates between that which is good and holy – the sacred – and that which is bad and evil – the profane.

Ever heard the phrase “do you use that mouth to kiss your mother?”  The suggestion is your language should be such as not to offend your mother.  But today, the ultimate arbiter of acceptable language is not the quaint sensibilities of your mother or even the third commandment from the Bible (Exodus 20:7) which admonishes believers not to use the Lord’s name in vain (covering sweary variations on “Jesus Christ” and “God dammit”).  In 21st century America, appropriateness of discourse is determined by our movie-ratings system as put forth and enforced by the MPAA (the Motion Picture Association of America, a trade group representing the five major film studios of the United States, the mini-major Amazon MGM Studios, and the video streaming services Netflix and Amazon Prime Video).  But even they don’t have a consistent system for how their ratings are awarded; I’m told you can use the word “fuck” once in a PG-13 (parental guidance needed for children 13 and under) movie, provided it is an exclamation (“Fuck!”) and not a phrase (“Fuck you!”), but if you use it more than once or as a phrase, your movie will get an R (restricted to adult audiences).  Don’t hold me to that.  It’s just something Ocean’s Eleven and Traffic director Steven Soderbergh told me over coffee one day when I worked in the industry.

Then there is the very thin line between offensive language and cussing (swearing).  Racial or ethnic slurs, insults based on sexual orientation, gender-based insults – these are all offensive in my book.  Even as some groups targeted by them have explicitly set out to “reclaim” the words used against them in an attempt to rob the words of their power:  “Queer” used to be an insult, now it’s an academic area of study, and the Q in LGBTQ.

But the cuss words derived from body parts seem, at least to me, to be the most awful and taboo.  To call someone a “cunt” or a “dick” is particularly beyond the pale (I even paused before typing that sentence… no really!).  Grammatically, these words don’t fill the same function as our old reliable four-letter words; mostly they are insults, directed at a person, rather than exclamations (“shit”) or intensifiers for a sentence (“damn”).  The word that started me down this path – fuck – has  become a kindof all-purpose utility profanity, usable as very nearly every part of speech one can name:  you can give or not give a fuck (making it a noun), tell someone to fuck off (prepositional phrase), or buy some fucking bananas (I think that makes it a gerund, or it could be an adjective there – I suspect there will be an email to correct me).  Or you can shout it out when a doctor is shoving a tiny camera up your urethra.  I don’t know what part of speech that makes it in that instance of involuntary utterance, but I can tell you what I was feeling!

Believe it or not, there’s research!  That shouldn’t surprise us.  If they’ve done research into whether lobsters feel pain when we throw them into a pot of boiling water to unlock their deliciousness, we shouldn’t think it surprising that someone, somewhere, has studied swearing.  In fact, a study by psychologists from Marist College found links between how fluent a person is in the English language and how fluent they are in swearing.  Their research dispelled the myth that people with a small vocabulary make up for their deficiency with cuss words; rather, they found that swearing appears to be a feature of language that an articulate speaker can use in order to communicate with maximum effectiveness.  And actually, some uses of swearing go beyond just communication.

Research conducted by Richard Stephens involved asking test subjects to hold their hand in iced water for as long as they could tolerate, while repeating a swear word.  He writes:

The same set of participants underwent the iced water test on a separate occasion, but this time they repeated a neutral, non-swear word. The heart rate of both sets of participants was monitored.

What we found was that those who swore withstood the pain of the ice-cold water for longer, rated it as less painful, and showed a greater increase in heart rate when compared to those who repeated a neutral word.

This suggests they had an emotional response to swearing and an activation of the fight or flight response: a natural defense mechanism that not only releases adrenalin and quickens the pulse, but also includes a natural pain relief known as stress-induced analgesia.

His research, along with that of the psychologists at Marist College, demonstrated that the size of your vocabulary of swear words is linked with your overall vocabulary, and swearing plays a useful physiological and even an emotional role.

After my procedure, I apologized to the doctor and to Jorge for my crude outburst.  They said, “it’s okay, we’ve heard worse!”