The Age of Profanity

Please, no more swear words

I will never forget my grandma’s reaction the first time I used a swear word.

It was the middle of July, we were playing hide and seek in the corn fields behind her farm, and I was ten. Less than a minute after I had hidden, she found me. I was so upset that I let out the swear word I had learned from my cousin the week before.

Grandma looked extremely disappointed.

It’s a cheap trick

Using profanity in online articles, or, worse, in titles, is a cheap trick to attract the readers’ attention. In any language, some words are infused with taboo power.

We are conditioned not to use them lightly by our parents, teachers, and society.

And we can’t help but notice and react to them.

The taboo words, the foul words, are needed because we all need to blow our stack sometimes. And if we’re overwhelmed by emotions, we can’t express ourselves clearly, but might still be able to utter a liberating swear word. In this context, it’s not a word anymore. It’s a concentration of anger, distress, and hate.

It becomes a vessel to carry away our bad feelings.

Only once we’re purged and calmed down, we can — maybe — explore our emotional response and learn from it.

Playing with our emotions

Using swear words in online writing is comparable to click bait titles. It’s playing with the emotions of the readers. It’s making them react strongly about something that usually doesn’t deserve such an amount of attention.

Wouldn’t we all feel better if the media didn’t deliberately play with our emotions?

It’s a difficult problem to solve because, of course, it works. Emotional headlines make us click. Profanity triggers us and increases the probability we will engage with the content, even if it’s through negative comments. Positive or negative, it doesn’t matter much to the algorithms.

The same goes with (some) influencers, social media stars, and people known for being known. Many of them are ready to share the craziest and most extreme ideas, be vulgar and irreverent, only for a few more seconds of air time.

Do we really need profanity to make our discourse heard?

I don’t think so. Especially now that everybody’s using swear words all the time. It’s a cheap trick that’s working less and less. People are getting numbed and tired of these manipulations. They’re more and more aware that following their instincts works well when chased by a lion but not so much when being trolled online.

Can we count on our education system to train our children?

Let’s hope so!

In the meantime, we can try, as online writers, to restrain ourselves from using profanity and playing with the emotions of our readers.

Unless it’s for a good cause and makes a fucking good point.

Smillew is a Medium artist who writes mainly about social justice, his Medium newsletter, and his Medium referral link. No need to follow him; he’ll show up in your feed.