Rebecca Roache is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Royal Holloway, University of London, and is currently writing a book about swearing.

Roache began her academic career at the University of Leeds, where she worked closely with Professor Robin Le Polvidin during her BA and MA studies, with a focus on the philosophy of time. Her philosophical interests cover a broad array of issues, covering but by no means limited to metaphysics, philosophy of mind, practical ethics, and philosophy of language.

This conversation took place over the phone in a quiet Islington café and I’m grateful to Rebecca for joining me in swearing with such gusto.

— David Maclean

DM: How should we define swearing? What separates it from other aspects of speech?

RR: I think there are a few things. If you look it up, you’ll find definitions like 'taboo language', which is just anything that you’re not allowed to do - often informally, not illegal but whatever is frowned upon. So that’s a good place to start but taboo language includes things other than swearing, like blasphemy and racist slurs, for example.

Swearing tends to focus on a cluster of taboo topics, things like sex, religion, lavatorial matters and a few other things. Unlike most other forms of taboo language, it is used to express emotion – something we do when we’re angry or surprised.

There are also some neurological aspects of swearing that mark it off from other forms of language. It’s part of what psychologists call 'automatic speech’, those forms of speech that we can produce without thinking, such as when you 'umm' and 'err' in the middle of a sentence, or counting and reciting the days of the week.

Often people who have had strokes or brain tumours, who have lost the ability to use language normally, retain aspects of automatic speech. So you hear stories of people who have had a severe stroke or brain injury and can still swear even though they can’t form full sentences or communicate normally.

DM: So that raises the question of what is meant when we swear. Because isn’t swearing mostly just implying? If you say to someone “go fuck yourself”, I’m not literally telling them to go and do that but the recipient understands the meaning and fills in the gaps.

Yes, sometimes when we swear we’re not using it like language at all. I think it was Geoff Nunberg, the linguist, who said that swearing can be more like a scream than an utterance. So if you drop something on your foot and shout fuck, it doesn’t really matter that you’re saying a word, any loud utterance would have done.

The example that you used is interesting because there are some swearwords that, if we do treat them as language, raise questions about how exactly we’re supposed to interpret them.