The naked truth about swearing

In the UK, it is not a criminal offence to be naked in public. An offence is only committed when an onlooker lodges an official complaint if they themselves are shocked and offended. The complaint can only be pursued if it can be proven that the person stripped off with the intention of offending others. Following recent high-profile events involving public figures, I would argue that the UK has a similarly relativist attitude towards swearing.

Swearing is readily – though not exclusively – invoked to express anger, negative emotions or outrage. Psychologist Steven Pinker expertly outlines the physiology of swearing and identifies the various reasons why we do it, though I'm more interested in the social perceptions of swearing. For example, if we believe that swearing is more prevalent now than in some nebulous era in the past, we might conclude that people today are angry about everything all the time.

Allow me to take the Swiss German usage of the word Hure (whore) as an example. This word appears to have been universally accepted as an intensifier, such that if gut means good, hure gut means very good. The intensifier is used with both positive and negative adjectives. As youth language remains the breeding ground of linguistic creativity, at some point in the past, young people must have recontextualised this word as an intensifier, and it has since been adopted to a greater or lesser extent by other sections of the population. This situation will prevail until such time as the signifier becomes too clichéd, loses its power in this new context and is replaced by a new word fulfilling the same function.

I sense a shift in public attitudes towards weaker notions of acceptability and appropriateness in this area, accelerated by social media and online activities. Firstly, without the bygone cultural and linguistic bottleneck of a few TV channels and a radio, we now encounter a much larger amount of unfiltered material likely to offend. Secondly, the Internet allows us to date and retrieve everything. We can be repeatedly offended regardless of whether we heard the utterance in context at the time or not. To construct a lazy, apocalyptic picture of profanity, I could display links here to Kenneth Tynan's famous utterance in 1963, the Sex Pistols' contrived outbursts in 1976 or Elton John's breakfast-show blunder on BBC Radio 2 on 28 January 2011. If we ignore the circumstances and the communicative intentions of individual instances of swearing, we are condemned to make emotive yet unfounded accusations with reference to the inferior speech styles of 'other', more lexically challenged people.

In reality, language – including swear words and youth language – displays our inexhaustible capacity to recontextualise existing words and invent new ones to accurately reflect concepts. But with such a relative concept as swearing, in public as well as private life, caution is advised. Unless we know that our intentions will not be misinterpreted, we should be acutely aware that the instantaneous yet permanent nature of modern media means that the boundaries between private and public are blurred. Similarly, what used to be 'tomorrow's chip paper' is now a web link passed between millions of strangers indefinitely. There is also no such thing as the watershed anymore. So if you're in public life and you're seen as a role-model in any way – you'll mind your language at all times. Little brother is watching!