Here's Why Curse Words Sound the Way They Do
swear word is like a linguistic punch in the nose. Virtually every language and culture has them—and virtually every language and culture formally disapproves of them. But that doesn’t stop them from being used widely, loudly, and lustily.
The study, conducted by psychologists Shiri Lev-Ari and Ryan McKay of Royal Holloway, University of London, recruited 215 native speakers of six languages—Arabic, Chinese, Finnish, French, German, and Spanish—and presented them with words with which they were not familiar from 20 distinct languages.
Participants in the study—which was titled “How good is your ‘sweardar’?”—were not told that the pairs of words they were presented were not real words. Instead, they were told that one was a curse word in an unnamed foreign language and one was not a curse word; they were then asked to guess which was which. In total, the subjects were presented with 80 word pairs each, and in 63% of those cases, they chose the word that did not contain an approximant as the likely obscene one.
In a second portion of their study, Lev-Ari and McKay examined “minced oaths” in the English language—words like “darn” and “shucks” that are used in place of their coarser alternatives. They collected 67 minced oaths that were variations on 24 swear words. Overall, they found that approximants were 70% likelier to be found in the minced oaths than in the swear words.
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