The Case for Mindful Cursing
“How to Build a Life” is a weekly column by Arthur Brooks, tackling questions of meaning and happiness. Click here to listen to his podcast series on all things happiness, How to Build a Happy Life.
Americans are profligate cursers. Of every 1,000 words we speak, some linguists have said, an average of five are swears. If you account for the fact that many people don’t swear in ordinary speech—one study of university students found that nearly half did not curse at all in natural conversation—swearers conceivably utter 9.43 dirty words per 1,000. Though men were responsible for 67 percent of public swearing in 1986, it was down to 55 percent by 2006—presumably not because men were cursing less in public.
And if you’re like a lot of other Americans, you’ve become by 41 percent from 2019 to 2021; on Twitter it rose by 27 percent. seem to be swearing more. People are swearing more at. People I know who never cursed before the pandemic are now using a little profanity, and my friends who were once moderate cursers have become expletive geysers.
