So it’s farewell to bloody Nora. The f-word has become Britain’s most popular swearword, overtaking “bloody”, as the nation’s use of expletives has dropped over the past two decades, a linguistics study has found.
Data on the use of 16 swearwords in the 1990s and the 2010s shows the f-word was the most frequently used, taking the title from “bloody” which was beaten into third place by “shit”.
The study, by Dr Robbie Love at Aston University, found there was a 27% drop in swearing in Britain over the 20-year period, down from 1,822 to 1,320 swearwords per million.
Men still swear more than women, and swearing still peaks in people’s 20s and declines thereafter, Love found.
His study, published in Text & Talk: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Language, Discourse & Communication Studies, analysed transcribed spoken conversations that took place in 1994 and in 2014 and looked at changing preferences for the 16 swearwords.
“Bloody” saw an 80% fall in popularity in the 20 years leading up to 2014, accounting for just 128 words per million. The word “fuck” was said slightly less, down to 542 from 564 words per million. “Shit” almost doubled in usage during the two decades, reaching 326 words per million in 2014.
The words themselves and associated derivatives were all included, so for example “shit” could be prefixed with “ape” “bat” or “dip” or used in words such as “gobshite” or “shithole”.
Love, an English language lecturer, told the Guardian: “Overall the data suggests that while swearing occurrence in casual British English speech is still within an expected range, it is lower than it was in the 1990s. It’s hard to say exactly why this appears to be the case – it may be due to shifts in what we consider to count as swearing, or that speakers perform the functions of swearing using other words that might not be considered to be taboo.
“What is most interesting to me are the changes in the popularity of individual swearwords and also the social distribution of swearing. ‘Bloody’ has fallen in usage significantly – this finding is supported in the age distribution which shows it is relatively more common among older adults.
“This has allowed two words – ‘fuck’ and ‘shit’ – to overtake. ‘Fuck’ has seen a substantial rise in usage over the last half a century. I think it is currently the swearword of choice as it is highly versatile – it can be slotted into speech in many different syntactic positions – and it is also semantically vague (in addition to its traditional usage to refer to sex), so it can be applied in many contexts.”
He added: “The gender distribution is interesting too. Male-identifying speakers use swearwords in casual conversation more than female-identifying speakers, but the gap is smaller than it was in the 1990s. While this alone is not evidence to suggest the gap will continue to close, it is clearly a possibility, and may be a byproduct of societal changes relating to women’s rights and freedom of expression – traditionally, swearing has been used to ‘police’ the language of women and has been less tolerated in women, but this may not be the case so much now.
“Overall I think these findings have implications for how we think about the role of swearing in society. Despite the slight decline, swearing is still a major component of everyday conversation, and the dominance of traditionally ‘strong’ swearwords like ‘fuck’ might cause us to reconsider just how strong it is, and whether there should be less censorship of such words in contexts where swearing is highly policed.”
