Why the **** does everyone swear all the ******* time?

One may as well begin with all the “cunts.”

Over the past few years, my social media feeds have gradually filled up with people (largely American cis white women in their 30s) congratulating themselves on “serving cunt.” Cunty little librarian glasses are all the rage. “Can a historian tell me why, as a society, we got less cunt?” demanded a viral TikTok in February that compared candy-colored Y2K technology with sleek post-iPhone contemporary tech. “QUIZ: Are They Really Serving Cunt or Do You Just Like Saying That?” asked Reductress in December. “Cunty (cunt, cunt, cunt, cunt),” sings Beyoncé in “PURE/HONEY.”

Yet about a decade ago, most of the people I knew considered the word to be nearly unspeakable outside of ribald British cinema. It was so offensive, so shocking, that we called it “the c-word.” We suggested it was one of the most offensive words in American English.

“Cunt” is only the latest in a series of previously unspeakable words that have over time become trendy to say. “Fuck” is now in such widespread use that it’s come to seem a little antiquated that you still can’t say it on network television. (Remember those “what the fork?” ads for The Good Place?) And TV long ago gave up on trying to ban phrases like “ass” and “pissed off,” although they were once considered so obscene Lenny Bruce was arrested for using them.

In the face of all these dirty words, a person might be forgiven for asking: Why the fuck are people swearing so goddamn much these days?

It’s hard to prove, says Michael Adams, author of In Praise of Profanity, that people actually are swearing more than they used to. “That’s for a number of methodological reasons,” he explains. For one thing, while people swear a lot on social media, it’s hard to show that social media users are a representative sample of the population. For another, we don’t have a real sense of how much people swore 50 years ago, as they unforesightfully failed to keep detailed records.

But if people aren’t swearing more than they used to, it does seem to be the case that they are swearing differently than they used to. “The specific words that are judged to be profane change over time,” says Benjamin Bergen, a professor of cognitive science and the author of What the F: What Swearing Reveals About Our Language, Our Brains, and Ourselves. “We’re currently experiencing a lot of flux in exactly how offensive particular words are judged to be.”

To understand how swear words change over time, here’s a brief history lesson.

One of the harshest medieval swears you could say was “zounds”

In medieval England, lots of the four-letter words we use to talk about bodies and sex were considered normal descriptive language. In her book Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing, Melissa Mohr notes that both London and Oxford boasted medieval streets called Grope-cunt Lane (where the brothels were). By a medieval country pond, Mohr writes, “There would’ve been a shiterow in there fishing, a windfucker flying above, arse-smart and cuntehoare hugging the edges of the pond, and pissabed amongst the grass.” (Those are, in today’s sadly unvivid terminology, the birds heron and kestrel; and the plants water pepper, horehound, and dandelions.)

“They were kind of direct words for certain things that you wouldn’t necessarily say if you had an audience with the king, but they didn’t have any extraordinary power,” Mohr told Vox. “They appeared in schoolbooks.”

What people considered obscene in medieval England was religious swearing. A word like “zounds,” from “Christ’s wounds,” could be genuinely shocking, which is why even today, our vocabulary for talking about profanity is religiously inflected. We talk about oaths and swearing and cursing because in the Middle Ages, to invoke God out loud meant that God was going to pay attention to whatever you were promising. When you said, “God damnit,” you were swearing before God, and he might damn you to hell if you didn’t deliver.

Mohr argues that bodily words were unremarkable in the Middle Ages because we had so little privacy from one another’s bodies. In a time of shared bedrooms and no indoor plumbing, defecation and sex happened more or less openly, and there was little point in being delicate about it with your language.

As the world grew more private, however, starting in the 15th century, bodily words grew steadily more taboo. By the 19th century, Victorians had begun to describe pants as “unmentionables.” Religious oaths were losing their edge in the post-Enlightenment age, but “fuck” and its ilk were by now plenty shocking enough to fill the vacuum.

Now, “fuck” seems to have become a lot less shocking than it used to be.

Over the past few decades, the f-word has grown steadily less offensive

Bergen thinks that we’re seeing a generational shift in what kinds of words are considered offensive. “Folks who are maybe 40 or older tend to think of profanity as including words that describe bodily functions and sex,” he says. “In more recent survey data, younger Americans tend to judge those words as far less offensive than older Americans do, to the point where the word ‘shit’ shows up for most people as not even in the top 50 most offensive words. For folks 25 and younger, ‘fuck’ is not in the top 20.”

Bergen says the “grandmother” of these surveys is one performed by Kristin Janschewitz at UCLA in 2008. Janschewitz gave her subjects a list of 460 words and asked them to rate each one for taboo and offense, along with a few other factors. In the final tally, “fuck” is fifth on the list of most taboo words, but it doesn’t appear in the top 10 list of most offensive. In other words, it’s a word college students know you’re not supposed to say, but that most of them aren’t particularly bothered by hearing. Bergen gives a version of the same survey to 100 undergraduates every year, and he says “fuck” is only trending more and more strongly out of the offensive category over time.

Profanity as we know it today evolves, spreads, and flourishes within subcultures, especially the subcultures of minority groups. “They are places where you have very clear in-versus-out group relations, and oftentimes where you find close social bonds and high degrees of emotionality,” says Berger. “That’s where you get the most interestingly creative profanity, and it’s the most profanity overall.”

You can signal your membership within a marginalized subgroup by using the profanity people within that group have reclaimed for themselves (which is why, as Fox News is always pointing out with deep outrage, it is okay for Black people to use the n-word but not white people). Most of the exciting and interesting slang in American English comes from subcultures, and profanity is no exception. Even the military, which gave us “snafu” and “clusterfuck,” can function as a linguistic subculture with its own colorful innovations on the f-word.

The queer community has historically tended to play with profanity with particular abandon, dirty words about sex and bodies being of particular interest to a group marginalized for their sexual preferences. “Serving cunt,” that fashionable phrase, comes from the drag scene, and gradually made its way toward the mainstream from there.

“What was once restricted to the drag community and understood to be a marker of that community’s identity now ends up seeping into mainstream culture through media like RuPaul’s Drag Race,” says Adams. “And then before you know it, people are using words they don’t know where they come from. They don’t know what they signify to the people who they mattered to first. They develop meanings or people start using them in ways that don’t really correspond to their subgroup origins. In some ways, that’s just the history of language.”

A lot has to happen, though, for “serving cunt” to go from Paris Is Burning to the Twitter account of a cis straight white woman. There are a few different theories as to why sex and body words have become less taboo over time. One possible factor is the rise of social media, where people write for a wide audience as informally as they talk to their close friends in private.

“It used to be that the only media you could consume was highly edited,” says Bergen. “With social media, all of a sudden now we have direct access to people’s informal language. If we have access to people’s informal communication and it includes more profanity, that just means we’re going to be exposed to more of it and that’s going to normalize it, and so people have become inured.”

Covid has its role to play, too. In the post-lockdown work-from-home era, swearing in the workplace seems to have begun trending up. In 2022, the office software company Sentieo reported that from 2020 to 2021, the incidence of expletives in conference call transcripts jumped from 104 to 166. (Their sample size is limited to calls made using their software, so let’s not consider this a formal study.) “Business formality,” Sentieo noted in its analysis of the trend, “is on its way out.” It seems to be harder for people to keep their language office-friendly when they’re dialing into Zoom meetings from their couches — and as public profanity becomes more common, the division between office language and private language comes to seem more and more artificial.

There’s also the issue of the rise of Donald Trump, who the New York Times once dubbed “the profanity president.” Trump swears frequently, publicly, and gleefully (“shithole countries,” “I fired his ass,” “grab ’em by the pussy,” etc.) and his supporters love him for it. They consider Trump’s swearing to be part of his authenticity, proof that he really is one of them.

In apparent answer, rank-and-file politicians have begun to swear with public abandon. A 2019 analysis from GovPredict found that politicians posted curse words on Twitter fewer than 200 times in 2016. In 2018, however, politicians tweeted curses over 2,500 times.

“They realized that there was some power in the electorate that Trump had identified,” says Adams of the rise of political swearing. “It made these politicians seem more normal.”

The swearing politicians included those who at the time were actively seeking the Democratic nomination for president. After a mass shooting in 2019, Beto O’Rourke released a campaign T-shirt that said “This is f*cked up. This is f*cked up. This is f*cked up. This is f*cked up. This is f*cked up. This is f*cked up,” and then, in smaller type, “End gun violence now.” He began a press conference with the line, “Members of the press: What the fuck?”

“Profanity is not the f-bomb,” O’Rourke said on MSNBC of his frequent campaign trail swearing. “What’s profane is a 17-month-old baby being shot in the face.”

O’Rourke’s line here points to one of the big cultural shifts that has accompanied the fall of “fuck” as a word of great obscenity. As a country, we have gone through decades of social change centered around the idea of making our sexual culture less shame-based. We have birth control now. The sexual revolution has come and gone. The whole shift has been so successful that we’re now seeing the beginnings of a backlash to the pro-casual sex culture, with the right having successfully taken down Roe and freely admitting they plan to come for contraceptives next. In some ways, it’s easier to say “fuck” than it is to actually do the deed in the US right now — but the changes the sexual revolution made to our culture are still there in the language. By now, we have all read lots of books and heard speeches about how bodies and sex aren’t filthy, and what’s really filthy is violence.

Which perhaps is why today, the words in the English language that are considered truly unspeakable are words that are held to enact or symbolize violence.

The unspeakable words of today are the slurs

“Fuck” isn’t that offensive to millennials and Gen Z, but slurs are. In Janschewitz’s study, the n-word is found to be the most offensive and most taboo of all the words on her list. It’s so taboo that it’s against Vox style to spell the word out under most circumstances.

“I think you see a lot of intentional education of kids describing the ways in which slurs and other terms of abuse can be harmful, and I don’t think that’s a thing that really was discussed in the ’80s or ’90s around kids,” says Bergen. “You see it internalized by younger folks and Gen Z and so on, to the point where they take it on themselves to educate older people about their attitudes toward slurs.”

Mohr points out that when religious and sexual swears were still shocking, racial epithets mostly weren’t. “When they made Gone With the Wind in 1939, they made such a big deal about putting ‘damn’ in there,” she says. “But the n-word was just going to be in there like it was totally fine until some of the Black actors objected. Societal consciousness of that as a potential slur only happened quite recently in the bigger scheme of things.”

In this context, the oddity of “cunt” becomes a little clearer. “Cunt” is unusual because it is both a bodily expletive and a gendered slur. After decades evolving in the drag ball scene, it’s ripe for reclamation, but it’s also almost unspeakable, ranked six on Janschewitz’s list of taboo words. That makes it potentially hurtful, but it also makes it exceptionally exciting to say. It is that rare thing: a word about sex and bodies that still has the power to shock.