Swear It
In The Better Angels of Our Nature, Steven Pinker suggests that the very essence of language is warning. From the first grunts of our ancestors, words became tools to signal threats, convey dangers and bind groups together through a shared understanding.
John McWhorter, in Words on the Move, takes it further: even the vilest of profanities have their place. They are not random outbursts of vulgarity, but finely honed expressions of intensity.
Still, both miss the deeper point. Profanity is not just a linguistic tool—it is the admission of language's failure.
Kierkegaard once termed this "word angst"—the creeping dread that language is not just inadequate but actively misleading. We grope for metaphors and adjectives, but some experiences simply won't yield. So, we swear. Not because we are crude, but because we are cornered.
The moment the brain's elaborate syntax machine sputters and shorts out, we fall back on primordial sound. Swearing is not the domain of the unhinged—it is our most ancient, efficient way of saying, this is beyond words.
And in 2025, science is humiliating language faster than ever before. At CERN, particle accelerators can reveal what the universe looked like a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. But here's the kicker: in that same blink of a moment, a proton can travel a trillion times a trillion distances.
Think about that. Time and space become so elastic, so absurd, that our words, with their clunky human scale, have no chance. Stephen Hawking, too, confronted this with his "no-boundary" proposal—the notion that the universe never actually began. Instead, space and time smear into a strange, infinite curve, erasing the need for a singular point of origin.
This is not merely hard to describe—it is fundamentally indescribable. A place where tenses break down and causality becomes slippery.
Faced with this, we swear. Not only in frustration but in awe. When you gaze through the James Webb Space Telescope and see light from stars so old they burned out before Earth had cooled, what is the appropriate response? "Fascinating"? "Breathtaking"?
Hardly. Something far cruder and far more human springs to mind. Because we have always known this truth intuitively—there are things for which words simply will not do.
This is the forgotten grace of profanity: it is not just for rage. It is for wonder, for grief, for disbelief, and, yes, even for love. It is the desperate syntax of the overwhelmed—linguistic whitecaps breaking on the shores of the ineffable.
Think about falling in love. You can try, in your best poetry, to describe the feeling of being utterly wrecked by someone's presence. Or, you can say, "I'm so f--king in love with you." The latter, stripped of its pretense, carries more truth.
So, let's do what English does best: adapt. Grow a new adaptation.
Just as we created new metaphors for the Internet age (we "surf" the web, we "friend" people), we need a vocabulary for the limits of vocabulary. Swearing should be reclaimed from its prudish cage and recognized for what it is: the boundary marker of the unspeakable.
When science drags us to the edges of comprehension, when love throws us into ecstatic disarray, when grief robs us of breath—let us swear, and swear boldly. Not because we are vulgar, but because we are honest.
BRENDAN RYAN
Salt Lake City
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