How Swear Words Reveal a Culture's Deepest Fears

Shakespeare's characters invoked God's wounds as an oath strong enough to end a conversation. A century and a half later, that same construction had become faintly comical. Today, the words that actually stop a room cold have nothing to do with theology. In American English, the most sanctioned language is no longer about the sacred or the body. It targets people.

That migration is the starting point for a recent video by Dr. Taylor Jones, a linguist with a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania who runs the Language Jones channel on YouTube. In just over seven minutes, Jones maps four centuries of English profanity against the patterns of a half-dozen other languages, arriving at a claim that is both obvious once stated and genuinely clarifying: a language's strongest swear words are found wherever the surrounding culture places its hardest prohibitions. Change the prohibitions, and the inventory of the unspeakable changes with them.

What I didn't anticipate before pressing play was the corollary Jones draws out of the cross-linguistic data. I had assumed that what made something a swear word was some quality of the word itself, its sound, its referent, its history. Jones's argument is cleaner than that, and a little more disorienting: the word is a symptom, not a cause. The force lives in the prohibition, and the word borrows it.

The Framework and Where It Breaks

Jones opens with Benjamin Bergen's four-category model, which organizes profanity around religion, sexuality, bodily waste, and slurs (abbreviated, Jones notes with a straight face, in a way he will leave as an exercise for the viewer). Bergen developed this taxonomy from British, American, and New Zealand English, and Jones is careful to note what Bergen himself cautioned: the four categories are not universal, and applying them globally goes beyond what the evidence supports. They work better, Jones says, as "a starting checklist," with the most interesting material appearing where they fail.

That epistemic carefulness runs through the whole video, and it is the thing I found most worth lingering on. I spend a considerable amount of time listening to people reason out loud. Most presenters, when they reach a hypothesis they find attractive, lean into it. The Calvinist explanation for Dutch disease-swearing is the kind of elegant, counterintuitive claim that tends to get absorbed into received wisdom by the time it clears the third citation. Jones presents it, then immediately names the researcher, Martin van Demillan, who proposed it, and then says, on camera, that it remains a hypothesis because a comparative study hasn't been done. What you hear, listening to that moment, is not hedging. It is someone actively resisting the pull of a good story. In a genre that frequently mistakes confidence for authority, that kind of out-loud restraint lands differently. It earns the confidence Jones does show elsewhere.

Languages That Never Left the Church

Italian, Jones argues, is the clearest case of a language that stayed inside Bergen's first category. Its strongest profanity consists of blasphemies aimed at the Christian God or the Virgin, and two structural details matter. First, Italian blasphemies tend to be phrases rather than single words, meaning the offense is constructed rather than triggered by a single lexical item. Second, Italian law still addresses them: Article 724 of the penal code was decriminalized in 1999 but survives as an administrative offense. Serie A, Jones notes, suspends players whose blasphemous speech reaches the pitch-side microphones.

Quebec French took the same religious raw material and did something stranger with it. The sacres derive from Catholic liturgical objects: tabarnac from the tabernacle, câlice from the chalice, ostie from the communion host. The phonological detail Jones emphasizes here is the part that tends to get left out of casual discussions of Quebec profanity. Each swear word carries its own pronunciation, subtly distinct from the standard liturgical term. A Quebecer who says "tabernacle" with standard French pronunciation has not sworn. The profane register and the sacred register have, over time, developed different phonological signatures, so the speaker's intention is encoded in the sound before the semantics even register.

Diseases, Animals, and What the Framework Misses

Dutch presents the sharpest challenge to Bergen's four categories. Its strongest terms name diseases: cancer, tuberculosis, typhus, cholera. They function as both intensifiers and insults, with the cancer term carrying the most force. Van Demillan's Calvinist hypothesis proposes that a theology linking earthly health to divine favor would naturally generate illness-based curses, weakening religious oaths in the process. Jones attributes the hypothesis, presents it as plausible, and then cites researcher Nicolen Vanderis's observation that no comparative study yet exists. The claim that Dutch is uniquely disease-focused in its profanity is, as Jones frames it, "not refuted. It's just not established."

Indonesian adds animal terms to the picture: words for dog and pig carry real weight, and Jones notes that the pig and dog terms intersect with Islamic categories of ritual impurity. Bergen's category of "slurs" can technically absorb this, but only through what Jones calls a kind of inferential stretching that obscures more than it explains.

Jones also introduces a distinction in Chinese swearing that the four-category model doesn't handle cleanly. Tā māde, which the writer Lu Xun called the "national curse" in a 1925 essay, belongs with sexual insults because it targets a man's female relatives. But Chinese speakers also navigate around the word for death, not because it's forbidden to say, but because it carries bad luck. The avoidance is prophylactic rather than transgressive. As Jones puts it: "the speaker navigates around an unlucky word rather than breaking a rule with a forbidden one." Both behaviors look like taboo from the outside. They are not the same thing, and conflating them makes swearing harder to understand, not easier.

The English Shift and What It Costs

Back to English, and to the harder question. Jones cites a study by Joshua Woodlock and colleagues at Macquarie University in which 60 Australian-born university students rated 55 terms twice each: once for personal offensiveness and once for social taboo. Group-targeting terms, covering racist, sexist, homophobic, and ableist language, rated highest on both measures, above sex, religion, and bodily waste. Racist slurs ranked highest within that set. Jones also notes, drawing on Kate Burridge's work in Forbidden Words, a striking contrast within a single language: a term that functions in American English as a gendered slur operates in Australian English (per fieldwork Jones describes in the video, attributed to researcher Cloud's work among Australian tradespeople) as a marker of membership and even endearment in specific working-class contexts. One word, two varietal registers, two entirely different social functions.

What does it mean that English's hardest language now centers on identity rather than the body or the divine? The progress-versus-decline framing that tends to attach to this question is the wrong instrument for it. I've spent a long time listening to how people use words to include and exclude, to signal and to harm, and what strikes me about the contemporary English pattern is not that it represents moral advancement or cultural decay. It's that the prohibition has become more precise. Early modern English swearing was imprecise in a theological sense: it invoked the divine as a general intensifier. Contemporary English profanity at its most potent is targeted. The words that now carry the most social voltage are the ones that reduce a person to a category. That specificity is not an accident. It reflects a culture that has become, at least in its formal commitments, more attentive to identity-based harm, and swearing has followed the fault lines.

Whether that precision makes the language more or less honest about its own violence is a question Jones leaves open. He probably should. Historical linguists have long observed that the potency of profanity tracks cultural anxiety rather than moral seriousness, and translatedpage.com notes that swear words across history have clustered around "religion, sexuality, bodily functions, and social status" precisely because those are the zones where a given society's rules are most charged. The domain shifts. The mechanism, as Jones says, "doesn't really."

Shakespeare's "zounds" is now a joke. Whatever words we treat as unspeakable today will carry different weight in a generation or two. The inventory is always in motion. The logic that drives it is not.

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Harold "Harry" Goodman is Buzzrag's Spoken Word and Audio Storytelling Correspondent.