Swearing as a Response to Pain: Assessing Effects of Novel Swear Words
62 comments
·June 29, 2025MattPalmer1086
At school my German teacher loved to teach us the longest swear word in German (or so he claimed). He would illustrate it by pretending he hit his thumb with a hammer, and then he would let out this wonderful long stream of invective, but which is one word in German. He would then translate it all for us.
No idea if it helps with hitting your thumb with a hammer, but memorable teaching!
MisterTea
> longest swear word in German
Inquiring minds want to know...
schandmaul
Himmi Herrgott Sackl Zement Zefix Halleluja Mi Leckst Am Oarsch Scheiss Glump Faregets
Edit: It‘s irrelevant if you write it as one word, you certainly say it as one.
MattPalmer1086
I wish I could remember. Words in German can be long as they are composed of other words. It was along the lines of thunder and lightning and terrible storms blight you! But I think there was a bit more to it than that.
EDIT; and the teacher may have made the entire thing up of course! Loved his lessons.
vincent-manis
Untergrundbahnhofzeitschriftsplatz: Subway station newspaper stand
cubefox
By the way, English also has compound nouns, only they are sometimes written with spaces and sometimes without. Sometimes even with dashes. E.g. compare "coalmine" and "file name". Compound nouns can get arbitrarily long too, e.g. "file name length limit history blog post introduction".
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techdmn
Many years ago, my daughter (maybe six at the time), lost something semi-important to her, I don't recall what. I think it might have been her username / pictorial password card for her school network account. Anyway, we were looking for it, and she said "Dad, dad, I don't know where it is, I feel like I'm going to say a bad word".
I, having just read an article like this, said "That's ok, sometimes saying a bad word can help you process your emotions and feel less stressed. Do you want to go down to the basement where nobody can hear you, and say the bad word?"
"Yes". She goes down the stairs, I close the door, and she yells at the top of her lungs: "I can't fucking find it!". I managed not to laugh, she comes back up, "Do you feel better?" "Yes." Great moments in parenting. :-) (We did eventually find whatever it was.)
jacobgkau
To think, you could've taken that opportunity to point out to her that saying the bad word didn't actually help her find it. Or you could've told her immediately that you heard her through the door because she yelled. Instead, you raised a casual swearer who's unaware of her surroundings. I hope nobody ever has to live in an apartment next to her.
qualeed
It's comments like this that really make participating on this forum not fun.
It's a cute story. Fuck is just a word. They aren't going to grow up to be a bad person because they said it as a kid, and it's wild to say stuff like this to someone when you have literally no other context about their life or upbringing.
Your weird negativity to a stranger and implying they aren't doing a good job parenting based on them sharing a couple sentence long story is, in my opinion, a worse character trait than saying fuck every now and again. You have 0 idea what kind of kid they are raising.
Oh the horror of a "casual swearer"!
gsinclair
Praise be to this comment!
galaxyLogic
There are T-shirts that say "Fuck You You Fucking Fuck!".
lxe
Sir, this isn't Instagram
sunrunner
> saying the bad word didn't actually help her find it
Any proof of this?
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lxe
This was the first paper I read almost to completion. What a fascinating read. It's cool to see the hypotheses be refuted through experimentation. TL;DR: twizpipe and fouch don't help with pain, while "fuck" does.
phantomathkg
So this is like a more rigorously version of Mythbusters' No Pain, No Gain test then.
ascorbic
The MythBusters test was inspired by an earlier study. It's quite a well-studied effect now. Here's a review of the literature: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10....
fracus
Mythbusters shouldn't have ended when it did. I wish all 5 of them could have made an arrangement where it could continue.
dtgriscom
I spent two years of high school learning Russian. I can't remember much of it, except the section of the alphabet that sounds like swearing: р, с, т, у, ф, х (pronounced, approximately, and with feeling: "er ess teh, oo eff HAH").
neoden
Oh, Russian is exceptionally well built for swearing. It provides possibilities barely imaginable from the perspective of languages such as English because of how mutable and composable word structure is. With roughly the same base set of 3-4 swear words the actual number of different forms that could be used goes to thousands and is hard to count, each word having its own shade of meaning and sometimes many more than one.
carpo
When my kids were younger I tried to to replace my swearing by saying "sugarplum fairies". It was fairly successful in becoming a natural replacement. However, the other day I kicked my toe really badly and instinctively yelled "sugarplum FUCKING fairies" and my kids (now early teen) found it extremely funny.
goopypoop
Can I swear in pain enough to Clockwork Orange myself? Could prove cheaper than the fucking swear jarrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
kulahan
I read once that there is a common structure to swear words. If you think about it, fuck, cunt, shit, crap - they all have kiiind of a similar vocal feeling.
I wonder if different fake swear words may have had a different outcome.
anoncow
There is also an impact of swear words on pleasure. Also on strength and performance - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S14690...
slig
Anecdotally, I find swearing in German and Italian satisfying and people around usually don't understand, so no issues there.
pif
I had been working at CERN for a bit less than a year, when my Russo-Israelian coworker, who had never visited Italy, erupted in a perfect "Porca puttana!" that made me question my manners in the office.
fuzzy_biscuit
I swear in Italian and Russian. Great minds think alike!
timewizard
Anecdotally I find swearing makes it worse. Now I just saw "ow!" or "that hurt!" Which honestly feels like it synchronizes my brain past the insult and I can move on much faster past it.
ethan_smith
This matches research on pain catastrophizing vs. neutralizing - your approach of acknowledging pain directly without emotional amplification may be activating different neural pathways than those enhanced by taboo-word usage.
MisterTea
Similar: I say something amusing/funny, e.g. I hit my head on a piece of metal and yelled "ah ya mother was a tin can you metal bastard" which breaks your thought from the pain. Screaming fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu... only keeps you focused.
chrisweekly
hahaha, I'm going to try this
Supermancho
In primates there are commonly 3 noises as a reaction to danger.
Initially the work from the 70s-80s on vervet monkeys https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7433999/ which was then found to be generalized for a host of other primates
~1 for danger in the air
~1 for danger on the ground
misc for unspecified danger
I would bet that modern swearing maps to these calls in a less specific way. Equivalents of "this shite" "that arsehole" and "damnnit" may have an evolutionary origin.
kulahan
I use a mix of both, but when I’m in really serious pain, I also find it’s more effective when I’m just like “Wew. WOW. Yeah that’s pretty good there. Phew. Wow. WOOOW.”
I dunno why, but wow seems to work well for me.
For the past few years I've made a conscious effort to not use swear words like "fucking" and "shit" casually. I feel like if they're overused they lose their power, to yourself and to others around you. Everyone of us knows that guy or girl that never normally swears, so then when they do you know it's serious.