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Tag: swearing

  • Town Swears Off Swearing: Watch Your Mouth or Pay the Fine

    A town that swears off swearing sounds like a place heavily inspired by director Marco Brambilla’s deeply underrated Sylvester Stallone/Wesley Snipes sci-fi actioner “Demolition Man”. In the film, a citation is automatically issued every time a person utters an inappropriate word, which ultimately becomes a running joke due to Stallone’s inability to curb his swearing. Although it may sound like a pretty goofy gimmick from an empty-headed Hollywood endeavor, something very similar is going down in the town of Middlesbrough, Massachusetts.

    In an effort to get the younger generation to cut back on the amount of foul language they spout in public, officials have passed an ordinance that would issue a fine of $20 to anyone caught spewing filth around others. Middleborough passed a public profanity law in 1966, though it was rarely used due to the cost and time required to drag the offending individual into court. Instead, they decriminalized profanity and transformed it into an ordinance, which would allow police to distribute tickets the same way they issue traffic violations.

    What about the ordinance encroaching on a person’s right to free speech? That’s definitely a concern, says Matthew Segal, legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts. “Police officers who never enforced the bylaw might be tempted to issue these fines, and people might end up getting fined for constitutionally protected speech,” he explained.

    However, despite First Amendment concerns, several local business owners are happy with the decision. In their eyes, public profanity in the downtown area has raged out of control for far too long. Fining folks for flinging obscenities might force them to watch their mouths.

    “I’m really happy about it. I’m sure there’s going to be some fallout, but I think what we did was necessary,” Mimi Duphily, who owns an auto parts store, said in response to the vote. Regarding the perpetrators themselves, she stated, “They’ll sit on the bench and yell back and forth to each other with the foulest language. It’s just so inappropriate.”

  • London Is Great at $#!)?@$$^%* Twitter Swearing

    Swearing, like 85% cacao dark chocolate and kalamata olives and people who always interrupt you, is an acquired taste. It’s enough put you off with your first experience to really write the entire notion off of the thing entirely yet, with some applied determination and the right person(s) supporting you, swearing can be elevated into an ethereal art that elevates you into an elite class of people who have transcended the middling tribulations of normal life and arrived into a new afternoon of linguistic enlightenment.

    If you’re a Twitter user, you have without doubt encountered some swear words. In fact, some Twitterers have seemingly boldly taken up the challenge of seeing how many creative uses of swear words can be craftily deployed within the 140-character restriction.

    Ed Manley, a researcher at University College London, has noticed the propensity of Twitter users in London who enjoy the difficult art of cussing and, more, cussing on Twitter. He took Twitter’s data and scoured the data for some of the most colorful purple language he could find in his fair city to find out which borrough swears the most on the micro-blogging site. The results reveal that Enfield has the highest percentage of swears in tweets with 3.16% of so to them, I tip my @#%*I hat. He goes into more detail, including a hypothesis about trends of cussing in London, over at the accompanying post on his blog.

    Manley, in his effortless genius, actually made a Google Maps layer to display the percentage of swearing per tweet per borrough. Have a look-see.


    Click here to see the full size map

    Now if only somebody could produce a similar map of different cities and neighborhoods in the United States with Google Maps API, I will do a couple of jumping jacks.

  • Cursing Elevates Your Pain Tolerance (But Only When Used Sparingly)

    Another study has confirmed what many of us already know: A few strategically placed “f*cks” can really help alleviate the pain of that toe you just stubbed.

    This study comes courtesy of Richard Stevens of Keele’s School of Psychology, and has just appeared in the American Journal of Pain. The findings, as reported in that amazingly titled magazine, show that pain tolerance is indeed increased by swearing – but only if the person in pain is not used to cursing like a drunken sailor.

    His research was conducted by using an ice-water challenge, a classic test of pain tolerance where part of the subject is subjected to incredibly cold water and is judged based on their ability to withstand that type of pain.

    He found that among those who reported swearing only a few times a day, the time that they could keep their hands submerged in the ice bath doubled when they employed a couple of naughty phrases.

    But when people who reported frequent swearing (60 times a day or more) tried to use the expletives to increase their pain tolerance – nothing really happened. Their swearing had no effect on the amount of time they could keep their hands in the ice bath.

    The simple takeaway: Swearing helps- but only if you are merely a casual user of bad language in your everyday life.

    From The Independent:

    The mechanism, the scientists say, is simple, swearing elicits an emotional response leading to what is termed “stress-induced analgesia”, also known as the “fight or flight” response, along with a surge of adrenalin.

    Frequent swearers can utter profanities without feeling an emotional response,and thus do not get the same pain-relieving effects. So, it seems, swearing lightly in one’s daily routine can help in the occasional, stressful situation

    This isn’t great news for me – according to the study I receive absolutely no benefit from breaking out the bad words when I cut myself shaving or something. Although this knowledge probably won’t stop me from sounding like an episode of The Wire every time it happens.

    This study corroborates another incredibly scientific study – the one performed by the Mythbusters in 2010. They also confirmed the myth that swearing increases pain tolerance through the ice bath test. Here’s some footage of my favorite mythbuster taking part in the experiment: