According to psycholinguist Timothy Jay, who has performed extensive research on swearing, children, these days learn swear words from a very young age — around one or two. Jay’s studies of children and swearing, conducted in the United States between 1992 and 2013, have found that young children generally learn the form and content of swear words from their parents.
In the 2013 study, involving predominantly the middle class, Caucasian children aged between one and 12, Jay and Kristin Jay found that by the time children entered school (around the age of five), they had a “fairly elaborate (42-word) taboo vocabulary”.
Yet the myth persists that children need “protection” from swear words outside the sanctuary of their home. There are even criminal laws predicated on this and other “folk-linguistic” theories on swearing. In New South Wales, for example, it is a crime to use offensive language in, near, or within hearing distance from, a public place or school. Police commonly issue on-the-spot fines for using four-letter words in public.
In Queensland, saying “dirty words” in public can be punished by up to six months’ imprisonment. Similar offensive language crimes exist throughout Australia. The Commissioners said that action was necessary to “safeguard the well-being of the nation’s children from the most objectionable, most offensive language”.
Myths about swearing
Alongside the idea that children can be corrupted by four-letter words, proscriptions against swearing rely on a number of “folk-linguistic” assumptions. Common theories about swearing include:
l Swear words are inherently harmful or dirty.
l Swearing is a sign of an “impoverished vocabulary”.
l People who swear are “lazy”.
l Swearing is “common” or “not classy”.
l Society must censor or punish swearing to prevent increasing use of four-letter words.
Each of these ideas have been discredited by linguists. The use of taboo words is a persistent language phenomena documented since ancient Roman times. The correlation between the form and meaning of swear words are arbitrary; they are not inherently sexual, harmful or dirty.
High taboo frequency has been positively correlated with other measures of verbal fluency, and swear words are relatively common among university students, a population that generally has “higher-than-average verbal abilities which selectively qualify them for admission”.
Swear words also have documented positive uses; they can be a non-violent way of venting frustration or anger and can express humour. Swearing can be a means by which to enhance group solidarity and even increase pain tolerance.
“Protecting” children from swear words
Proponents of laws that censor or punish swear words have long advanced the rationale that children need “protection” from obscenities. When obscenity laws were introduced to the colonies in the mid-19th century, women and children as beacons of purity were considered most at risk of being polluted by the filth of swear words. Children exposed to swear words were thought to catch the habit of swearing in the same way one acquires a bad cold.
Judges, magistrates and politicians continue to dictate that it is inappropriate to swear in restaurants, shopping centres, parks and school playgrounds in which children are present.
On the other hand, army camps, football matches, tennis courts and male dressing rooms are considered places in which swearing is acceptable, or even to be expected.
Source: www.theconversation.com
