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Posted by sega_sai 2 days ago

Swearing as a Response to Pain: Assessing Effects of Novel Swear Words(www.frontiersin.org)
59 points | 65 comments
somedude895 1 hour ago|
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.
gmac 35 minutes ago|
Right on topic, since overuse does in fact reduce their power to relieve pain: https://www.jpain.org/article/S1526-5900(11)00762-0/fulltext
card_zero 24 minutes ago||
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Fictional_English_cu...
xarope 1 hour ago||
As a kid, I vaguely remember appropriating some that I thought were from Tin Tin/Captain Haddock, but when I look in the list[1], I don't recognize my favorites :-(.

[1] https://tintin.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_Captain_Haddock%27s_C...

[edit] holy mackerel, you odd-toed ungulate, I found some!

MattPalmer1086 11 hours ago||
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 11 hours ago|
> longest swear word in German

Inquiring minds want to know...

schandmaul 2 hours ago|||
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.

thaumasiotes 1 hour ago||
> It‘s irrelevant if you write it as one word, you certainly say it as one.

True, but you say everything as one word. You produce "It's irrelevant if you write it as one word" as one word. It has substitutable parts, which is also true of German compound words.

People are shockingly gullible about the fact that compound nouns in German are written without spaces while the grammatically identical compound nouns that are so common in English are written with them, as if spaces occurred in speech.

MattPalmer1086 11 hours ago|||
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 7 hours ago|||
Untergrundbahnhofzeitschriftsplatz: Subway station newspaper stand
chrisweekly 4 hours ago||
The root primitives are so easy to discern and interpret: under,ground, train,yard time,writing place
nothrabannosir 3 hours ago||
(Bahn is more like track, not train)
cubefox 10 hours ago||||
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".
sib 8 hours ago|||
While English has compound nouns, they are different in that they are not (generally) single words.

For example, the lovely and memorable

Donaudampfschiffahrtselektrizitätenhauptbetriebswerkbauunterbeamtengesellschaft

would be translated into something like

"Association for Subordinate Officials of the Main Maintenance Building of the Danube Steamboat Shipping Company"

knome 3 hours ago|||
Squashing "danube steamboat shipping company electric services main maintenance building subordinate officials association" into a single word vs leaving it spaced out is kind of irrelevant. It's like getting excited over PascalCase vs snake_case.
swinglock 1 hour ago||
Instead try for example "washing machine motor" and you'll find it's a feature fixing issues with clarity, not a style preference.
philwelch 8 hours ago|||
It just takes longer to standardize them but English absolutely has compound single words. Examples include “folklore”, “pancake”, “manslaughter”, “oatmeal”, “pocketknife”, and “gunman”.
TulliusCicero 6 hours ago||
Right, they're just typically limited to two subwords.
sib 5 hours ago|||
And you can't typically just make them up as you go along and have them accepted as "words."
philwelch 3 hours ago|||
Albeit rare, triple compound words are nonetheless commonly used and recognized in English. Many of them sound formal and archaic but they are nevertheless still in common usage nowadays, not merely a relic of the days of highwaymen and crossbowmen. The archaic examples heretofore used notwithstanding, it would be false to claim that there are no triple compound words whatsoever.

(Inasmuch as I've made my point, I will spare you any further woebegone prose.)

SoftTalker 10 hours ago|||
And they work as swears too.

Goddamnmotherfuckingsonofabitch

etc.

cubefox 10 hours ago||
Though I believe that's technically not a compound noun. (Fun fact: "compound noun" is a compound noun.)
techdmn 11 hours ago||
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 8 hours ago|
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 8 hours ago|||
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 7 hours ago|||
Praise be to this comment!
galaxyLogic 7 hours ago|||
There are T-shirts that say "Fuck You You Fucking Fuck!".

See: https://www.etsy.com/market/fuck_you_you_fucking

supermatt 10 minutes ago||||
It’s bold of you to critique someone else’s parenting when it’s clearly your own parents who raised the sanctimonious little cunt (not a curse, just an observation) in this conversation.
sunrunner 7 hours ago||||
> saying the bad word didn't actually help her find it

Any proof of this?

lxe 3 hours ago||||
Sir, this isn't Instagram
phantomathkg 4 hours ago||
So this is like a more rigorously version of Mythbusters' No Pain, No Gain test then.
ascorbic 2 hours ago||
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 2 hours ago||
Mythbusters shouldn't have ended when it did. I wish all 5 of them could have made an arrangement where it could continue.
carpo 7 hours ago||
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.
dtgriscom 7 hours ago||
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 2 hours ago|
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.
lxe 3 hours ago||
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.
goopypoop 8 hours ago|
Can I swear in pain enough to Clockwork Orange myself? Could prove cheaper than the fucking swear jarrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
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