Ben Guttmann
In 1972, George Carlin walked off a stage in Milwaukee… and walked into police custody. Following his famous bit about the “seven words you can’t say on television,” the comedian was arrested on charges of profanity and disturbing the peace.
While fifty years ago, Carlin’s iconic list (my apologies, but you must have seen this coming from the blog title: “ass,” “balls,” “cocksucker,” “cunt", “fuck", “motherfucker", “piss,” “shit,” and “tits”) landed him a mugshot, today you can find nearly all of these words blown up in bold, 90-point Helvetica lining the shelves of any book store. The self-help aisle is now not safe for work.
We’ve been swearing for a long time. Ancient Romans cursed. Peasants in the Middle Ages cursed. Most of our current arsenal of swear words can trace their origins back to the Renaissance. But, the use of expletives in our literature is a more modern phenomenon.
Some point to Adam Mansbach’s parody children’s book Go the F*ck to Sleep, from 2011, as the start of this trend. But the floodgates really opened when Jen Sincero landed herself a #1 New York Times Best-Seller with You Are a Badass in 2013. Then Mark Manson sold millions of copies of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck. Gary John Bishop hit it big with Unfuk Yourself. Sarah Knight played off the non-cursing Marie Kondo with The Life-Changing Magic of Not Giving a Fck. Hit after hit after hit.
These books, and many others, succeeded partly because they were salient. They stood out. They rose to our attention.
In a sea of traditionally blasé titles, like Think and Grow Rich, The Power of Positive Thinking, and The Four Agreements, the bluntness of something like Unfu*k Yourself shines as a beacon of contrast. You can easily convince yourself: This book is different… so maybe this book is better.
If Mark Manson titled his book How to Refocus Your Attention, it would get lost in the noise of a thousand similar books. But telling somebody about the gentle, “subtle art” of something as crude as “not giving a f*ck” immediately makes the book jump to our attention.
This strategy works great when the cursing is novel and unique. But the magic wears off when the hundreds of imitators come poring into the marketplace. It’s an imperfect metric, but there are over 50,000 results for the word “fuck” on Amazon. One 2017 study found that swearing within books (using Carlin’s list as the measuring stick) has risen 28X since 1950.
Cursing is somewhat magical. Swearing can make you seem more honest and make building relationships and trust within groups easier. A large vocabulary of bad words might be correlated with intelligence. Deploying curse words increases our pain tolerance.
But as with the foul-language book titles, and like pretty much everything else, these effects wear thin over time. Across nearly every category, the benefits of cursing are most effective when used in moderation. Psychologist Richard Stephens, who conducted some of the research referenced above, summarized it, “We found that the people who swear the most in everyday life got the least benefit from swearing.”
The same holds true for our marketing. In a category where cursing was once unheard of, titles that used it immediately benefited. But now that everybody is zigging, it’s time to zag.
