Swearing is shocking, rude and fun, writes Rebecca Roache in her new book For F*ck’s Sake. Here’s how our former monarch might have employed the ‘F’ and ‘C’ words to dramatic effect…

The late Queen Elizabeth II famously described 1992 as an annus horribilis in her televised Christmas Message that year. (It means “horrible year”– be sensible you lot, this is Oxford University Press.) At the time, her words rippled through media reports around the world, as journalists speculated about what particular events (and there were a few candidates) could have pushed her to use her address to the nation to bitch about stuff rather than to reflect on her 40 years – it was her anniversary! – on the throne.

The speech is still discussed more than 30 years later, and thanks to the Netflix series The Crown, a new generation is finding out about it. Part of what raised eyebrows at the time was the fact that Her Majesty’s mask of propriety had slipped a bit, and revealed her to be… well, pissed off. We can all relate to that, can’t we? Even if the way in which she vented her annoyance – in Latin, while standing in front of a gold and red velvet throne – is rather distant from our own frustrated behaviour.

But what if it hadn’t been? What if the way in which she had expressed herself had been much more akin to how old Geraint down the local pub moans about the roadworks on the lane leading down to his farm?

Let’s picture how this might have unfolded. Christmas Day, 1992, and you’re in the UK. Perhaps it’s where you live, or maybe you’re just visiting. Bloated and snoozy after your Christmas lunch, you give thanks for the elasticated waistband on your shell suit and settle down in front of the TV to eat as much unhealthy food as possible while watching the Queen’s Speech.

There she is on the screen: coiffed and pearl-necklaced in front of her Guildhall throne, with her husband Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh on her left, and Prime Minister John Major on her right, just the other side of the ermine-clad Lord Mayor of London. In the hush that follows, she begins to speak.

“This is not a year on which I shall look back with undiluted pleasure,” she says. “In the words of one of my more sympathetic correspondents, it has turned out to be a fucking shit year. I suspect that I am not alone in finding that it has absolutely sucked arseholes. I’m not going to lie to you cunts. One can’t wait to see the fucking back of it.”

What might your reaction have been to witnessing this, do you think? You might respond, at least initially, with shock and disbelief. Perhaps you glance around at your family, a mince pie hovering between your gaping mouth and the crumb-dusted plate on your lap, momentarily speechless. The lot of you might wordlessly seek reassurance from each other that yes, you really did hear what you all thought you heard.

After that, in some families, the experience might sour the rest of the day, and you might all gravely ruminate on what the world is coming to. But if your family is anything like mine, your initial shock would instead give way to glee and hilarity. The Queen said what? You open another bottle of wine. Argue about who’s going to use the phone first to call friends. (It’s 1992, remember: only estate agents have mobile phones, and WhatsApp hasn’t been invented.) Tell your kids to stop scaring the cats by running around yelling SUCKED ARSEHOLES!!!!!

Or perhaps, instead, you would just continue watching the TV in rapt silence, not wanting to miss any further sweary outbursts from Her Majesty. Whatever your response, the chances of any of this not making headlines around the world are approximately zero.

But why should any of this be a big deal? People swear all the time. Had you decided to wander to the local pub after lunch instead of watching to see what the Monarch had to say, you would not have batted an eyelid if, during the course of an increasingly alcohol-fuelled afternoon, you heard Geraint embark on yet another one of his sweary rants about the roadworks.

On the other hand, in other contexts, your reaction to this sort of language would be different still. If somebody had delivered anything resembling the Sovereign’s potty-mouthed remarks during the funeral of one of your closest relatives while standing at the graveside watching the coffin being lowered into the ground, it’s likely that you would have been horrified, upset, decidedly unamused, and perhaps even angry, even if you’re normally the sort of person who doesn’t mind swearing at all.

And if one of the staff at your toddler’s nursery used this language in the presence of the children, you might be alarmed, and you might worry about this person’s competence to look after your child.

What is it about swearing that leads us to react so differently to it depending on who is swearing and where and how they’re doing it? What – if anything – is wrong with swearing? And what sort of wrong are we dealing with here?

There are many puzzling things about swearing and its effect on us, but no less puzzling are some of the things we do to try to avoid causing offence through swearing. Let’s return to our imaginary Queen’s Speech, which we left having observed that we could expect to find Her Majesty’s tirade reported prominently and internationally in the news. Despite the inevitable interest from the media in reporting an event like this, it’s unlikely that we would have found many news outlets reporting an unedited account of what was said.

Instead, we’d have seen asterisks sprinkled across the headlines like festive snowflakes. Our Head of State would have been quoted as having described the foregoing 12 months as a f***ing sh*t year. In other words, we could have expected to find the newspapers censoring what the Queen said even as they aimed to report exactly what she said.

Similarly, televised news footage of the speech would have used bleeps to replace the swear words, and perhaps also pixelated the Defender of the Faith’s mouth in order to thwart attempts at lip- reading. And yet we’d all know exactly what it was she’d said, even if we hadn’t seen the original broadcast.

This way of “sanitising” swear words to communicate them inoffensively is widespread and effective – but how does it work? How does f*** manage to be less offensive than fuck, given that anyone who understands f*** knows exactly what word is being communicated to them, and given that anyone who writes f*** intends to communicate fuck to their readers? We’re going to dive into all this.

Extract from For F*ck’s Sake: Why Swearing is Shocking, Rude, & Fun by Rebecca Roache (£16.99, OUP).

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