Profanity.

A keg race between 40 boys is never going to end prettily, but over the weekend I had the pleasure of pouring beers for a bunch of friends. There were four groups of 10 boys each from different year groups at Uni competing to finish a keg first with only 4 girls allowed to attend for the first hour, and only under the proviso that we were to be pouring our team’s beers. Conflicted as my feminist side was, I couldn’t bear to see my friends loose the race and so I dutifully went along, ignored any RSA knowledge I hold and poured the boys their beers.

As the day progressed a few different things became very apparent, not only was the language these boys used very much profane, these words, “fuck, cunt, bastard etc.” were used in an enormous range of contexts, as insults, as adjectives, as exclamations, as terms of endearment, and the list goes on and on and on. The thing that I really found very entertaining however, was the fact that, with very few girls at the party the boys really let loose with their swearing. Some of the boys, close friends of mine were swearing like old sailors when up until now I’d never heard more than a few proverbial peeps out of them. The even more interesting thing, that both myself and the other girls noticed was as one of us approached different groups to have a chat, the swearing and profanity would drop to a minimum until we left and then it would immediately start up again!

Sapolsky and Kaye (2005) found that male and male interaction between unmarried med was the interaction in which the greatest levels of profanity was used. When reading this finding I was not surprised in the slightest, Keg race was a perfect example. An observation made by myself and another fellow beer wench was that in these conversations and the context of the day, the two of us were swearing quite frequently, something which was very out of character for the both of us. We were swearing to fit in and minimise the gap between us and the boys. Daly et al (2003) backs up our finding by suggesting that women use profanity in order to fit in with their male coleuges in a male dominated workplace, it also suggests that profanity in this sense is udes to convey a sense of team solidarity.

None the less, I still felt myself, the 3 other beer girls and the 40 odd boys present needed to wash our mouths out with soap!

 

Daly, J., Holmes, J., Newton, J. & Stubbe, M. (2003). ‘Expletives as solidarity signals in FTAs on the factory floor’, Journal of Pragmatics, Vol. 36 (1), pp. 945-964

Sapolsky, B. & Kaye, B. (2005). ‘The use of offensive language by men and women in prime time television entertainment’. Atlantic Journal of Communication, Vol. 13 (4), pp. 292-303