What the f---: Are people swearing more?

If you attended John Mellencamp’s recent show at the IU Auditorium, you heard the word blankety-blank from the stage, loud and clear, several times.

As The Herald-Times reported on the front page, our hometown folk-rock star shared a little “Indiana wisdom” halfway through his performance at IU.

“I’m 71 now, and I’m going to tell you what I’ve learned: the trick is not giving a f---,” Mellencamp counseled to a few laughs, even a few cheers.

“We give too many f---s about things that don’t matter,” Mellencamp observed before returning to music. Later in the show, when a few audience members screamed in appreciation during his ballads, Mellencamp was less philosophical:

“If you want to do that, go out in the f---ing hallway.”

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If some members of the audience took offense at Mellencamp’s instructions, it wasn’t reported. But we do seem to excuse performers for their language, explained Michael Adams, IU professor of English and chair of the department.

“There’s a performative aspect to it,” Adams said in an interview. “A performer is trying to build what you might call colloquial rapport. We trust people who talk like us, and we like the reassurance that other people will take a risk with us.”

So, are we hearing more of the F word these days?

“I think we are,” says Adams, author of the 2016 book “In Praise of Profanity.” But he adds, “It’s impossible to gauge in a global way because there are all the opportunities to be expressive that we didn’t allow in the past.”

Did people swear as much in the past?

“Sure, they did,” Adams says. “But they didn’t swear as much in plain view — because there was no ‘plain view.’ We created the plain view.” With social media in mind, he adds: “It invites the performance we’re talking about.”

And thinking about performance, people of a certain age may recall when TV comedian George Carlin, on stage in 1972, listed “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television.” You can find Carlin pronouncing them in an online search. Or use your imagination — the first letters are S, P, F, C, C, M, and T.

Another expert on profanity, Professor John McWhorter of Columbia University, revised Carlin’s list and added two words in his 2021 book “Nine Nasty Words: English in the Gutter: Then, Now, and Forever.”

Again, try guessing those words from the initials: D, H, F, S, A, D, C, N, F, with possibly another C. For McWhorter’s discourse on each word, you can check out his book at the Monroe County Public Library.

For national stats on swearing, be wary of article such as one from “Insider” with the headline, “The average American utters 80 to 90 curse words every day.”

Arthur C. Brooks, writing in The Atlantic, offers a more relaxed assessment: “Americans are profligate cursers,” he writes. “Of every 1,000 words we speak, some linguists have said, an average of five are swears.” Well, that seems more civilized.

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Brooks notes further, thinking about COVID: “If you’re like a lot of other Americans, you’ve become a bit more of a potty mouth over the past two years. Use of the most common swear words on Facebook went up by 41 percent from 2019 to 2021.”

But what is it about the F word that makes it so — useful? IU professor Adams explains it this way, for example comparing F--- to S---.

“The two words have different phonetic construction,” he notes. “The F word is more useful because of the way it starts and the way it ends. The letter F is a propulsive sound, and it takes you into the vowel, an ‘uh,’ and that’s different from the F; and then you hit a K.” Full stop.

"So, you get a push out of the F word that you don’t get with the S word.”

Any questions, class?

This article originally appeared on The Herald-Times: How ubiquitous is the f word today? Are people swearing more?