45 Of The Most Amusing Child-Friendly Insults That Members Of This Online Group Couldn’t Resist Sharing With Others

Swear words are an interesting part of our language as they are taboo and very widely used at the same time. Friends and colleagues may swear while talking to each other all the time, but not when they are in a more formal setting, in public or in front of family. 

They help people relieve stress or blow off some steam if something is irritating them. Some research suggests that people who swear are more intelligent, more honest and creative. So the cause that makes us swear and the words themselves are more often negative, but the effect they have and the traits they indicate are usually positive.

Even though adults swear in private all the time, they don’t want children hearing it. The Reddit thread in question is the perfect example of people searching ways of insulting others or swearing by using unusual words and phrases.

Bored Panda reached out to Timothy Jay, PhD who taught Introduction To Psychology and Cognitive Psychology in Massachusetts College Of Liberal Arts and who expertises in psycholinguistics and has a particular interest is swearing.

We asked him what leads adults to protect children from swear words and search for euphemisms. Dr. Jay told us that “Americans have an age-old custom of protecting children from certain aspects of life, such as sexuality, menstruation, birth control, offensive language/music/videos/games.” 

The custom stems from the belief that swearing is harmful to children, “so most parents have rules about swearing in the home, although most of these parents break their own rules from time to time.”

However, the Professor Emeritus doesn’t agree that this is the best approach, “What parents need to do is teach their children that it is okay to have emotions. They have to teach children how to express their emotions in a manner that will not create personal or interpersonal problems.”

We may imagine that people who swear have a lower education, come from low-income families and lack social skills, but it truly doesn’t reflect reality. As mentioned, people who swear can possess positive traits such as intelligence and honesty more often than those who don’t swear.

Dr. Jay confirms it, “Swearing might indicate that the speaker is not holding anything back and gets to the emotional core of communication. People who have large, fluent vocabularies are also good at generating swear words.”

Not only swearing shows positive traits of a person, but it has positive outcomes and are used for positive purposes, “Swearing is used positively to: vent anger/frustration, substitute for physical violence, create peer bonding, create humor, allow for self-denigration.

It’s not to say that people who dont swear are bad or stupid people who don’t have a sense of humor. And people who use child-friendly swears are not inferior either. Actually, Dr. Jay thinks that these milder swears may have the same effect as the heavier ones, “Depends on the particular person. Mormons use euphemisms (sugar, darn, fudge) that seem to work for their emotional expressions. Each person has a history of what will work for relieving stress as a matter of habit…so, it depends.”