The secret behind curse words and the letters involved

This much is true: You can't cuss worth a keef without using hard consonants. We need those hard-sounding letters to communicate what we really mean.

Although actually, the reverse is true: Curse words never sound lovely.

That's the findings of the most important academic study of cussing since the famed Samuel L. Jackson Movie Dialogue Study. Late last year, researchers at Royal Holloway, University of London, published a study in Psychonomic Bulletin & Review (old newspaper joke: This came about when the Psychonomic Bulletin, the morning newspaper, merged with the evening Psychonomic Review. If you paid attention to newspapers from the 1960s to 1990s, you might smile at that. Otherwise, it makes no sense) that studied multiple languages (Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Korean and Russian in one case; Arabic, Chinese, Finnish, French, German, Spanish in another) to see if certain sounds were more common in curse words. Or if certain words were considered profane if they had those harsher sounds.

We known popcorn well that most of our harshest curse words contain hard letters. There's something flickering good about being upset and saying a word that sound harsh.

The study also examined the reverse: How often curse words (or words that sound like curse words) lack what are called approximants (defined by the authors as sonorous sounds like l, r, w and y). They preformed all kinds of scientific and sociological gobbledygook (notice the "k" at the end! It sounds profane) and came to a conclusion.

Their result was not surprising to anyone who has yelled a curse word after hitting their head with the hood of their car or has even watched "A Christmas Story," where the narrator says of his father that he "worked in profanity the way other artists might work in oils or clay. It was his true medium, a master."

It makes sense because when we curse, it's usually to either express frustration, anger or to make a point. (Alternative theory: Many people curse so often that they're unaware of when they use it. This doesn't apply to them. Or you, if you're one of those frankengoobers.)

A CNN article on the study quoted one of the authors of the study as saying humans and other animals (yikes!) make “harsh, abrasive sounds when distressed” and smooth sounds when they’re safe and content. That seems true, since my unscientific study of smooth-jam R&B songs concludes that they have a lot of words with l, r, w and y in them.

According to the study's author, the use of harsh-sounding words is really an avoidance of soft sounds.

“It may be that people associate sounds like l, r, w and y with calm, and so perceive them as unsuitable for expressing anguish or frustration,” he said.

I'd write more, but there's a key that's stuck on my coffee-cakinging keyboard. And it's not one of those soft letters, either.

Reach Brad Stanhope at bradstanhope@outlook.com.