The benefits of bad language
There’s a snippet in yesterday’s GUARDIAN under ‘science’ titled: ‘Swearing lessens the pain other words cannot reach’. The article is too short to excerpt effectively* so this is most of it and I hope copying it here is not too heinous a crime: ‘Swearing can . . . lessen pain . . . scientists at Keele University . . . asked 66 volunteers to submerge a hand into iced water while repeating one swear word out of a list of “five words you might use after hitting yourself on the thumb with a hammer” . . . again . . . with “five words to describe a table.” Volunteers were able to keep their hands in longer when they swore. Their heart rates . . . accelerated and . . . pain perception reduced. The scientists, writing in NeuroReport, believe swearing triggers a “fight or flight” response and heightens aggression.’
In the first place, I love this.** In the second place . . . according to the one-rat experiment that is my life, it’s true. I’ve been turning the local atmosphere a deep indigo for decades and in response to a variety of stimuli, but I noticed a long time ago that if you start yelling your head off in that split second between whatever you’ve done to yourself and when the pain hits, I don’t know if the pain is precisely less, but it’s noticeably easier to bear. Violence of language seems to hold it off somehow, objectify it. It has occurred to me (frequently) that I am merely nuts, but hey, whatever works.
But the point at which I learnt to work this system hard was only after I moved over here.*** I was life-threateningly allergic to lush southern England vegetation, and not least among perils was my hyper-reactivity to nettle burns. Before homeopathy came to my rescue I used to have to dope myself up during particularly bad patches of hay fever—during which times I was therefore even more of a space cadet than I am anyway—and when I was out of my gourd on Big Pharma antihistamines I didn’t react as savagely to nettles. Any other time, the merest brush of an urtica leaf and that whole arm or leg or side of my body would throb for a good twenty-four hours, or rather a very bad twenty-four hours, including preventing me from sleeping that night. There are a lot of nettles in southern England—and I’d become a gardener as well as a passionate user of the public-footpath system. In my new life I was haunted by nettles.†
I always swore when I burnt myself of course, because I’m like that, and because it got me over the initial outbreak of PAIN. But I didn’t discover I was missing a trick till one day when I was down near the front gate reclaiming a bit of wilderness and fell in a patch of nettles. All one arm and hand, the side of my neck and my face . . . I was going to die. I picked myself up, shrieking with pain, shock and fury . . . and I knew that as soon as I stopped screaming it would overwhelm me . . . I was also extremely pissed off at having done something so stupid . . . so I just went on screaming. †† And from that physical-tension sense of holding off assault, I could feel the assault . . . ebbing. I won’t say the pain went away, but it did subside. It was never as bad as it should have been, and was gone by bedtime.
After that you can be sure I swore like sixty any time I had a close personal encounter with a nettle, and any time I was going after a neglected area I’d crank myself up first into a berserker high—I won’t call it rage, it doesn’t have to be rage: nor do you have to scream, fortunately, the odd intense grunt will do—before I waded in. ††† Worked like a charm, which arguably it is. It’s not something I could keep up for long—say twenty minutes—but you can rip out a lot of nettles in twenty minutes. ‡ And I could even get stung on the insides of my wrists and forearms—my commonest least favourite place for nettle burns, where the skin is so thin—and the sensation would sizzle briefly and retire.
It fascinates me what already being in a state of heightened whatever can do—for nettle stings for example it’s much more effective than merely cursing yourself blue after the undesirable has struck—nor do I understand the chemical mechanism. What I’m talking about is the same high that every band of military elite has taught itself to put on like sword-belts or bandoliers before going into battle ‡‡ and I’m living proof it works for girls too. But that’s chiefly mood altering chemicals, isn’t it? I know mind and body are all wound up into the same critter but I would have thought that the hormone to make you feel you’re capable of anything, including licking the army just over the next hill that outnumbers you three to one, would not be a near relation of the enzyme or whatever it is that stops your skin reacting to formic acid. But how little I know. Now that I’m back on line‡‡‡ maybe I’ll try to look it up.
* * *
* http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2009/jul/12/swearing-pain-scientific-research-keele
** In the spirit of scientific inquiry I tried tripping over a chair and subsequently dancing around the kitchen shouting: Flat! Brown! Four-legged! And all that happened is that Chaos got out of the dog bed to investigate this strange new hellgoddess manifestation. The shouting and the hopping were familiar, but there was something subtly different. . . . Arguably Chaos is flat, brown, and four-legged, so perhaps he thought I was calling him.
*** I am uneasily half-certain I’ve told this story before. I’ve also said more than once that recycling is going to happen on this blog: and this is a particularly clear and emphatic example of mind-body interaction and as a homeopath and a card-carrying member of the It’s All Connected club this story is going to come up from time to time.
I do hope I’m telling it more or less the same way, however. (I wasn’t wearing shorts, was I? I’m pretty sure I wasn’t wearing shorts. It has to be blisteringly hot before I’ll be so imprudent as to do any serious gardening in shorts.)
† Without wishing to spoil my own story, I will add that discovering dock leaves helped too. Any of you living in nettle-prone areas will I assume be aware that docks and nettles tend to grow in the same swathes of ground—but I’ve been surprised to discover how many people don’t know that dock-leaf juice will damp a nettle burn. You need a or several fairly large and fairly green and juicy dock leaves and you need them fast . . . but I had a lot fewer sleepless nights after I learnt to dive for the nearest dock plant, frantically mash up a few leaves, and plaster it to whatever I’d just burnt. This is of course not ideal when you’re in jeans and the nettles have got you on the inside of the thigh, but it’s worth a little embarrassment.^ You also want to be swearing the standard blue streak to keep the situation under control while you’re doing your diving and mashing.
^ Say I. It depends on how badly you burn.
†† Pity the poor neighbours, who were just on the other side of the wall there; Peter, as I recall, was at the other end of our big garden, and never heard a thing.
††† And yes of course I would be wearing gloves and so on. But nettles can sting you perfectly well through pretty much any clothing short of armour, speaking of berserkers. I am regularly stung through my rose-gauntlet gloves and denim jeans. Gloves and jeans slow them down a little, but they’re not an impenetrable barrier.
‡ As a good ecological greenie I wish to say that there were always patches of nettles in the old garden. It was merely a question of where and how many. You look lofty and say they’re for the butterflies if the subject comes up, but the fact is—as I have also said before—the old garden was two and a half acres with only Peter, me, and our two-day-a-week gardeneroid, who was a kind of large semi-mobile gnome, to cope, and we were never on top of it.
Peter used to say that a big garden was an empire, and that while you were busy subduing one province another one would be getting up a rebellion.
‡‡ I’m told the Vikings’ berserker reputation is much exaggerated
‡‡‡ Yaaaaay Computer Men. Mind you, they don’t know what’s happened either. But they’ve taken away the offending machinery and left me with a patch. A patch that works.
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