• Rather than claim he was misquoted, S African President joked he was off his meds
Some years ago, I read a report that said scientists thought cursing can enhance the effectiveness and persuasiveness of an argument.
They also found that people who curse often actually lie less and have a higher degree of integrity.
According to one of the researchers: “People who are good at producing language are good at producing swear words. It’s not because they don’t have language — it’s because they have a whole toolbox full of words.”
Not to show off or anything, but I can swear like the proverbial trooper, and those who know me well will tell you I often do so in conversation.
It’s funny, I don't recall my parents ever swearing, at least not around me. That said, I do remember hearing both my grandmothers utter the occasional curse word, so perhaps the swearing gene skipped a generation.
I think I learned the power of a well-aimed, if a little ill-timed, curse when I was in secondary school.
A group of my friends and I had begun using swear words and phrases as terms of endearment to each other using the logic of 13-year-old boys, which was exactly what we were at the time.
We thought it was terribly sophisticated. So, for instance, we would playfully call each other bastards in the old sense of a child born out of wedlock and think it was a complete hoot.
The problem was not everyone around us thought the same way, as I found out when I shouted out the phrase 'mwana haramu' at a car I thought to be carrying my friend Timothy, who would respond in kind. Only to realise that his father was also in the car after the words were out of my mouth.
You’d have thought I’d learnt my lesson the year before, when I had linked the coarse Anglo-Saxon word for sexual intercourse with the word bastard in the hearing of one of my aunts.
A group of us were playing in the pool at their home in Nyali, and someone had literally poked me in the eye, causing me to retort with a stream of swear words. My very shocked aunt, who happened to be nearby, heard me and nearly sent me back home to my parents in Nairobi in utter disgrace.
However, as she was acting in loco parentis, she concocted her own chastisement of me and made me write a letter of apology, which for a 12-year-old, normally thought to be a good influence on other children, it was a tougher punishment than it sounds.
Today, years of social conditioning and lots of figurative tongue-biting have gone into ensuring that I control my language when in certain company.
I am not always successful with this suppression of strong language, but by and large, I have managed to keep a civil tongue at the office and around the easily shocked.
I got to thinking about this the other day after the mild-mannered and normally unflappable President Cyril Ramaphosa let loose with some swearing while answering questions in Parliament.
The President, who had earlier joked that he was off his meds, seemed to be getting fed up with Opposition claims of inaction against his ministers for fear that they might make his life difficult. At some point, he said out loud in the National Assembly that he fears “fokol”, and is not afraid to act when needed.
Now 'fokol' is an Afrikaans word that is used to mean “nothing at all” or “very little”, but if you say it out loud, you can hear its roots lie in a similarly pronounced English phrase with the same meaning.
The use of the phrase by the President caused quite the stir, and I can bet if an opinion poll on his popularity had been taken immediately afterwards, he might have scored very high.
For the public, it was kind of like President Mwai Kibaki’s 'mavi ya kuku (chicken poop)' moment. For Kenyans, it humanised the President.