With fuck on the front and an invite to learn how to cuss your stale croissant on the back, the Swearing Festival’s postcard-sized flier garnered plenty of attention.

Edinburgh Castle Pub, located at 950 Geary in San Francisco, hosted the cursing celebration February 18. During the evening scholars analyzed, and patrons embraced, expletive expression.

“I hope you die in a pool of your own fucking vomit!” patron Jules Margaret said of her soon to be ex-husband. She took home first prize, a tapestry with the words “go fuck yourself” on it, for publicly humiliating her spouse during the vile oaths contest.

When the bar reopened in 1993, manager Alan Black knew the venue’s survival was dependant on creating something more than just another place to drink.

“Swearing is a giggle,” Black said. “There’s a childish excitability about swearing and I think that’s what people are expecting to find.”
Though most visitors were attracted to the fun and games, Black was interested in discussing swearing culture on a more intellectual level.

Andrew Orlowski, one of three event panelists and a journalist for the The Register, a British publication, believes there are alternatives to swearing that still possess a great deal of impact.

“In England when a soccer referee makes a mistake you would say the referee’s a wanker or a cunt, but in Italy you would say the referee’s a cuckold,” he said. “Which has a lot more power implying that if he doesn’t know what’s going on in front of him he doesn’t know what’s going on behind his back at home.”

Beth Lisick, author of Everybody Into the Pool, wondered where the future of swearing, and communication in general, was headed.

“What are going to be the new words?” Lisick said. “Do we have to do something new now that’s going to make the swear words we used to know have an impact?

Stanford writing and rhetoric lecturer Jonathan Hunt discussed how swearing evolves through spanning cultures and generations.

”Taboos are always migrating. I don’t think it’s necessarily a cycle. They’re geographically located,” Hunt said. “Like ‘bloody’ in 1912 could cause a riot in a British theatre when it was uttered on stage for the first time by a woman, but in the United States there was no reaction whatsoever because it’s treated as a trait of British speech.”

Swearing is foremost a form of communication, but it’s verbal form isn’t necessarily its sole vehicle for execution. Orlowski points out the importance of body language.

“If you travel in Spain and Italy they don’t really need to say anything to make their intentions very clear,” Orlowski said. “It’s really quite a gift to use expressive gestures in that way.”

To demonstrate motions are as effective as spoken obscenities Michelle Karell, an Edinburgh Castle bartender and cocktail server, taught the crowd how to express “go fuck yourself” in Italian.

Some attendees felt uneasy being around so much excessive swearing.

Michael Pena, a writer and San Francisco State alumni, was one of those people. He, like bar manager Black, was most interested in the panel discussion.

“My favorite part was when one of the panelists talked about the phenomenon of someone with a brain injury that can’t necessarily retain any information but can still manage to cuss up a blue streak,” Pena said.

Black hoped the Swearing Festival would inspire people to find an inventive approach to swearing and, more importantly, daily interaction.

“Maybe people will pick up dictionaries and find more interesting adjectives to describe their frustrations,” Black said. ”Maybe that should be the crusade to the end of swearing.”

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