My longest relationship has been with a pack of cigarettes. At first, this chemical romance felt like a kind of performance, a behavioral cosplay of my art-school peers, who appeared to be perpetually surrounded by a cloud of Camel Blue. Later, while ignoring a rather obvious addiction, I tricked my brain into believing smoking had a soporific and soothing act, inhaling a cultural narrative that it exuded the nihilist style of a 1960s French actress. The reality: Smoking is abjectly gross, zero-gain, and unglamourous. The premature aging, the lingering smell, the constant headaches and chest pain, the fact it’s literally killing you—all of it, no thank you. As Alexa Chung once said, “I gave up smoking (again), because as much as I loved them, they didn’t love me back.” So here I am: 40 days cig-free.
The world’s leading cause of avoidable premature mortality, tobacco smoking is a scientifically proven, virtueless vice. Broadly speaking, a vice is a “bad habit” or a “weakness of character.” But, in the spirit of honesty, it would be a disservice to claim to be a poster girl for wellness in other ways, as I find joy in a plethora of so-called “guilty pleasures.” To steal a Natasha Lyonne (who also quit cigarettes recently) school of thought: “I fucking love a vice.” Is that always an inherently bad thing? Could some “vices” even yield a positive outcome? Context is everything.
Take the F-bomb, for instance, which was artfully dropped a total of 3,021 times over Succession’s four seasons. Despite having parents who are pretty lax when it comes to dinner-table profanity, swearing’s make-up has, for me, long been painted “foul.” It is explosive, rude, indecent. A tick to be tamed. This is a skewed representation. “People use it as much for expressing enthusiasm or sympathy as they do frustration,” explains Emma Byrne, author of Swearing Is Good for You: The Amazing Science of Bad Language. “It also helps to bolster our physical and emotional resilience.” Otherwise known as lalochezia, one of the most underrated of terms: essentially vulgar vernacular relieves emotional stress or pain. “It’s like having an extra octave,” Byrne adds. “If you’ve ever tried to play the piano with only the white keys, you’d be really limited in the kinds of things you can play… sometimes swearing is absolutely the right note.”
There’s something intensely liberating about this language. Without verbal insult, with good intentions, it has the power to help us navigate or signal how we’re feeling. It can make us feel better. Induce belly laughter or stunned speechlessness. During the pandemic, it was shared speech, small talk with near strangers, gossip, we so deeply craved. Despite the latter’s historically negative connotations, Xinyue Pan, an assistant professor of psychology—whose research explores the evolution and functions of gossip—applies a neutral definition here, as merely an exchange of “information about a third party.”
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