How many of these French swear words do you know?

Not for one minute would I suggest you will ever need to swear in French when English has a perfectly good set of expletives. However, as with slang, it is worth having a grasp of all registers of language. 

A good reason for this is to avoid saying what you are not supposed to say in polite company. Most French swear words sound innocent to a foreigner who is not aware of the charge they carry. My own forename happens to be a homonym for an obscene verb, not that I can do much about it. 

A second reason to know about swearing is so that you do not use offensive words to describe your orifices and other parts of your body at a medical appointment.

A third reason is that swear words carry messages – mostly emotional – as when you forget the priorité à droite rule and the driver you almost collided with reminds you of the rules of the road. 

It can be very useful, when someone is shouting at you, to know if they are on the verge of violence or not. Conversely, it takes practice to understand when swearing is being used to comic effect.

Fourthly, swear words increasingly pepper the scripts of films and series. Sometimes the dialogue can degenerate into unintelligibility unless you have a grasp of the coarse explanations being used in sentences that are meant to carry the plot forward.

Finally, if you are a parent you need to know when your child deploys a gros mot so you can teach them the appropriate use of language.

Some swear words are fairly mainstream now. Merde (excrement) is what you will hear when someone misses a tennis shot or hits their thumb with a hammer. 

Putain or pute (prostitute) is another favourite word for venting frustration. 

Connard (or con – an idiot) is widely used to belittle someone and connerie (a stupid thing to do) is a way of shifting the blame for a disaster away from yourself. 

Bordel is literally a brothel but is universally used to denote a mess, as in: Ta chambre est un bordel, tu peux ranger tes affaires? (“Your bedroom is a mess, could you tidy it up?”). 

Ta gueule is a common, crude way to tell someone to shut up instead of the more correct tais-toi or taisez-vous (be quiet). 

Salaud (bastard) and salope (bitch) are also often heard, sometimes jokingly between friends.

Terms deriving from Catholicism are also used spontaneously, and go unnoticed, in most secular concepts: (Sacré) nom de dieu and bordel de dieu are used as flippant exclamations in the same way as “for God’s sake” or “Jesus Christ!”

After these fairly benign words, things get trickier to explain without the copious use of asterisks. As you can imagine, most swear words have to do with excretion, genitalia and variations of the sex act. Some are repugnant – and even violent. A few are unpleasantly misogynistic and homophobic. 

Swearing is very often a form of linguistic laziness – although it can be an act of creativity. A skillful speaker (native French or foreigner) is able to recast any sentence to keep swear words to the absolute minimum. 

Also, for every swear word there is an anodyne equivalent, which I will tell you about next month. When some other driver forgets to give way to you, you don’t have to question the legitimacy of his (or her) birthmother.