Offence escalation promises to explain how swearing came to be viewed as offensive. The story begins with certain forms of speech being dispreferred. Once these preferences are established within a community of speakers, people’s knowledge that some expressions are to be avoided inevitably leads them to infer that if they do use a dispreferred expression, they will likely cause discomfort in their listener. And this makes using the dispreferred expression an even greater transgression: it is one thing unwittingly to use a disliked expression; quite another to use a disliked expression knowing that it is disliked, especially if our audience knows that we know that the expression is disliked. In the latter case, but not necessarily in the former, our audience has good reason to doubt our goodwill towards them; consequently, they are offended.

We need to add something to this offence escalation story to explain how words become swear words. As I have outlined it, offence escalation enables any word to become offensive, at least to someone, provided that it involves a word that the listener dislikes. As we see from the Rebecca/Rachel example, even a perfectly respectable name can become offensive to someone when used in a certain way. However, swear words are not merely words that are disliked, and which have subsequently grown to be offensive through a process of offence escalation. After all, ‘Rachel’ is not a swear word, even when used as described above. In addition to being dispreferred, swear words also share certain features in common, such as their focus on taboo topics like sex and defecation. They also, as we have noted, sound a certain way. Offence escalation does not explain why it is the taboo words with a particular sound, rather than other sorts of words, that get to be swear words.