New Zealand

Redditor asks ‘do Kiwis swear too much?’, gets classic NZ response

"I love peppering my sentences with spicy words!"

We Kiwis are known for shooting it straight, but quite often we’ll do it with some colourful language.

This hasn’t gone unnoticed by a Kiwi who’s been living overseas. @Dan_Kuroko took to Reddit to ask: “Is it just me thinking this or do Kiwis swear A LOT?”

“I've been living overseas for a number of years now (probably close to 10, mostly around Asia and the US), and it's only since I started visiting more often that I've noticed how much Kiwis swear,” Dan wrote.

“For example, when we're describing something, we always have to say f***ing in front of it - "that's f***ing cool, that was f***ing wild, f***ing hell.”

He followed up his post wondering whether he’s imagining things, and while I’ve never really thought about it, he might be f***ing right, ya know.

Turns out, we’re all pretty aware of it, with one commenter writing: “Yes we do, I tailor my sentences accordingly to who's in the room though, but yeah, I do use them a lot during the day.”

"I profusely swear and I'm usually completely oblivious to it,” another said. “Fkn is my word for umm."

“Shit, I f****ing love peppering my sentences with spicy words when I'm with my good c****s,” a third proudly embraced it.

For some, swearing adds a bit of flavour. “Swearing is the delicious hokey pokey in the bland vanilla ice cream of modern language,” one person said.

Another agreed: "At this point, they're not really swear words anymore but more of a sentence enhancer."

“Sometimes they're not even enhancers, just stand-ins for regular words,” added a third. “Like ‘shit’ will often just mean ‘stuff’, like ‘Put your shit over there’ or ‘Did you remember to get the shit to make dip while you were out?’”

A fourth made a point of questioning: “Is it that New Zealanders swear a lot, or that Americans don’t swear very much? 🤔”

“They’re just words, why bother getting upset by it?” Another asked.

Will we stop? Probably not… but hey, we love a self-aware bunch, and we’re bloody owning it.