I finally need to stifle my swearing

Having used expletives to make friends and influence people, Will Gore thinks twice about effing and jeffing

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Most of us, I imagine, regret things we have said to our nearest and dearest. Families are often places of verbal rough and tumble, as children test boundaries, mums and dads express their frustration, and distant uncles inadvertently put their feet in it by slagging off a much-loved cousin.

My earliest memory of remorse over words spoken in anger still makes me squirm. I was perhaps nine or 10 and we were about to set off on a family holiday. The car was packed and we were all ready for the off, but at the last minute, my father – certainly not a man governed by notions of punctuality – decided he needed to mow the lawn. Small boys don’t generally handle delay and boredom well, so by the time we were ready to go for the second time, the air was fractious.

As we got into the car, I stubbed my ankle on an umbrella that dad had left in the rear passenger footwell. It didn’t really hurt a great deal, but I was already irritated; and the sense that my father was the cause both of my general feelings of annoyance and my very minor injury led me to explode. “Dad!” I shouted, “you f***ing b*****d!”