Venja Beck, 22, got her bachelor’s in psychology and communication at Maastricht University College and after a sabbatical year she’s now working on her research master’s in cognitive sciences in Amsterdam. At high school she attended the bilingual Da Vinci Class at College Den Hulster in Venlo, which explains her ease with the English language. At the Da Vinci Class she also taught psychology to a group of gifted students of varying ages, who were especially interested in social psychology and some groundbreaking experiments with children involving the Bobo-doll. She a keen visual artist, swing dancer, Dungeons and Dragons player and improv actor. She feels very comfortable on stage and taking part in TedxVenlo just seems like fun and it’s great that she gets the chance to be nerdy for ten minutes without people walking out. 

The subject of her talk will be about the science of swearing, especially the impact of profanity on most people. She taught a 40-minute class on the subject to her high school students who were thrilled by it. The apt title of her talk is ‘I swear this will be a good TEDtalk’, also indicating that swearing derives from taking oaths. In her talk she hopes to convince us that swearing is actually very powerful ‘cool’ language that doesn’t deserve to be condemned so much and must not be equated to poor intelligence. It has always been a widely accepted tradition dating back to medieval times. Except maybe in the typically Dutch tradition of using terrible diseases in swearing, this expression of strong emotions deserves to be appreciated more.