The Case for Cursing -

The Case for Cursing -
“The paradox is that it’s that very act of suppression of the language
that creates those same taboos for the next generation,” said Benjamin K. Bergen, author of “What the F: What Swearing Reveals About Our Language, Our Brains and Ourselves.” He calls this the “profanity paradox.”
“The reason that a child thinks the F-word is a bad word is that, growing up, he or she was told
that it was a bad word, so profanity is a cultural construct that perpetuates itself through time,” said Dr. Bergen, a professor of cognitive science at the University of California, San Diego.
“We found that people who could generate a lot of letter words and animal names could also generate the most swear words,” Dr. Jay said.
“For pain relief, swearing seems to trigger the natural ‘fight or flight’ stress response,
as well as increased adrenaline and heart pumping,” Dr. Stephens said in an email.
He then asked them to submerge a hand in ice water for as long as they could, while repeating a word from either list: a swear word or a neutral one.
“Any language scholar knows otherwise.”
Dr. Jay was the co-author of a 2015 study, published in Language Sciences,
that tested the ability of people to generate words beginning with a given letter.
“This is the ‘poverty of vocabulary’ myth, that people swear because they lack the right words due to impoverished vocabulary,’’ Dr. Jay said.
There’s emphatic swearing, for instance, which is meant to highlight a point, and dysphemistic swearing, which is meant to make a point provocatively.