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For many of us, four-letter words are a part of our everyday lives, and without the emphasis they give, stuff just doesn’t sound the same. Imagine if the last words Rhett Butler uttered to Scarlett O’Hara at the end of Gone With the Wind were “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a hoot.” So different, right? There are a lot of places where you might learn your first bad word — perhaps from an older kid at school or etched into the wall of a public bathroom, or maybe even from your own parents. In an article published in the Association of Psychological Sciences Observer, psychologists Timothy Jay and Kristin Janschewitz found that most kids learn their first curse word at age two and “becomes adult-like by ages 11 or 12. By the time children enter school, they have a working vocabulary of 30-40 offensive words.”
The researchers also concluded that swearing might not be as bad as we previously thought. The pair studied and recorded over 10,000 instances of public swearing by both children and adults and found that, at least in public occurrences of swearing, taboo language rarely led to adverse consequences. In fact, swearing can actually help in many aspects of our lives. Some of the findings from the article are certainly verrrrrrry interesting.
Raises pain tolerance:
published in the NeuroReport in2000 found that when subjects stuck their hands into icy cold water and either repeated a curse word or a non-curse word, those who said something naughty actually had higher heart rates and lower perceived pain.
