1. The average person swears quite a bit.
About 0.7% of the words a person uses in the course of a
day are swear words, which may not sound significant
except that as Mohr notes, we use first-person plural
pronouns — words like we, our and ourselves — at about
the same rate. The typical range, Mohr says, goes from zero
to about 3%. What would it be like to have a conversation
with a three-percenter? “That would be like Eddie Murphy,”
Mohr says. Presumably from Eddie Murphy Raw, not from
Shrek Forever After.

2. Kids often learn a four-letter word before they
learn the alphabet.
Mohr’s work incorporates research by Timothy Jay, a
psychology professor at the Massachusetts College of
Liberal Arts, who uncovered the 0.7% statistic above and
has also charted a rise in the use of swear words by
children — even toddlers. By the age of two, Mohr says,
most children know at least one swear word; it really “kicks
off” around the ages of three or four.

3. Some of today’s most popular swear words
have been around for more than a thousand years.
“S— is an extremely old word that’s found in Anglo-Saxon
texts,” Mohr says. What English-speakers now call asses
and farts can also be traced back to the Anglo-Saxons, she
adds, though in those times the terms wouldn’t have been
considered as impolite as they are today.

4. The ancient Romans laid the groundwork for
modern day f-bombs.
There are two main kinds of swear words, says Mohr: oaths
—like taking the Lord’s name in vain—and obscene words,
like sexual and racial slurs. The Romans gave us a model for
the obscene words, she says, because their swearing was
similarly based on sexual taboos, though with a different
spin. “The Romans didn’t divide people up [by being
heterosexual and homosexual],” she says. “They divided
people into active and passive. So what was important was
to be the active partner.” Hence, sexual slurs were more
along the lines words like pathicus, a rather graphic term
which basically means receiver.

5. In the Medieval era, oaths were believed to
physically injure Jesus Christ.
In the Middle Ages, Mohr says, certain vain oaths were
believed to actually tear apart the ascended body of Christ,
as he sat next to his Father in heaven. Phrases that
incorporated body parts, like swearing “by God’s bones” or
“by God’s nails,” were looked upon as a kind of opposite to
the Catholic eucharist—the ceremony in which a priest is
said to conjure Christ’s physical body in a wafer and his
blood in wine.

6. However, obscene words were no big deal.
“The sexual and excremental words were not charged,
basically because people in the Middle Ages had much less
privacy than we do,” Mohr explains, “so they had a much
less advanced sense of shame.” Multiple people slept in the
same beds or used privies at the same time, so people
observed each other in the throes of their, er, natural
functions much more frequently — which made the mention
of them less scandalous.

7. People in the “rising middle class” use less
profanity.
“Bourgeois people” typically swear the least, Mohr says.
“This goes back to the Victorian era idea that you get
control over your language and your deportment, which
indicates that you are a proper, good person and this is a
sign of your morality and awareness of social rules,” she
explains. The upper classes, she says, have been shown to
swear more, however: while “social strivers” mind their
tongues, aristocrats have a secure position in society, so
they can say whatever they want — and may even make a
show of doing so.

8. Swearing can physiologically affect your body.
Hearing and saying swear words changes our skin
conductance response, making our palms sweat. One study,
Mohr notes, also found that swearing helps alleviate pain,
that if you put your hand in a bucket of cold water, you can
keep it in there longer if you say s— rather than shoot.
Which is a good piece of info to have next time you’re doing a
polar bear plunge.

9. People don’t use cuss words just because they
have lazy minds.
Mohr discusses the myriad social purposes swearing can
serve, some nasty and some nice. “They definitely are the
best words that you can use to insult people, because they
are much better than other words at getting at people’s
emotions,” she says. Swear words are also the best words
to use if you hit your finger with a hammer, because they are
cathartic, helping people deal with emotion as well as pain.
And studies have shown that they help people bond — like
blue-collar workers who use taboo terms to build in-group
solidarity against management types. When asked if the
world would be better off if everyone quit their cussing,
Mohr answers with a four-letter word of her own: “Nope.”