Everyone experiences a really bad week now and then. When you’re living in a different country, anger can cause  frustration, especially since expressing it in a foreign language is funny under the best of circumstances and can escalate into some serious misunderstandings and sometimes even cause some serious damage.

By swearing, we don’t only communicate the meaning of a sentence, but also our emotional response to the meaning.  It allows us to express anger, disgust or pain, or indicate to someone that they’ve gone too far.

As a guest in this country, and someone who enjoys a good inappropriate colorful descriptive adjective every now and then, (when the circumstances call for it of course) I find myself missing, spontaneously giving someone a piece of my mind with th
e proper  expletives.

Much like children, Swear words are almost always the first words that most of my students learn …on their own. Swear words are also the words in the sentence that sound the most unnatural when  used by a non native speaker (they don’t always sound that appealing when used by native speakers either, for that matter… unless uttered by Hugh Grant).

Some very interesting research was done by  Professor Richard Stephens
about the benefit of swearing. Some of it, especially the experiment about how swearing helps withstand pain longer, was unnecessary, all researchers had to do was to go to a delivery room at any given time, to have reached the exact same conclusion.

This week I’m giving a lesson on swearing.  We’ll go through the List of American VS British obscenities , the origin of swear words, the original four letter words as opposed to their meek substitutes, and look at some tweeter date on swear word popularity in various geographic locations.

Maybe they won’t sound natural but I predict we’ll have great fun using them at a ‘controlled environment’ and with the excuse of an  ‘educational’ learning experience.

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