The psychology of why we swear — and how to do it properly in different languages

• Swearing helps us to be more expressive, and can even help us with pain relief and with tasks like lifting weights.
• People swear in five different ways: Descriptively, idiomatically, abusively, emphatically, and cathartically.
  
• How people swear around the world differs quite a lot too — for example, in the Philippines, there's a special anger vocabulary.

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Swearing has a bad reputation. It's considered unprofessional to swear in a job interview, for example. But in reality it's something pretty much all of us do on a daily basis. In fact, we speak about 10 swear words a day on average, and children start swearing by the age of six or younger.

Swearing could actually be a sign of a high IQ, according to psychologist Richard Stephens, and it could help us be better at things like lifting weights, and dealing with pain.See the rest of the story at Business Insider

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