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Kids get grounded for swearing, and bad words are banned from television... but why is that the case if most adults swear anyway? Linguist and cognitive scientist Benjamin K. Bergen says that swearing can be funny, cathartic, and even useful! In this rated-PG episode, he explains how the science of swearing can help us understand how our brains process language, and what the worst words tell us about our culture. And the episode is squeaky clean: no swearing included!  More from Curiosity: BACKBLAZE: Fully featured 15-day free trial of unlimited cloud backup for your Mac or PC, which you can get for just $5/month SKILLSHARE: Two months of unlimited access to more than 20 thousand classes for just 99 cents THRIVE MARKET: Get an extra 25% off your first order along with a free 30-day trial Swearing Can Literally Dull The Pain This 1785 Dictionary of Vulgar Phrases Is a Hilarious Collection of Bad Words from the Past The First Barcode Scanned Gravitational Lensing Is a Magnifying Glass Made by Gravity Additional resources from Dr. Benjamin Bergen: Benjamin K. Bergen, UC San Diego Department of Cognitive Science "What the F: What Swearing Reveals About Our Language, Our Brains, and Ourselves" "Louder Than Words: The New Science of How the Mind Makes Meaning"Other studies and resources discussed: Swearing, Euphemisms, and Linguistic Relativity | PLOS Effect of Manipulated State Aggression on Pain Tolerance | SAGE Journals Cursing and gender in a corpus of MySpace pages | Semantic Scholar Swearing in English: Bad Language, Purity and Power from 1586 to the Present | Google Books Gender, expletive use, and context: Male and female expletive use in structured and unstructured conversation among New Zealand university students | ProQuest See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.