Swearing

 As someone who swears rather a lot (never in print, of course), I was pleased to come across this excellent research-based report on 'Why swearing makes you stronger'. Not only is swearing, as we all know, big, and clever, and enjoyable; it can also boost your performance, at least when it comes to holding your hand in ice water or doing chair push-ups (whatever they are). I'm sure I also heard recently of research showing that swearing can relieve acute pain, and that one word in particular – that old favourite, the f-word – was by far the most effective, offering the optimal combination of fricative, short vowel and plosive. 
 At school we were told that using swear words was the sign of a limited vocabulary, despite the evident fact that profane language greatly extended our vocabulary, creating a kind of auxiliary lexicon, capable of conveying quite subtle shades of meaning (well, sometimes). The richness of profane language, and its capacity for creating neologisms, is attested by the number of dictionaries devoted to it, from Grose's Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue to Eric Partridge's Shakespeare's Bawdy, Green's Dictionary of Slang, and (on a somewhat less scholarly level) Roger's Profanisaurus. The Australian branch of the English language has been especially productive of picturesque profanities, and the late Barry Humphries – particularly in his Les Paterson persona – was a virtuoso of vulgarity, creating a fine array of new terms the world never thought it had need of (see his extremely filthy book The Traveller's Tool and its invaluable glossary, also the adventures of Barry Mackenzie). But enough of this filth.