“The Romans didn’t divide people up ,” she says. 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. 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 ancient Romans laid the groundwork for modern day f-bombs. 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.Ĥ.

“S- is an extremely old word that’s found in Anglo-Saxon texts,” Mohr says. Some of today’s most popular swear words have been around for more than a thousand years. 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.ģ. 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. Presumably from Eddie Murphy Raw, not from Shrek Forever After.Ģ. Kids often learn a four-letter word before they learn the alphabet. What would it be like to have a conversation with a three-percenter? “That would be like Eddie Murphy,” Mohr says. The typical range, Mohr says, goes from zero to about 3%. The average person swears quite a bit.Ībout 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. (FROM THE MAGAZINE: Help! My Baby Swears)ġ. Here are nine talking points from her opus for your next (presumably, pretty edgy) cocktail hour.

NewsFeed asked Mohr what surprising tidbits readers might stumble upon amidst the expletives.

In Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing, a book out this month from Oxford University Press, medieval literature expert Melissa Mohr traces humans’ use of naughty language back to Roman times. Follow words have been around since the days of our forebears-and their forebears, too.

Holy Sh*t by Melissa Mohr