Nine Things You Probably Didn’t Know About Swear Words. Four-letter words have been around since the days of our forebears—and their forebears, too. 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. NewsFeed asked Mohr what surprising tidbits readers might stumble upon amidst the expletives. Here are nine talking points from her opus for your next (presumably, pretty edgy) cocktail hour. (FROM THE MAGAZINE: Help! My Baby Swears) 1. About 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. 2. (MORE: Why Swearing Helps Ease the Pain) 3. “S— is an extremely old word that’s found in Anglo-Saxon texts,” Mohr says. 4.
(MORE: Children Who Hear Swears on TV Are More Aggressive, Says Study) 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. Vocabulary Games, English Vocabulary Word Games. Self-Study Vocabulary Quizzes. Vocabulary Quiz (Jennifer Cassels-Scupham.