An article appeared in the New York Times titled Almost before we spoke, we swore. It reports on scientific inquiry to the social/linguistic/neurological significances of cursing. According to the article, the effect of seeing/hearing curse words is similar to that of seeing offensive/strong/sexual images: people will be "blinded" by the "strong" thoughts and unable to process items that are near those objects either temporally or spatially. For example, in a test, the researcher flashes a series of images at a subject, the subject is asked to pick out the picture that is placed upside down (the pictures are usually landscape, and easy to tell which is the right side up). If immediately before the "wrong" picture the researcher flashes a picture of human entrails, many subjects would be "blinded" for a short while after seeing the image and unable to catch the subsequent target image. In the test presented in the article, the subjects are given a list of words to memorize. The researchers find that words immediately preceding and following profanities just seem to fall out of the subjects' memories, whereas the profanities themselves are most clearly remembered.

And another interesting fact as most college students probably already know, the free flow of foul language between friends can often signal peace and tranquility, rather than hostility.

A bit of fun statistic:

The investigators have found, among other things, that men generally curse more than women, unless said women are in a sorority, and that university provosts swear more than librarians or the staff members of the university day care center.

On slashdot, we see the following comment^* by wizwormathorne (760340):

"Nothing" in Shakespeare

It's not "an O Thing" that the title is referring to (which is totally ridiculous). The title is a reference to two things. "Noting" (as another poster replied) - which is insignificant conversation and "Nothing" which IS a polite bit of Shakespearean slang which can (and usually does) refer to the female genitalia. The pun on "nothing" is perhaps most obvious in a conversation in Shakespeare's Hamlet with Ophelia:

Hamlet: Lady, shall I lie in your lap?
[Lying down at Ophelia's feet.]
Ophelia: No, my lord.
Hamlet: I mean, my head upon your lap?
Ophelia: Ay, my lord.
Ham.: Do you think I meant country matters?
Oph.: I think nothing, my lord.
Ham.: That's a fair thought to lie between maids' legs.
Oph.: What is, my lord?
Ham.: Nothing.

Incidentally, Much Ado About Nothing is about both the effects "casual" conversation and the implications of real and perceived sexual relationships.

A quick search on Google seems to confirm that assertion. According to Renegade Comedy's Study Guide for Much Ado About Nothing:

Shakespeare receives three gold stars for this title. In early modern English, "nothing" would be pronounced "noting." "Nothing" could mean "nothing;" "nothing" could denote "noting" or eavesdropping; "nothing" was also a slang term for female genitalia, which was "nothing" compared to what a man had. So, the play revolves around instances of deception and eavesdropping coupled with sexual politics. The basic action of the play is hide and overhear.

Now I wish that there's a list of such words so I can actually understand more of the hidden meanings in Shakespeare.

While we are on the subject of the Brits and naughty words, here's a fun bit from yahoo news concerning a village in Austria named Fucking. It seems that the town is annoyed at all the British tourists who goes around stealing their town signs. But they can't very well claim innocence to the use of that word in the English language. Here's the official website of the village. I am pretty sure they were quite happy at using its illustrative name as a tourist attraction up until the point their signs get stolen. For those of you with no German knowledge, the name is not pronounced the same way as the gerund of the English vulgar verb for fornication; it should be pronounced closer to "fooking" (there's no sound for it in English really, it is halfway between the "oo" as in "book" in English, and the "u" as in "yu", the pin-yi for the Chinese character for jade... very close to the French "u"). (Oh, and the hamlet is at 48' 03"N 13' 51"E.)

* The comment resides at http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=162871&cid=13611372. Due to some silliness in my coding, I cannot have unescaped ampersands in my blog entries, and the above url, if included in a standard <a> tag would cause the update to fail. I should probably try fixing it sometime soon, but now school started and my attention are on courses.