Melissa Mohr has very interesting information on the subject of swearing. I did a little research on swearing during my etymology unit, but this information is much more thorough than the kind I discovered.
Swear words were very different long ago. Using the word 'Christ' and 'God' in conjunction with body parts offended people because they thought that Jesus and God's body parts would be painfully removed when people spoke those words.
These days, words that used to be exactly what they meant, such as the words for poop and sexual intercourse were described by their swear-version these days. Basically, words that used to be normal, everyday words became offensive over the course of one generation of our language. This is very interesting because these words used to be household words, but were replaced by French variants over the course of a generation of English. How our language will evolve in the coming hundred or thousand years may be very similar to this, making some of our words swear-worthy.
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