From The New York Review of Books: "Neurologists have learned a great deal about the brain from studying how brain-damaged people use swearwords — notably, that they do use them, heavily, even when they have lost all other speech. This suggests profanity is encoded in the brain separately from most other language. While neutral words are processed in the cerebral cortex, the late-developing region that separates us from other animals, profanity seems to originate in the more primitive limbic system, which controls emotions. As a result, we care about swearwords differently. Hearing them, people may sweat (this can be measured by a polygraph), and, tellingly, bilingual people sweat more when the taboo word is in their first language."
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