Diagram of Words

Before I begin, I would like everybody to take a look at this diagram of words. If you find even one word you have mentioned before, I would like you to raise your hand. Thank you. What do these words have in common? My guess would be that you said it to a friend who made you mad? You said it when you were walking into the lift and it closes on you? You said it when you feel all the assignments, quizzes and exams start pouring in and you don’t have enough time to complete everything? Foul words, ladies and gentlemen. These are words that people use to curse, swear or cuss when they feel that it is necessary or when it becomes a habit in life to include these words in their daily vocabulary. Please excuse some of my language for the later part of my speech as it may sound impolite and rude to some. Do note that I do not mean to offend anyone in the process.

In my recent survey, most of you agreed that cursing goes against your personal principles but today I am here to persuade all of you that cursing is not as bad as you think. Personally, I have kept a principle of not cursing since I was young but I was always curious on how people around me could just say those words so easily as if there were no constraints and it was perfectly fine and normal to do so. With that, I did some research on cursing and although there is still a debate on whether cursing is considered positive or negative, I will prove my point on how cursing is beneficial in increasing pain tolerance and developing social relationships if we curse the right way.

You might want to ask, how exactly can cursing be beneficial? It contradicts with your principles and you definitely wouldn’t want to curse in front of a teacher. Have you ever tried soaking your hands in ice-cold water or even holding an ice cube for more than thirty seconds? The cold hurt, didn’t it? This was what Dr. Richard Stephens, a psychologist of Keele University in England did (Stephens, 2009). In Dr. Stephen’s study, he gathered sixty-seven college students to list five words they might use after hitting their thumb with a hammer, which resulted in words on the diagram I have shown you earlier. Later, he told them to list down another five words they would use to describe a table, which resulted in words like brown, flat, square, hard and so on. Then, the students were told to soak their hands in ice-cold water while repeatedly saying a curse word from the first list of words and repeat the experiment again with a word used to describe a table. In the end, the results showed that repeating a curse word allowed the students to hold their hands in ice-cold water for an average of forty seconds longer.

Now, where’s the logic in this? Dr. Steven George from the University of Florida Center for Pain Research and Behavorial Health said that cursing from comes with a negative emotion that helps us counter pain in a more colourful way (George, 2011). The natural

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