In Italy profanities that attack religion are so pretty much a taboo that is weird to foreigners: you can have a prime time tv show with full frontal nudity and some violence, but you will not hear swearing against god until after midnight.

Edited to reflect a comment by gattilorenz

I've mentioned it here before, but Your Mother's Tongue: Book of European Invective is a great and extremely funny book on the subject.

It always amazes me that rich/educated people swear a lot and poor/uneducated people swear a lot but in between (middle-class) everyone is ultra polite. At least that is what I found from the limited (as one person of course experiences cannot be very broad) set of meetings in NL/UK/US.

Quebec used to be a highly religious society heavily controlled by the Catholic Church until the 1960s. Quebec profanities are full of slangy modifications of terms that, translated literally, mean things like "chalice" or "eucharist". English used to be like that as well. Damn and Hell were harsh words. With the decline in our religiosity has come a decline in the severity of the words. Most societies have taboos about sex and bodily waste, so little surprise that there's a profane term for those things in most languages.

And what about today? Some of the most profane words in contemporary English are slurs used against racial and sexual minorities. N-word, F-word (no, not that one, the other F-word), and so on. Speaking these words invokes transgression of the most sacred values of society. Some are considered so powerful or dangerous, that simply saying them aloud is believed to have the ability to cause psychic harm, which is more than a little reminiscent of the old beliefs about the risk of supernatural destruction being inflicted on communities by God that tolerate blasphemy.

As you note, I think this is likely a universal human tendency. There's always going to be the sacred and the taboo. And taking a big fat verbal shit on them will always outrage people.

Scatology, biology in all forms, and in much of the world (Med, Mid East, Africa, Lots of Asia, etc) sexuality. Family relations are pretty much a universal target as well.

I once read an article that wrote about different cultures typical curse words. It explained that the principle of cursing is to break a taboo. If you know how a culture curses, you know what's holy to them.

* In North America, cursing often revolves around sexuality. * In slavic countries, cursing involves the mother. * In middle eastern countries, it involves the father. (Not sure if I remember that one correctly, though.)

> In Spain, we say "Jesus!" when you sneeze, instead of "Bless you!" (and, in general, we are outrageously foul-mouthed compared to the US).

..it may sound as if "¡Jesús!" ("Bless you!") is foulmouthed - when in fact is something a four-year-old would typically say.

Context matters a lot in linguistic, and the Sapir-Worff hypothesis is not just unproven, it's almost certainly completely wrong.

There's a prudish streak in the US that I really believe comes from the fact that the country was originally settled by people too religious and too concerned with overtly moral social interaction to be tolerated in 17th century England.

That may seem like too easy an explanation but I really do think there is some truth to it. Despite the excesses in American culture, that sort of casual swearing still gets backlash when it goes beyond people who are familiar with each other.

And it's way way more offensive than anything usually used in English. In English it's just mostly isolated words, fuck, fucking, shit, cunt etc.

In English, if you hit your toe against the kitchen cabinet, how would people react if you said: "oh, may that rotten stinky whore God fuck his dirty dick into the sky!" And you come up with it on the fly, this is just an example. Obviously people don't talk like this all the time anywhere, but I don't think this level of offensiveness is usual in English.

I find it interesting that they are generally used to express awe, surprise, or to invoke a sense of gravity or urgency -- opposed to other swear words which generally seek to disgust, communicate an offensive attitude, or invoke taboo to draw attention through shock. The religious oaths seem to me more like the oaths of fantasy ("By Turin's beard!", "I swear upon the sword of my father", "In Vela's name") than the language of shock and offense ("scurvy maggots", "Why don't you go stick your foo in a bar and then baz it?")

I'd speculate that they're referencing the strong emotions religious people actually feel -- the awe and gravity of the sacred, a cry for help in a moment of fear, not the offensive force of blasphemy. The amplification is always toward the sacred ("sweet Mary, Jesus, and all the saints") or the silly ("Jesus H. Christ on a pogo stick"), never toward the offensive. "Jesus" amplifies to "Jesus Christ" or "holy Jesus", never to something like "Jesus' stinkin' piss".

In Dutch, my native language, one is more likely to use diseases (kanker (=cancer), tering (=tuberculosis), typhus (=typhoid fever), etc)), hardly any sexual acts or organs (only 'lul (=dick)' really although 'mierenneuker' (=ant fucker) is also a common mild swear word), excrement (schijt (=shit), zeiken/zeikert/zeikstraal (=to piss/someone who pisses/jet of piss)), religion (verdomme (=damn), godverdomme (=goddammit).

Swedish, my second language, is not a good language for swearing as it uses rather silly, powerless words of sometimes dubious origin, mostly related to religion (fan (=the devil), satan, (i) helvete (=(what the) hell)), sexual organs (kuk (=dick), fitta (=cunt)), excrement (skit (=shit)) and what seem to be random words (sjutton (=the number seventeen...?)), weird combinations (jävla skitstövel (=devilish shit boot)).

German is the most proficient swearing language I know, both due to its rich vocabulary as well as the satisfying vocalisation offered by the language, using words from just about all categories except for diseases (wherein it differs from the related Dutch language). I also know French but my knowledge of French swear words is lacking beyond the basics.