“Under certain circumstances, profanity provides relief denied even to prayer.” — Mark Twain

There’s a lot of truth to Twain’s epigram. Let’s face it, just about all of us have dealt with one or another little misfortune by letting a few choice words fly, just because it made us feel better. And, according to the experts, that’s just one of the benefits of swearing that we’ll look at this time.

But first, just what is swearing? Well, that kind of depends on what you choose to call it. Cursing (which later got shortened to “cuss”) used to imply damning or punishing someone, while swearing suggested blasphemy, or invoking a deity to empower your words.

Today, other names for swearing include: Obscenity, profanity, billingsgate, scatology, ribaldry, scurrility and invective. There seem to be almost as many words for swearing as there are actual swear words.

But why does the use of profanity have such a powerful effect on people?

“Profanity is powerful because we make it powerful,” says Dr. Benjamin K. Bergen, author of “What the F: What Swearing Reveals About Our Language, Our Brains and Ourselves.” According to Bergen, we tell children that the F-word is a bad word, “so profanity is a cultural construct that perpetuates itself through time.”

Surprisingly, swearing can make us appear honest and authentic to others who feel that they’re receiving an unfiltered response. That’s because a few colorful words tend to increase the perceived informality of language and improve peoples’ impressions of the source.

Like many things, the more our language is studied, the more nuances identified. Swearing is no exception. “There’s emphatic swearing, which is meant to highlight a point, and dysphemic swearing, which is meant to make a point provocatively,” says Harvard professor Steven Pinker, author of “The Stuff of Thought.”

It’s near impossible to offer examples of either in a family newspaper, given both types are meant to be either vulgar and elicit a negative reaction from the listener, or a curse intentionally meant to be provocative. For the latter, for instance, perhaps you know someone who likes to throw the F-bomb in a sentence before every adjective or noun.

So, similar profanity for different occasions. Making your point provocatively is still better than provoking an actual fight. Swearing at that jerk who just teed you off is much preferred to the alternative: air-mailing a knuckle sandwich — or receiving one.

“Slurs are the exception” to the belief that cursing has its positives, says Bergen, “because they target groups and can foster prejudice.”

A few carefully selected curse words can also help us deal with pain, according to researchers, by way of something called the hypoalgesic effect. It’s a fancy way of saying that something — in this case, using profanity — reduces the sensation of pain, especially if you don’t usually cuss very much (say, less than a drunken sailor).

For example, several studies have found that subjects who swore were able to keep their hands in a bucket of ice water 50 percent longer than those who either didn’t swear or used made up swear words.

In other words, yelling things like “blimey,” “cheese and rice,” “shut the front door,” “crap,” “crikey,” “son of a biscuit” or “William Shatner” won’t bring you as much relief.

And finally, did you know that swearing is actually a sign of more education? In fact, studies have found that people in the upper middle class swear more than those in the lower middle class.

According to Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts professor Timothy Jay, it’s a myth “that people swear because they lack the right words due to impoverished vocabulary. Any language scholar knows otherwise.” In other words, he says, “People who are good at language are good at generating a swearing vocabulary.”

That means that last week when I hit my thumb with a hammer all the neighbors must have thought I was really smart.

Jim Witherell of Lewiston is a writer and lover of words whose work includes “L.L. Bean: The Man and His Company” and “Ed Muskie: Made in Maine.”

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