For a lot of people, swearing is natural response when they are angry, stub their toe or realise they've done their homework wrong (to name a few). In fact, some research has shown that swearing can relieve physical pain as it increases aggression, which in turn helps to block out pain: http://gnews.com/science/Swearing-Relieves-Your-%E2%80%98Effing-Pain-871332738424.html
Yet swearing is still frowned upon, by some people at least. Personally, swearing in itse
lf doesn't bother me at all (and as I do it myself, I'd be a hypocrite if I said it did) although I do find it a bit tedious trying to have a conversation with someone who swears literally every other word or obviously swears to try and show off. Apart from anything, if overused swearing loses its novelty - I think that if it's used to express certain emotions or used just sometimes in an informal way, then this stops the words from losing their meaning, as they do if you use them excessively. This said, I wouldn't swear in front of someone if I knew they didn't like it.
lf doesn't bother me at all (and as I do it myself, I'd be a hypocrite if I said it did) although I do find it a bit tedious trying to have a conversation with someone who swears literally every other word or obviously swears to try and show off. Apart from anything, if overused swearing loses its novelty - I think that if it's used to express certain emotions or used just sometimes in an informal way, then this stops the words from losing their meaning, as they do if you use them excessively. This said, I wouldn't swear in front of someone if I knew they didn't like it. I think that with swearing, whether or not someone is offended depends at least partly on the context. If you swear at someone, they will probably be offended by the way in which you are using the words, not by the words in themselves. Normal words can be used in this way too and I think that sometimes these can actually be more offensive (e.g. calling someone stupid, ugly, useless etc) as these are more personal, compared to swear words which are essentially generic insults used to signify aggression.
Swearing seems to be one of those things that the majority of people do, but which is not approved of in certain situations. It shocks most people to hear children swear, for instance (perhaps because in this case it is something that the child must have heard from adults and are innocently repeating without any understanding of what the word means) and this is the main reason nowadays for censorship of swearing. However, attitudes to swearing have softened considerably over the years; comedian George Carlin faced a court case in 1978 for his "seven dirty words routine", a transcript of which can be found here: http://www.erenkrantz.com/Humor/SevenDirtyWords.shtml
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