Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times science writer Natalie Angier is the author of four critically acclaimed books, including the best seller Woman: An Intimate Geography (1999). Her most recent, The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science (2008), provides a guide to the major theories of science. The following article, published in 2005 in the New York Times, uses linguistic and psychological research to try to explain a very common phenomenon: swearing.
