Swearing helps

According to research by the University of East Anglia's Norwich Business School swearing benefits workers. It lets them express feelings such as frustration and it encourages relationships to develop. Professor Yehuda Baruch said, "Our study suggested that, in many cases, taboo language serves the needs of people for developing and maintaining solidarity and as a mechanism to cope with stress. Banning it could backfire. Employees use swearing on a continuous basis but not necessarily in a negative, abusive manner. Swearing is a social phenomenon to reflect solidarity and enhance group cohesiveness or as a psychological phenomenon to release stress."

Basically I think she tried to say, in an over-complicated way, is that swearing really helps us to release stress and get all our frustrations out to allow us to work more effectively.

This got me thinking about how teachers could try to avoid swearing in front of the children. Using bad language is obviously a no no, but what do people say instead. "Shine a light" is a phrase I have uttered when dropping a pile of photocopies, which is really good for avoiding saying a certain four-letter word beginning with S. Does anyone else do this?