Hey, guess what – swearing might actually be good for you. Or good for decreasing pain, anyway.

For a study that came out this weekend, a researcher in the UK had a bunch of undergrads stick their hands in buckets of ice water and say either a swear word or a neutral word over and over. The bucket of ice water is a pretty standard way to test pain tolerance. They did better while swearing.

Read my story, with funny quotes, here.

I had to ask the guy what the students’ favorite swear words were, of course. I giggled both at the list of words coming out of this perfectly polite British man’s mouth, and at the fact that he said “excuse me” after the last one, which is a word that people just don’t say in polite conversation. Or even impolite conversation. I said something about how weird this all was. He agreed. He said, “I’ve been doing interviews today when I was in sole charge of my [five-year-old] daughter and I had to sort of go to another room and tell people what the words were. ”

I haven’t hurt myself since I started working on the story last Friday, so I can’t tell you what I say in such situations. Well, that’s not true. I kind of put a table down on my toe on Saturday, which hurt a lot, but my mom was holding the other end of the table and I don’t think I am physiologically capable of swearing in front of my mom. I mostly gasped and jumped around. The researcher shares that particular inhibition. He said (possibly joking), “The paper doesn’t have any swear words in it because I wanted to be able to share it with my mother.”