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Who uses dirty words? And when? How is the bad language we use reflected in the movies, in the courts, and elsewhere? With Cursing in America, psychologist Timothy Jay presents the first serious and extensive examination of American profanity from a psycholinguistic-contextual point of view. An amazing amount of factual data gathered through several field studies and numerous laboratory-based experiments reveals the relationship between cursing and language acquisition, anger expression, gender stereotypes and offensiveness. Sexual harassment, censorship, language content of film, obscene phone calls and cursing at public schools are some of the topics which are analyzed and related to the data. Word-by-word tables demonstrate the influence that factors such as frequency of occurrence, degree of offensiveness, and gender and age of the speaker have on obscene language usage in America today.