Working on a particularly nasty engineering problem with a co-worker – I slipped up and swore at the office. I immediately apologized, which brought about a round of confusion followed by a really interesting conversation.
I am working over seas and so although he is fluent, the co-workers in question has english as his second or third language. He made an interesting observation, that for non native speakers swearing gets used in english language popular media so much that it just seems part of the language. There are no levels or apparent filters. So while he understands that we don’t all walk around dropping f-bombs like in the movies or on TV, its totally unclear what the cultural contexts around swearing is. So as a result swearing is just seen as any other part of the language. Which is kind of fascinating given the range of feelings and social constructs that exist around swearing back home.