A recent study by some British academics with apparently nothing better to do proved, they say, that a person could reduce their feelings of pain by swearing up a storm.

Not around my mama it wouldn't.

The swearing study, done at Keele University in Staffordshire, U.K., had students stick their hands in icy water for as long as they could stand it. To test the result of emotional outbursts on the feeling of pain, some test participants were told to swear while their hands were in the water. The people who swore said that their pain lessened when they swore, and when they swore they could hold their hands in the icy water longer.

That has never been my experience, especially as a loose-lipped youth. Now, my mother expressed herself quite well without swearing. Between her imperious stare, her eyebrow arched like a warrior's bow, the only oaths that ever passed her lips, or needed to, were the slightly Shakespearian "Confound it!" and "Blast."

Pushed to the limit, she would go all medieval on us: "Plague take it!" she'd mutter, stamping her foot for emphasis. Listen, when your mama invokes an oath that's been in her family since the Black Plague, it puts that whole genealogy thing into perspective. When she said it, I felt Ol' Mr. Death waggling his bony finger from the gnarled branches of my family tree.

But back to this British university study. I mean, confound it, any man could tell you that it's not the swearing, it's any process that gets your fight-or-flight adrenaline fired up. It gets the blood pumping, and that lessens the feeling of cold, and it focuses the mind away from the water. Honestly, this took a university study to figure out?

But truly grown men learn to be angry and not pop off with cuss words. We learn to, we train to get up a head of steam, ignore pain, and focus power where it needs to go, like down your arm to your fist, or down your finger to a trigger. Cussing is a pop-off valve for the weak, the common. If you do it around your mama or any other decent company, you still have some growing up to do.

In the Navy, of course, cussing became much more a part of normal life, like background noise. Sailors and Marines found that the longer we were deployed, away from mamas, girls, and other normal people, the worse we cussed. By the end of a six-month deployment, fourletter words habitually spiced every d@#$* sentence we spoke and we barely f*&@#$ noticed it.

But there was a price to pay. When we got to take our new vocabulary home on leave, many a sailor boy, many a young Marine complimented his sweet Mom on her dinner by saying something like, "This is the best meal I've had in six @#$@#$ months!"

When that happened, I guarantee swearing did not reduce their pain. Just ask mama.