Honestly, when you consider the etymology of "profanity" and "curse word", they all go back to religious roots. Even the use of deliberately misspelled and mispronounced curse words is called a "minced oath".

We don't really have a good word for swearing that's not a religious reference. The closest we have is "obscenity", but that traditionally only refers to sexual words. For example, "fuck" is obscenity, but "goddammit" is profanity.

A comparison to other languages and cultures would be useful.

In Finnish the origin for "curse word" comes from incantation / casting a spell. At least nowadays the root word means purely a hostile spell, or a hex. I'd say in modern use basically equivalent to "a curse" in English, as the magical aspect isn't really present in the society any more. I can't say if it has originally also included benevolent spells.

it's difficult to analyze the truth value of your thesis because you use words that all have dual meanings, "religious word" vs "naughty word" (swear, oath, profane) and we see from "don't take the Lord's name in vain" the ancient tendency to curse (another religious term) when we wish to indicate anger to the point of irreverence, or just irreverence.

I think a better way to look at it is, we humans have been the way we are for a long time, and we don't "think" in our language, we think in brain language (deep structure and deeper, and the proof is that brain damaged aphasics can forget all the words for emotions but they still can conceptualize them, i.e. thinking is not related to language; deaf people also may never learn language, but they can think)

Humans have a tendency to be religious for whatever reason, and humans have a tendency to get mad and spew a blue streak, and regardless of what your religio-culturo-background, you come from a culture that has ways to communicate what you want, to get the point across that you are at the moment as salty as a sailor.

In general cursing seems to be a matter of transgressing social norms to emphasize a mental/emotional state. Your point perfectly illustrates why a religious "curse" would so often do that, and maybe why they have been falling out of favor lately. Cursing god used to be something that would ruin your life, if it were overheard and still is in some parts of the world. Mostly though, it's prosaic.

Scatology, biology in all forms, and in much of the world (Med, Mid East, Africa, Lots of Asia, etc) sexuality. Family relations are pretty much a universal target as well.

> and in much of the world (Med, Mid East, Africa, Lots of Asia, etc) sexuality.

Include the US/England with "Fuck" here. "Ficken" doesn't work at all in German as a swear word. Words that associates uncleaniness, like "Scheiße" or "Arschloch", have much more shock value.

I thought "Scheiße" was commonly used as an expletive in Germany and wasn't considered at all shocking.