From the brains behind brains on, this is The Moment of Um.

Um. comes to you from APM Studios. I'm Clara.

Um... Wednesdays are my favorite day of the week, because it's my day to clean the house,

and I love cleaning. My friends call me cleaning Clara.

Today, I'm cleaning the living room, and I realize that the furniture arrangement is feeling

a little stale.

But I came up with a brilliant plan to really rejuvenate the room.

The only thing left to do is to move the couch.

Just got to lift with the legs.

Okay. Deep breath. One, two, three.

Oh, I'm doing it. Almost there. Ow! My toe! Razzlefrazz it! That felt better. My grandpa always says that when he stubs his toe. Heazzle-Fraset! That felt better.

My grandpa always says that when he stubs his toe.

He told me it's better to say a silly, made-up word when you hurt yourself or get frustrated instead of using real swear words, because real swear words are rude and could upset people.

Although, wait a second.

Why do we even have swear words if we can't say them?

My friend Teddy was wondering about this too.

It's interesting you can see that swear words exist in almost every language that we know and that we have studied. And in all these languages,

they actually are very similar. So they stem from topics that for some reason across different

societies, we have decided that are taboo, so that we shouldn't talk about openly. I'm Carolyn DeBray,

and I'm a linguist, and I work at the University of Basel in Switzerland.

So, for example, certain topics such as toilet use, also sometimes certain animals that are

considered to be particularly bad or dirty. And interestingly, you have all these similar

...