Swearing is of ten defined as an expression of feelings and emotions. It is, however, not fulIy clear why we swear to express our feelings and emotions. This paper will try to east some light on some aspeets of this question. The first part of the paper will deal with the problem of what emotions there are and how they can be charaeterized.

The characterization will be presented in tenns of a conceptual model.This conceptual model gives us aninsight into the various dimensions. of anemotion as a psyho-social phenomenon. The latter part of the paper willbe devoted to a discussion of how the emotions are related to swearing.