For many English speakers, part of the fun of swearing is the thrill of sounding out naughty words, but a new study has found many curses around the world share similar sound patterns despite being unrelated linguistically. Without naming names, many English curses use sharp P, T or K sounds called ‘stop consonants’ because they interrupt the airflow of speech. To see whether this pattern was found in other languages, UK researchers asked fluent Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Korean and Russian speakers to write a list of the rudest words they could think of and then compared those to a list of neutral words in the same language. They found those languages didn’t use the harsh-sounding stop consonants of English curse words – rather, they didn’t include any gentle-sounding L, R, W and Y consonants. That was also true of Chinese, Arabic, German, Spanish and English. French was the exception, but then again, everything sounds lovely in French…