Or, as one of my physical chemistry lecturers once said (in Ireland), "You can't know everything: there's too fucking much to know; you need to understand." That was actually part of the teaching, not a random aside about the pandemic. It felt appropriate to me.

If used sparingly, swear words can be quite effective in conveying one's feelings. If used every other word, that is a different problem. So, when you hit your finger with a hammer, what do you say, and do you really mean it?

When I was an undergrad in the 90s, one of my professors told us about a time he caught some grief from the administration for swearing, and proudly recounted how he blew them off. He repeated the swear word in question in the course of telling his story.

One of my friends in graduate school who was a very effective teacher (certainly a better and more popular teacher than me) said "the best way to get your students to like you is to swear in class." Nonetheless now that I'm much older than my students I feel much less comfortable swearing in class.

@Struggling_Student, it might help to point out where you are from if not from the UK.

@TRiG: I am totally going to steal that the next time I need to mentor somebody (I work in industry but the concept translates readily).

If a single student complains the lecturer will receive a warning so it’s a high risk strategy for them to swear so publicly.

@graffe I think this might be very location dependent. Both that a student would complain about swear words or that the university would issue a warning about something like this seems quite unlikely to me.

Keep in mind that freedom of speech is taken very seriously in western democratic countries. If swearing is not targeted at people (so is non-discriminatory), rules against it are somewhat a sensitive subject, since it's easy to fall into censorship abuse, which reminds too much of old regimes that ravaged Europe decades ago. There is a thin line between ruling against too much "bad words" and shutting people mouth.

In Italy we had an article of criminal law that punished with a somewhat harsh fine someone who "used expressions contrary to public decency". Although it was almost never enforced in later years, still it was abrogated in 1999.

@Arno that's a strange phenomenon really: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_the_United_States - "The First Amendment protects against censorship imposed by law, but does not protect against corporate censorship, the restraint of speech of spokespersons, employees, or business associates by threatening monetary loss, loss of employment, or loss of access to the marketplace."

You'll hear it in the workplace after you graduate, so might as well get used to it at some point...

@Arno The relevance is context and country dependent. I made also a reference to an abrogated Italian law to show the relevance. What constitutes "public decency" is highly subjective, hence rules that go against swearing are liable to be a mean of curtailing free speech: today "fuck" is against decency, tomorrow accusing a corrupt politician is, the day after tomorrow dissenting with the government becomes "indecent". We have plenty of countries even nowadays in which this is true sadly.