Those who use the swear words have more abilities in the use of language, new American study proved. The range of the cuss words determines the intelligence and proper verbal expression of a person.
How many times in our childhood we have heard from our mums: “Don’t curse! It’s just for stupid people!” Well, now, we can finally answer our mums that It’s exactly the opposite. In other words, as much profanity we can use, as much we are intelligent, at least as the American researchers claim.
Taboo language is not a sing of stupidity
The study has been published in the Language Sciences journal and its beginning expresses the motivation for this study by words of one of the psychologist: “We cannot help but judge others on the basis of their speech. Unfortunately, when it comes to taboo language, it is a common assumption that people who swear frequently are lazy, do not have an adequate vocabulary, lack education, or simply cannot control themselves.”
The experiment has been led at two colleges in the US by two psychologists, Kristin Jay and Timothy Jay who wanted to refute the “truth of our mums”. The research should have deepened the linguistic use and the vocabulary of young people. The 43 participants, aged between 18 and 22 have been testing in two disciplines – swear words and animals. The task included the limited time of one minute in which the volunteers had to write as many swear words as they could think of. Following, the same time limit was given to write as many names of animals they could think of. Finally, the amount of the words were compared and the conclusion arose – those who had written a longer list of cuss words were also able to write more animal’s name.
Poverty of Vocabulary
To use proper terminology, the study concept is called “Poverty of Vocabulary” and describes the state that use of the swearing words is caused by the lack of intellectual capacity and inability to express in a proper, “cleaner” way. “The overall finding of this set of studies, that taboo fluency is positively correlated with other measures of verbal fluency, undermines the POV [Poverty of Vocabulary] view of swearing. That is, a voluminous taboo lexicon may better be considered an indicator of healthy verbal abilities rather than a cover for their deficiencies,” the psychologists described their outcomes.
However, the cuss word study shows another, not so suitable fact about the use of the vulgarisms. The most common profanity is closely linked to degradation of woman. “Expressive swear words were uttered more frequently than slurs except when those slurs pertained to women. Terms like “bitch” were uttered almost as frequently as those common words you might shout if you hit your finger with a hammer.“Huffingtonpost.com comments.
Users of Facebook like to use the swear words
For adding other interesting facts, let’s see the use of swear words on one of the most famous social network, Facebook. The statistics on Slate.com describes the use of profanity sorted by gender and age; research was lead on American Facebook. The most commonly used profanity is sh**t and immediately after followed by f**ck, these words are “winners” are the same for both of genders. However, in the age, there might be a slight difference. People between 13 and 24 like to write latter mentioned. Nevertheless, the popular swear word for persons over 24 is again sh**t.
Hip Hop against Country music
Another research published on Lab.musixmatch.com shows how much profanity is usually used in the lyrics of modern music. The most of the taboo words are used in lyrics of Hip Hop and Heavy Metal. Rock music appears very polite, with its ranking 1 profanity in 1043 words and it becomes less swearing than the Pop music. In the last position of profanity is the Country music, where you might find one cuss word in almost 5 thousand other words.
It is important to remember that more swearing, more intelligence. And next time, when somebody will complain about our non proper verbal vocabulary, we can just keep calm and explain, how it is in reality!