If You Swear A Lot, You Might Be Smarter Than Others According To A Research

So turns out, cussing is not such a bad idea.

According to a research published in Language Sciences, says that people who swear a lot, are actually smarter than those who don’t. Fuckin’ amazing, isn’t it?

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Psychologists Kristin and Timothy Jay, of Marist college and the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts, respectively, pitted two language theories against each other to test to determine the place of swear words in our knowledge of the language.

They wrote:  A folk assumption about colloquial speech is that taboo words are used because speakers cannot find better words with which to express themselves: because speakers lack vocabulary. A competing possibility is that fluency is fluency regardless of subject matter—that there is no reason to propose a difference in lexicon size and ease of access for taboo as opposed to emotionally neutral words.

 

To put this theory to test, the duo asked people to experiment with it. Their experiment included asking the group of people to say as many swear words as they could recall or remember within 60 seconds. The same group of people were then asked to say the names of as many animals they could remember withing the same time.

They then compared the results and found out that the number of people who could recall more swear words were the same ones that could remember more animal names as well, thus indicating a larger vocabulary for these people.

 

Through this, they were able to correlate more usage of cuss words with the person having a larger knowledge of verbal abilities.

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And since they had categorized the swear words into groups like slurs, general pejoratives, sexual terms, etc, they were able to determine, that people who used more vulgarities, in general, were the proficient ones when it came to linguistic knowledge.

 

Isn’t this fucking awesome? Let’s ‘swear’ to make ourselves more intelligent now. 😉

Source: GOOD Magazine, Independent UK
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