Studies have shown that swearing more is a sign of healthy verbal ability. Basically, if you swear a lot, you are f**king awesome, super f**king smart and you know how to use your f**king words properly!
Swearing is often seen as a sign that the speaker lacks vocabulary, cannot express themselves in a less offensive way, or even lacks intelligence. Well, this isn’t the case.
Studies have shown, however, that swearing may in fact display a more, rather than less, intelligent use of language.
Psychologists have performed numerous studies over the years using various amounts of subjects, however their testing methods have been the same. The verbal fluency test and swearing fluency tests have been used to determine if someone who swears a lot, is lacking in ‘regular’ vocabulary aspects.
You can actually do this simple test yourself or with your friends.
Verbal fluency – can be measured by asking volunteers to think of as many words beginning with a certain of the alphabet as they can in 1 minute.
People with greater language skills can generally think of more examples in the allotted time. Based on this approach, the researchers created the swearing fluency task. This task requires volunteers to list as many different swear words as they can think of in 1 minute.
So in simple terms, people that swear often are not necessarily people of low intelligence, in fact, it’s quite the opposite.
By comparing scores from both the verbal and swearing fluency tasks, it was found that the people who scored highest on the verbal fluency test also tended to do best on the swearing fluency task. The weakest in the verbal fluency test also did poorly on the swearing fluency task.
What this correlation suggests is that swearing isn’t simply a sign of language poverty, lack of general vocabulary, or low intelligence.
Instead, swearing appears to be a feature of language that an articulate speaker can use in order to communicate with maximum effectiveness. And actually, some uses of swearing go beyond just communication.
