If you swear "like a trooper", like myself, you probably believe what your mother told you - that you're lazy with language if you're foul-mouthed, and that swearing, while a lot of fun, is a bad habit.
For some, swearing has always been held as the preserve of the uneducated.
In "Taboo word fluency and knowledge of slurs and general pejoratives: deconstructing the poverty-of-vocabulary myth", psychologists Kristin and Timothy Jay, of Marist college and the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts, respectively, essentially pit two competing language theories against each other in order to determine the place of swear words within our broader language palette.
The study also found that sweary people were more likely to be "neurotic", but also more likely to be "open".
For the first experiment, they gathered 43 participants (30 women) aged between 18 and 22 years, and first asked them to rattle off as many swear or taboo words as they could in 60 seconds.
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"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".
What the fuck does it all mean? .
Previous studies have shown that people with larger vocabularies tend to have a higher overall intelligence and are emotionally stronger than the curse police. They proved this with an exercise that we wish we had been a part of.
The subjects were then asked to name as many animals as they could think of in the same time frame - and the ones who dropped the most four-letter words were also more likely to come up with the most creatures. You might end up sounding more like a character in a Martin Scorsese movie than a Harvard classics professor, but who fucking cares, dammit.
