It doesn’t matter who we are, there is going to come a moment in our life when something slips out of our mouth that we didn’t intend to come out. We also probably have that one friend (or perhaps even more) that never holds back and just lets it fly, anytime they want. It doesn’t matter if something bad is happening in their life or not, they seem to find a reason to swear and they squeeze it into almost every sentence.
Most people will think about cursing as being a sign of low intelligence or perhaps that somebody is not refined. If you are one of those individuals who think that swearing only comes from uneducated individuals, you will be interested in a scientific study that has some light to shed on the subject. Not only do they say fairly good things about people who swear, they say that those who do so may be the smartest of our friends.
Kristin Joy and Timothy Jay are two psychologists who work at the Marist College and Massachusetts College of Liberal arts. According to their research, they think that smart people are more likely to swear than other people.
Their study shows that including swear words in your vocabulary means that you are very fluent in your vocabulary. This is the opposite of what many of us have thought for years. According to their conclusions, if you have a high IQ, you’re more likely to swear frequently.
“People who use taboo words understand their general expressive content as well as nuanced distinctions that must be drawn to use slurs appropriately,” said the researchers in their study. “The ability to make nuanced distinction indicates the presence of more rather than less linguistic knowledge.”
Before you go off and start swearing on a regular basis, you might want to keep some other things in mind. Just because somebody can’t seem to finish a sentence without swearing does not mean that they are ready to teach a college course. That being said, the study is interesting.
It looked into social media websites and the behavior people had when posting. According to the research, those who are honest tend to be the ones who swear frequently. They don’t like to hide behind a mask, so they don’t mind swearing.
In addition, the psychologists say that people swear more often when they have a higher comfort level with expressing themselves. In their reasoning, cursing is an expression of emotion and if you use it at the proper part of a sentence, it can really add some emphasis.
The moral of the story is; the next time you are around somebody who is cursing too much, you might just be of the company of a genius.