I have people in my life that would accuse me of making this up to justify my own vices. So imagine my extreme joy when I have finally been vindicated. It seems a potty mouth may not be all bad. This interesting and humorous information came from Medical Daily in their article, “Bad Words: People Who Curse And Swear May Actually Have Higher Verbal Intelligence.”
Hearing someone use swear words may bother you. The swearer might even be judged to be less intelligent by their improper language. Every dog has his day and today is the day for profanity lovers. The results of a new study published in Language Sciences indicate that a lack of verbal fluency has nothing to do with how often people use profanity.
For the study, researchers recruited more than 200 college students aged 18 to 22 to take a Controlled Oral Word Association Test (COWAT). The verbal fluency test is designed to measure spontaneous production of words belonging to the same category. And students completed both written and oral tests in three specific categories: general fluency (standard vocabulary); taboo word fluency (curse words); and animal word fluency (words like bird, bat, and tiger). The animal fluency portion of the COWAT test is a semantic category that produces more words than the swear word category. As an extra semantic category, it allowed researchers to compare fluencies and better identify a positive correlation between them.
The prejudice against profanity may have to be readjusted.
Melody K. Smith
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