Considered a sign of a weak mind, swearing is often associated with rudeness and ignorance.
But a new study has found that the people who swear a lot have a much better vocabulary than people who don’t.
As per the study published in the Language Sciences journal, a large knowledge of profanities does not mean that the talker is uneducated; it could actually mean that the talker has a wider fluency with words in general.
The study, a joint effort of psychologists at Marist College and the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts, involved 43 participants (consisting of 30 women and 13 men) in their late teens to early twenties who were given 60 seconds to say as many swear words as they could. They were then asked to do the same with animal names.
Just in case you were wondering..
A total of 533 different curse words and phrases were noticed in the test. “F**k,” “sh*t” and “b**ch” were the top three swear words.
Not to be left behind, even ladies kept up quite nicely with the men.
Researchers came up with the hypothesis that people who listed the most curse words didn’t have any trouble coming up with the neutral words. In fact, they were able to name more animals, proving to have a much bigger vocabulary than other clean-tongued participants.
