Good news, assholes: All those cockheads who have been telling you for years that curse words are a sign of poor breeding, low intelligence, and a shitty command of the English language should shut their fucking mouths, because it turns out that eloquent swearing is merely a sign of a strong vocabulary.
As the Scientific American blog reported Tuesday, many people believe in what’s called the “poverty-of-vocabulary” (POV) hypothesis—the belief that douchebags who curse a lot do so because they don’t have anything else to fucking say. In this view, people who use phrases like “spiky fucker,” “that thing you cut shit with,” and “goddamn round cocksucker for wet food” for forks, knives, and spoons, respectively, aren’t being creative—they’re leaning on bad language like a crutch.
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But a study from some fucking eggheads at Marist College and the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts shows that the POV hypothesis can go eat a big bowl of ass, because it turns out that those who are more proficient in coming up with taboo words are also more verbally proficient in general.
The way those fuckers worked that shit out was by giving some study participants a Controlled Word Association Test (COWAT), which is basically a way of judging how big a vocabulary those study assholes really had. Then the participants were asked to drop as many taboo words as possible—from “cunt” to “crackhead” to “clit”—in a minute.
The results found that people with the most curses on the tips of their shit-eating tongues were less agreeable and conscientious and more neurotic than others, but we pretty much knew that already. The surprising finding was that generally, the more taboos they threw out, the more words they knew overall.
That shit is not exactly surprising, because anyone with a cable subscription and a pair of fucking eyes knows that curse words add a soupy, cum-like richness to the feast that is the English language. Shows like The Thick of It, The Wire, Deadwood, and South Park have painted whole fucking murals with their profanity, and all that shit is beloved by graduate-degree-holding motherfuckers. And Louis CK? Yeah those fancy pants cocksuckers will always talk about how great he is at dinner parties and shit, and he has whole routines about the worst words in the English language. Even that old dickbag Shakespeare loved curses: According to some NPR shit from 2013, he invented the slang term “Roger” for penis and also once referred to a vagina as “Spain” in a play.
Basically, anyone who actually read Chaucer in school knows that vulgarity and art have gone hand-in-fucking-glove for as long as there’s been vulgarity, art, gloves, and fucking, but it’s nice to have some no-doubt-grant-supported fuckfaces telling us that profanity doesn’t make you stupid.
As the Scientific American fucker notes, “Just because verbally fluent people have the ability to cuss with the best of them, does not mean that they will do so.” So smart people might know 20 ways to tell someone to go suck a horse’s cock, but they also presumably know how to moderate that shit based on circumstance. Someone whose every other word is fuck might not be all that bright, but it’s hard to tell, and maybe you shouldn’t judge a book by its fucking cover. Shit.
