Yes, really!!! Welcome to the bottom of worldly wisdom—so called.
Hot on the heels of my article The “F” word shirt comes the article and CBS Sunday Morning show segment Some frank words about profanity (CBS News, October 23, 2016 AD) featuring Faith Salie, denote two points about communication. One is how to impress people and, in this case, give them an excuse (which is different than a reason) to employ profanity into their vocabulary: and that is, “Hey, a (as in one) study conclude…therefore, it is true and good.” The other is about how profanity is a virtue.
The claim is that “bad language” could “possibly be a good thing” which is actually “true” and about which “You may be right! Based on a recent study, researchers found that people who curse a lot are more intelligent.”
Of course, this brings us to the fact that quantifying intelligence is subjective: for example, book smarts vs. street smarts or common sense. The one single study being referenced is Jay, K., Jay, T., “Taboo word fluency and knowledge of slurs and general pejoratives: deconstructing the poverty-of-vocabulary myth,” Language Sciences, November 2015 AD. And you thought that those rappers are oh so hoi polloi: those people are geniuses based on the manner whereby they can rhyme cuss words together. Makes me wonder who funded the study yeah, who is the big bucks behind the research—Flavor Flav?!?!
The claim is that the one single study is that “fluency in taboo language correlates with overall verbal fluency. The more words you know, the more you know … AND the more colorfully you can express yourself, with nuance, metaphor and emotion” (ellipses in original). I can certainly agree that “The more words you know, the more you know” in general but that is like saying that “The more snuff films you watch, the more you know. Yet, overall how about making the colorful manner in which you can express yourself, with nuance, metaphor and emotion, be based on breaking out a thesaurus every now and again?—is there another word for thesaurus?
Faith Salie states, “let’s hear it for the ladies!” because as the one single study shows “men and women in this experiment swore in equal measure,” so both are equally disgusting. But oops, she played off of the gender binary, provided only two gender options and placed some into one and others into the other: TRIGGER!!!
Well, this goes to the nature of that which is considered taboo language as the politically correct movement’s commandments de jour are even now demanding that there are very many things we either cannot say or say at the risk of being bombarded with hatred. You may be aware that in Aldous Huxley’s 1932 AD book “Brave New World” since children were produced via artificial means, terms such as “mother” was viewed as “smut” talk. Well, we are living in a Cowardly New World right now.
She then makes a joke about how as a mother of a two-year-old and a four-year-old, “I definitely feel dumber now” and her kids “have been sabotaging my IQ. I’m squandering invaluable gray matter by censoring myself. Every time I say “Sugar!” and “Fudge!,” little neurons in my brain probably die.”
Conversely, “My husband is a graduate of two Ivy League universities — with a degree in Classics! — and he sounds like a David Mamet character when I hear him on a business call. Perhaps I should not be annoyed at my mother-in-law when she uses the ‘F-word’ in front of our children. Now I see that Grandma, a Ph.D., is merely trying to enrich their lexicon, so they can go to fine schools.”
Yes, you have the likes of her husband and mother-in-law for why you keep a clean home when it comes to such terminology but your kids hear it in school. Oh yeah, but, apparently, you should be thanking Faith’s husband and mother-in-law for making your children more intelligent.
We are also told that “Cursing makes you feel better” and so might punching people on the nose at will so have at it. In one other single study “participants were asked to plunge their hands into ice water for as long as they could bear it. When they were encouraged to swear up a storm, they were able to keep their hands underwater 73% longer.” So the lesson is that if for whatever reason you need your hand to remain submerged in ice water for a long time then well, you know.
I can dispute this result, the study’s conclusion, off the top of my head because there have been studies on weightlifting that suggest the merits of yelling out so as to pump yourself to get those last final reps in. And this is just yelling, even just a guttural sound.
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