Alright, motherfuckers. Buckle up. This is going to be one hell of a ride. We are about to check out, whether one of you idiots is actually more intelligent than all the other morons. How are we doing that? Easy. Several websites reported a while ago that people who are more intelligent, tend to use swear words more often.
So, whenever I’m insulting you, it’s just a sign of my superior intelligence. No need to frown, sunshine.
If you want to listen to me and get hypnotized by my beautiful voice-acting, just hit me hard!
Apparently, I don’t need your help to find another topic to debunk. This is mainly due to one, very obvious reason: I’m intelligent as fuck.
Yesterday, my Facebook newsfeed brought another gem to my attention. An article(1) which was almost a year old stating a connection between higher intelligence and a high frequency of swearing. Naturally, since I consider myself as an intellectually superior being who also happens to curse almost all the time – I was intrigued.
Did this mean, there was actually some solid research backing up my antisocial behavior? This would be fucking amazing! Whenever people started to complain, I could now just tell them, I needed to express my immense intellectual capabilities. Awesome.
There was but one problem with this piece of crap article. It reported about some kind of ominous study conducted by the University of Rochester – without fucking linking it. AAAAAAAAAHHHH!
Stupid plebeian shitheads. So, I had to spent quite some time in an attempt to find it – which I didn’t. If someone could tell me more about it in a comment, I would be forever grateful. I might even consider paying anybody for a helpful hint.
Why are “science” journalists so incredibly retarded?
If you want something done right – do it yourself. This is especially true when it comes to news articles about scientific research. Apparently, journalists are missing some kind of special gene, which prevents them from doing actual research BEFORE they publish another useless piece of shit.
At least the author linked to another study(2)…
Which, of course, he neither read nor understood.
Otherwise, he would not have written, that people who can swear the most in one minute are also achieving higher scores on IQ tests. This is NOT what the study was about.
Please, just fucking kill me already.
Well, at least I’m here to enlighten you guys.
As you can derive from its title, the study evaluated whether there was any truth about the idea that increased swearing is correlated with a poverty of vocabulary (POV).
The main idea behind this concept is, that people who are using swear words are lacking verbal fluency in general – which can be seen as a sign of less intelligence(3).
Obviously, people can be retards no matter whether they use swear words or not.
To evaluate, whether the POV hypothesis was true or not, the researchers conducted three different studies. Their argument was, that there is no special kind of POV correlated with the frequent use of swear words.
And, it came as no surprise, the POV hypothesis was nonsense and can be disregarded as a myth. People who showed signs of high verbal fluency were able to display a high taboo word fluency as well.
But to be clear: you are neither more intelligent because you are swearing nor are you cursing more often because of higher intellectual capabilities – it just means, your general level of verbal fluency is quite high. People who are more eloquent are able to express themselves better, thus might also use swear words in a more nuanced and frequent way.
But once an idiot, always an idiot. You will not suddenly become the next Elon Musk just because you start cursing like Gordon Ramsay – sorry, lad.
And it also does not mean that your friendly next-door mathematician is actually a brain-dead retard because he is not insulting you constantly due to your lack of logical reasoning and ability not to be a douche.
It’s interesting to notice, that the available research regarding this specific subject is actually not as extensive as one would have thought. Especially considering the immense press coverage of the above-described results.
Personally, I think this can mainly be explained by some kind of weird need for justification and uniqueness. Most people want to be special. They want to feel individual. Therefore, if someone tells them, that increased frequency of swearing is a valid indicator of higher intelligence, they instantly hop on the hype train – like the brain-dead zombies they actually are.
Believing everything you read in a newspaper, written by some kind of mentally disabled “science” journalist is usually not a sign of superior intellectual capabilities. Quite the contrary. It just proves your need for attention and your intense craving for every piece of hope telling you, that you might be special after all.
You are most likely not.
It is far more realistic you are just another victim of too much overconfidence. The main problem with incompetent people is – they are not able to realize their incompetence, as Dunning and Kruger stated it famously almost twenty years ago(4).
Dumb people cannot reflect upon their own idiocy – otherwise, they would not be dumb. No matter how often they experience events which prove their incompetence over and over again, they will still think of themselves as highly skilled individuals. Harry Stack Sullivan wrote, quite fascinated one could say, about this issue more than half a century ago in Conceptions of modern psychiatry(5):
"the failure of learning which has left their capacity for fantastic, self-centered delusions so utterly unaffected by a life-long history of educative events
If you ever argued with someone who was significantly below your own intellectual abilities, you will understand this far too well. It does not matter how good your arguments are, how much counter-evidence you are presenting – they simply cannot understand it, but will still think, you are the one who is wrong and don’t know what he is talking about.
With this in mind, I have an important life lesson for you guys:
Never argue with idiots – they will pull you down at their intellectual level and just beat you with experience.
Feel always free to discuss my ideas and share your own thoughts about the things I’m writing about. Nobody is omniscient and if we all walk away a bit smarter than before, we’ll have achieved a lot.
Thanks for reading and stay sceptical.
(1) https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/swearing-study-intelligent-intelligence-university-of-rochester-a7916516.html
(2) Jay, Kristin L.; Jay, Timothy B. Taboo word fluency and knowledge of slurs and general pejoratives: deconstructing the poverty-of-vocabulary myth. Language Sciences 52 (2015) 251–259
(3) O’Connor, J., 2000. Cuss Control: The Complete Book on How to Curb Your Cursing. Three Rivers Press, New York.
(4) Kruger, Justin; Dunning, David (1999). "Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments". Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. American Psychological Association. 77 (6): 1121–1134.
(5) Sullivan, H. S. (1953). Conceptions of modern psychiatry. New York: Norton.
@egotheist