K12 said:
Leon Royce said:
Swearing shows low class and vulgarity. It shows that you are agitated inside.
Teenagers, rappers, dockworkers and the French like swearing.
The best critique of a research article is definitely saying "NUH-UH!"
I'm glad this exists because the "swear words restrict your vocabulary" argument is stupid and something that my Dad says to me all the fucking time.
I'd definitely like to see a study following up on this which actually shows arelationship between fluency and frequency of swearing because that would be a much more definitive in addressing that argument. It does seem to show that there's nothing special about swear words, they're just words (as it pertains to vocabulary) which is something I'm glad to see.
It's reasonable to assume that regularly using a word means you're better able to recall it but it's also possible that the effect of having a strong taboo against a word would have the same (or an even greater) effect on your ability to recall it.
My guess is that people who never swear and people who swear very very frequently will have lower word fluency than people who swear commonly but not excessively.
It's an Escapist "research" article. It's misreporting the actual study, which speaks of fluency in swearing. It's not about frequency. You can click through the the abstract from the article, the "Highlights" section. It says that fluency in Taboo language (Here being perjoratives and slurs) correlates to general fluency, and correlates with neuroticism and openness from their "Big Five" personality traits. And it negatively correlated with agreeableness and conscientiousness.
In other words, the article is mistaken.
Going down further into the actual abstract (AKA, further than the Escapist is willing to go). Bear in mind, that I'm not a psychologist, sociologist, nor familiar with their terms, so I'm literally looking them up on the go, my field is Engineering.
The study does not say that it's a "sign of intelligence". It doesn't even correlate intelligence. Intelligence, IQ, and any other measures of intelligence, aren't mentioned at all. It does mention fluency, and vocabulary, not intelligence.
In fact, it highlights negative associations too, that people with a high fluency in swearing tend to be more anxious, fearful, moody, envious, frustrated, jealous or lonely, and that they have less concern for social harmony and get along less well with others, being generally less considerate, kind, generous, trusting and trustworthy. So the Escapist has actually misled many users here that this is all positives. You can check this yourself, it's the "Big Five" personality model, and it references that neuroticism and openness are positively correlated, while agreeableness and conscientiousness were negatively correlated (ie, there's an inverse correlation, greater fluency in swears correlates with less agreeableness and conscientiousness).
What the study does say is that their results agree with the "fluency is fluency" hypothesis. That fluency in language is fluency in language, however vulgar. Which supports your statement at least. Of course, the Escapist manages to mess up the reporting here as well. The actual abstract does not say anything about linguists, and it's not overturning some prior status, they mention the folk assumption that swearing indicates a low vocabulary. Also, I'm fairly sure that the fluency is fluency hypothesis isn't something they coined. Unfortunately, the well for googling that has been poisoned by lazy, irresponsible, unethical reporting. They've actually managed to bury real science here with this. It's hard enough as it is to use the internet to search scholarly sources.
The article also says that the study "failed to address" the relation between intelligence and the frequency of swearing, which is just inane. It has no bearing or relation on what they were looking at, and is just a rewording from the BPS article they sourced this from. If you look it up, there's a bunch of piss-poor (Ooooh look how smart I ams, a swears, doesn't that show I'm clever, unlike say, reading an abstract, which is to understanding research papers as toe-dipping is to swimming) "science journalism" and "pop science" articles, all of which are calling it an intelligence correlation, as opposed to a vocabulary fluency one (Also, the study says nothing about the effectiveness of communication, and given the personality correlations, that should be very much up in the air).
In fact, while Royce doesn't seem to have supported their statement, the actual study does support their statements, and it supports them better than the article.
As always, the best critique of a research article is reading the actual research, and the actual research says that the article is mistaken, and actually full of shit.
Again, I am an engineer. I had to look up every bit of jargon in the abstract, including the proper definitions of common terms as they pertain to their use in the literature. This took me about 10 minutes. For an abstract, that one's actually pretty readable. This is more effort than any of the publications that reported on this went to, including the Escapist. And it shows a sad trend-that people aren't willing to click through to even the abstract. They are interested in the veneer of science, not the science itself. They're interested in having their biases confirmed and engaging in the cargo cult of popular science, rather than actual science. Any enthusiast can do what I did, and tear through this, you just need to have the desire to do so, and, ironically enough, the vocabulary to comprehend the article, and the definitions you'll need to properly parse their meaning, which for all their swearing, the Escapist has not demonstrated.
Also, as for "proof" or anything else, nobody has mentioned study size, the correlation, the error bars, presumably because none of these publications have a subscription, and couldn't fork out $36 to access the paper. I'm not fucked to do that, my university might let me access it, but that's a waste of time. It's journalist's job to parse this stuff and give us the important bits, saving us having to buy the article, and here they have utterly failed.
