At last, at last, vindicated at last. Can you imagine my delight when I recently learned that, according to a variety of studies, people who regularly use profanity have a higher level of intelligence and integrity than those who do not?
I remember the first time I used a bona fide curseword. I’m not talking about kiddie cussing like “fartknocker” and “booger-eater.” I’m talking about adult curse words, like those on FCC’s list of banned words for TV including, in this case, the S-word.
I was around nine years old, on the school bus with some friends who were blubbering about the arrival of Escape from the Planet of the Apes, the third installment of the Apes film series.
“Don’t bother,” I told them. “It’s a piece of . . .” you know what.
I remember how it felt to say that word—so naughty but ever so gratifying—like how you feel after you inhale a pint of ice cream or visit a website that specializes in hermaphroditic midget porn.
See, Escape was not a, “pile of garbage” nor was it a “hunk of junk.” These descriptions did not adequately convey the contempt I felt for that film, so held because, well—it didn’t have any fartknocking apes in it! The first two films were loaded with ‘em—hundreds of apes walking around with their funky ape hunches making all their scrunchy ape faces. However Escape was set on present day Earth and featured only two actors in ape costumes! Now I ask, what kind of booger-eating monkey movie only got two fartknocking monkeys in it?
So, at the age of nine, I uttered my first curse. And criminy did the butt-slurping floodgates open! Turns out the S-word is a gateway curseword because shortly after came the F-word, the C-word, the MFing-word, the CSer-word, D-word, P-word, B-word and all the rest until, in almost no time, I became Tanner Boyle, the scowling, cursing, middle-finger-flinging, blonde smartass from the original Bad News Bears movie.
Today, profanity rolls off my tongue as readily as flatulence from Donald Trump’s Twitter feed. Of course, I’m not oblivious to my surroundings. If I stub my toe in church I’m not going to howl out the S-, F-, C-, MFing-, CSer-, P-, D- and B-word combo in front of The Virgin’s virgin ears. However, I might say it after a dinner party, if the valet loses my car keys.
For the record, I’m not talking about bigoted slurs, but rather, what we typically refer to as four-letter-words. I find these words to be useful and practical and reserve the right to use them at will—despite society’s disapproval. Indeed, for a long time now we have been told that swearing is a sign of low morals, inferior intelligence, creative laziness, and a limited—oh fer fuck’s sake, what’s that word again? Oh, I remember—vocabulary.
Well according to a recent study in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science, that’s a bunch of bullstinkies. In the study—which is subtitled “The Relationship between Profanity and Honesty”—researchers wrote, “The positive relation between profanity and honesty is robust...” And the reason for that, they surmised, is that, “Swearing is often used to express one’s feelings, which suggests people who do this regularly portray themselves in a more honest light.”
It also seems that frequent cursing is a sign of intelligence. According to a 2015 study published in the journal Language Sciences by psychologists Kristin and Timothy Jay, “... [heavy swearing] may be considered an indicator of healthy verbal abilities...” which in turn is a sign of intelligence.
This is not to say that people who swear are superior to those who don’t. I just want to dispel the myth that frequent cursing means we are stupid, lazy, and/or morally inferior—and, to dispel the assumption that exposing children to four-letter-words causes them harm, of which there is not a shred of evidence to suggest.
Now, this is the part of the article where the reader might expect me to embark on a rant about how the censoring of profanity is a bunch of horsehonkers. It’s the part where I’m supposed to say that the FCC should eliminate the TV ban. The part where I say people need to lay off the swear-shaming and that parents should take a pill whenever someone accidentally blurts an expletive in the presence of their kids’ precious eardrums.
But I’m not going to say those things. Why? Well, what if one day we collectively decided that all our delightful obscenities were no longer verboten? What if everyone—your boss, your grandma, educators, Congress, Katie Couric, the cable news tickers, Jerry Seinfeld and Dora the Explorer all began regularly using four-letter words? Well they would lose their impact. And that, my friends, would be a travesty. If the F-word became so common that it had the same impact as, say, the word fudge, what good will it do when you hit your thumb with a hammer?
“Oh fudge, I have mangled my thumb—woe is me.”
If the C-word were as common as cantelope, how would you effectively berate your wife after catching her cheating?
“You cantelope! I hope you fudging rot in heck!”
Do we really want a time to come when the C-word is so impotent, I won’t even get in trouble for saying it? What a sad day it would be if nobody B-worded about the offensive language in this column. No, there will be no anti-censorship rant today. These words must remain taboo. I shudder to think what would happen if they didn’t.