“People who curse a lot have better vocabularies than those who don’t, study finds“.
If you don’t want to read the whole thing, what they did find was that people don’t have a huge repertoire of swear-words, but if you put a classroom together, pretty much every single person is going to have a swear word they use that their classmates don’t use.
I had to give it a look, because I’m pretty sure I’m at the far end of the bell curve on both vulgarities/per sentence and gross mother-tongue vocabulary. There are people who argue that people who swear frequently are overcompensating for their poor vocabulary. Or at least I think there are. The idea’s out in the aether, right? Haven’t actually seen someone in my circle bring it up. And I’ve been watching for it. I’ve been itching for that challenge for years. YOU WANT TO THROW DOWN!? I’m in the boat where anyone offended by my foul language has unfriended me years ago. I’m secure in my world of sampling bias. And even still, I have enough ethos banked securing my reputation as having a robust vocabulary should someone consider having the thought that gutter-mouth and erudition cannot coexist.
This article may have baited me, but I wasn’t the target audience. Who was? Considering Facebook is the medium in which this was disseminated in my world, may I draw your attention to this word-cloud compiled from Facebook users:
As we can see be this presentation of data, males do the swearing on social media. So the intuitive logic might be to think males will be interested in validating their vulgarity as a proxy for their vocabulary. But it’s because men swear so much on social media that this article was not targeted towards them. This article is tagging insecurity, not pomposity. A guy who swears might read the headline and agree, but it’s the women who will share this. A woman appears to have written it too. The logically astute of you will pick up that I just implied that women are insecure. Well, duh, amirite? But this case isn’t a generalization. What I will defend is the thesis that this article represents evidence that women are insecure about vulgarity. It’s acceptable for men to swear, socially. For women less so. Or even if it’s not true, it’s the perception. At least the one held by women. Not all of them sure, but it’s enough to bring in click-bait dollars. Of course this can all be argued away by accusing me of begging the question (that is, using circular logic).
That’s my sexist sixth-pence. What is less speculative is the fact that this study didn’t prove shit. As always, we should check the source. “Well, we can still probably get a good idea from the abstract.” I can see I still have a lot of work to do. Come, let’s not let paywalls stand in our way. The siege engines of the internet will help us take these walls. Here we go.
I’m not reading that introduction. There can’t possibly be that much to say about this. They’re doing a (really half-assed) test on something they heard someone say on the internet. *scroll scroll scroll* Ah, here we go, “Study 1 examined fluency as a function of prompt (FAS, animal, taboo) and sex.” If this is some Dr. Seuss kind of thing where the authors just wanted to see if they could put “animal taboo sex” in a paper, then I withdraw any complaints I have. Deleting my browser history notwithstanding, what does this mean? “FAS” is a test where they ask people to say all the words that start with “F”, then “A”, then “S”. Usually, such as in this case, a category of things is picked. E.g. all the animals you can name that start with “A”. Which is what they did.
So who’d they put through the ringer? “A total of 43 participants (30 women) were recruited from introductory psychology courses at a small liberal arts college and compensated with research participation credit. Their ages ranged from 18 to 22 years (M=19.2 years). Half of the participants were tested by a male experimenter and half by a female experimenter. Participation was in accordance with the ethical principles of the American Psychological Association (2002).” So yeah, mostly some girls from an undergrad psych 101 class. No sampling bias there. Perfect stand in for everyone. Credit to the Science Alert writer for at least recording the sample size.
Also, I like the “ethical principles” thing. I’m not giving the writers crap for it. They didn’t have to put it in the paper, but honestly, they are required to submit an unholy amount of paperwork to show that there experiment was “ethical”, because for legal purposes, this qualifies as experimenting on humans. Mostly. They could appeal to some exemptions in the rules, but they’re just playing it safe. This isn’t them being neurotic as much as it is that this is what the regulations actually believe. And the public wants this. We ask for regulations to keep people safe, so this is what happens when you ask bureaucrats to do it. We don’t have enough faith in the justice system to decide things with heuristics, so we use bureaucracy, and it’s just really stupid.
Anyway, the young people were given three tests, the FAS without a category, the FAS with a category (animals), and “as many ‘curse words or swear words’ as possible”, a minute for each. They averaged 13.51 FAS words, 21.61 animal words, and 9.30 swear words. My immediate reaction is, “Wait, they got way more animals than when unrestricted by category. That’s a neat piece of psychology info. What dos this mean? People like categories? Freedom is hard? Humans crave direction instruction to thrive?” BUT! “Across all participants, 400 taboo words were generated representing 79 different taboo word types, and 47 of these had a frequency of only 1 or 2.” In a minute, these kids thought of an average of 9 swear words, but because of the tiny sample size (only 43 people) basically every single person had a swear word their classmates don’t use. That’s actually really fucking cool.
And you can find that out just by looking at the mean averages. Middle school stats will still dig up lots of cool things. When they crammed in a bunch of college stats to make it look like real science and not just giving your kids an easy classroom activity to further a personal career, they found… weak but extant correlations between all the numbers. That is, people who could name more animals tended to be able to name more words that start with “F”. That is, some people can list lots of words quickly, and others aren’t as good at that. Thanks, science!
They repeated the experiment, but this time had people write their answers down, because maybe people are too chickenshit to swear aloud. Their results were similar, except the correlations were much weaker across categories.
They then did a third study with what appears to be two or three classes together, where they repeated study 2, and added some questions for people to answer on a 7 point scale (because, as I have mentioned elsewhere, a 10 point scale makes it harder to torture the statistics into being significant), and they gave them a test to rank them on a scale of the
Big Five personality traits. The only real correlation they found was with the number of unique swears per minute and their score on the
openness aspect of the personality trait (r^2 or .83). Which the authors remarked was “surprising”.
They open their discussion thus: “The overall finding of this set of studies, that taboo fluency is positively correlated with other measures of verbal fluency, undermines the POV view of swearing.
That is, a voluminous taboo lexicon may better be considered an indicator of healthy verbal abilities rather than a cover for their deficiencies.”
A guy I knew in college had a good word for these authors: chucklefucks. They only thing these surveys to a couple psych undergrad classes showed was that people who score high on a openness personality inventory know a couple more swears than other people off the top of their head. The fact that this is surprising amuses me because, if their tests work, then they absolutely should have found this. People on the openness end of the spectrum are said by definition to have a diverse vocabulary. So out of all that, psych tests have at least a little bit of internal consistency, I suppose. Good hustle.
What these studies did not in the least bit demonstrate was the relationship between vulgarity and vocabulary. They didn’t even try. Having people blast words in a category in a minute tests a number of processes, having a hell of a lot more to do with
memory and information
recall than testing vocabulary. I mean, if somebody with a roommate who had a book on neuroscience peer reviewed this article, they would have caught that. Peer review didn’t. There are stupid quizzes on the internet you can take for fun that put in way, way more effort into their methodology than these “scientists” did. E.g. http://testyourvocab.com/details . The sheer laziness in this methodology and the complete ineptitude in analysis… just… [expletives]. Knowing a bunch of animals that start with “A” off the top of your head is just a terrible, awful metric for testing vocabulary. And knowing a
lot of swear words is not the same as using them. Somebody who uses some variation of “fuck” 3 times a sentence is more vulgar than someone who can think of a couple unique swears but never uses them. Now, they allegedly tested for this, and I will look into it when I have more time, but they referred to another paper of theirs to make the assertion, and I simple don’t take their math or methodology seriously. Even granting that, we still have no useful metric for gauging total vocabulary aptitude of any of their participants, making their studies useless in proving what they set out to prove.
Personal anecdote/observation: I have gone back and trimmed several swear words out of this draft. I am extremely tired, which I notice increases my propensity for swearing. It may work well to convey my emotional mood, but people have raised the point that it may be hindering my writing.
