Do you swear a lot? Great! Because here’s some excellent and important information that will make your day about ten !@#$ing times better: People who swear are the best. No, really. Studies have been done. Last year, we learned that people who swear are articulate and intelligent; then we learned that (contrary to popular belief) people who swear have vast vocabularies that contain multitudes; and today we learn something that’s even nicer to hear — people who swear are more honest than people who don’t. Take that, everyone who doesn’t swear! You’re all just a bunch of phony liars.
Before we get too carried away — it’s worse than a clearance sale at the Four Letter Word store in our office, sometimes — let’s discuss the particulars: This most recent study about swearing, which was just accepted for publication, consisted of two parts. In the first, nearly 300 people were asked about their swearing habits and given sets of questions to answer; in the second, researchers compiled the answers of 74,000 people surveyed on Facebook and found that those who cared less about swearing also tended to lie less than those who didn’t.
This could absolutely be one of those scenarios — like peeing in the shower — in which people say they don’t something but we all know that they do. And you just don’t trust the ones that say they don’t! The study’s co-author David Stillwell, from The University of Cambridge, had this to say to The Daily Mail:
‘There are two ways of looking at it. You might think if someone is swearing a lot, this is a negative social behaviour seen as a bad thing to do, so if someone swears they are probably a bad person as well.
‘On the other hand, they are not filtering their language so they are probably also not putting their stories about what is going on through similar filters which might turn them into untruths.
‘That is what we seemed to land on in this study, that people who use the language that comes to mind first are less likely to be playing games with the truth.’
So don’t worry so much about your f-bombs anymore! It turns out that they just make you seem more honest less like you’re posturing yourself to look cool. And that? It makes you even cooler!
