The colourful bursts of words that you often hear when walking to work, stuck in traffic or, better yet, while sitting quietly in public transport, is quite astounding.

The words seem so naturally woven together, it sounds almost like an idiom we learnt at school. Whether you casually brush such type of language off as a ‘funny’ Maltese trait, or are completely offended by it, people who curse are often labelled inferior or, sticking to the theme of displeasing words, “injurant” and “ħamallu”.

Even in Maltese literature, swearing is typically associated with certain characters.

“Swearing is probably the ultimate marker of the evil and despair of an obnoxious male antagonist,” points out Adrian Grima, who teaches Maltese literature at the University of Malta, with reference to Maltese romantic literature.

“He swears because he cannot hide or even control the evil inside him and because he is unable to deal rationally with the situation he finds himself in. The blasphemous villain is overcome by his own evil and by that same fate that he has challenged and that has turned against him because of his immorality. This in no way is the real world: Righteousness must triumph.”

However, looking at it on a broader sense and not solely on a national level, swearing plays a big part in every language and although cultures may vary, as do morals, the general negative view on cussing appears to remain the same.

Nonetheless, a recent study suggests that this is no more than society’s perception.

The study, conducted in Massachusetts, found that those who possess a healthy repertoire of curse words often have a richer vocabulary than those who don’t.

The sort of person who thinks swearing is in any way a sign of a lack of education or a lack of verbal interest is just f**king lunatic

So, as British comedian Stephen Fry says, “The sort of person who thinks swearing is in any way a sign of a lack of education or a lack of verbal interest is just f**king lunatic.”

Psychologist Kristin Jay and Timothy Jay of Marist College and Massachusetts college of Liberal arts came up with the hypothesis that people who are well versed in curse words are more likely to have greater overall fluency in that particular language. For the first experiment, they gathered 43 participants (30 women) aged between 18 and 22, and asked them to rattle off as many swear words they could think of in 60 seconds. After doing this, they had to recite as many animal names as they could in the same amount of time.

By combining the taboo words with animal names, it gave researchers a good indication of a person’s overall vocabulary.

As any intelligible American English taboo word or phrase was considered fair game, the participants ended up generating a total of 533 taboo words.

Furthermore, in a second experiment, another 49 participants (34 women), aged between 18 and 22, were asked to perform a similar task – this time they were asked to write down as many curse words and animal names starting with the letter “a” as they could. They also completed FAS tasks to assess their overall language fluency.

Publishing their finding in the journal Language Sciences, the researchers also portray that expressive curse words generated at higher rates than slurs, and there was little difference between what the female and male participants could come up with.

“Consistent with findings that do not show a sex difference in taboo lexicon size, no overall sex difference in taboo word generation was obtained,” they report.

Hence, the findings suggest that the ability to generate curse words was not an indication of overall language poverty, but rather, that taboo fluency is positively correlated with other measures of verbal fluency.

The ability to make nuanced distinctions indicates the presence of more rather than less linguistic knowledge.

“That is, a voluminous taboo lexicon may better be considered an indicator of healthy verbal abilities rather than a cover for their deficiencies,” the researchers conclude.”

In such a way, when a person swears he is in no way portraying his ignorance, but rather, showing off his ability to play with his language.

In the words of one of the masters of language, Shakespeare: “You taught me language, and my profit on’t/ Is I know how to curse.”

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