骂出花儿？恭喜，说明你的词汇量很大！

If someone's ever accused you of sounding less intelligent because you swear too much, don't worry - science has got your back. A 2015 study found that those who have a healthy repertoire of curse words at their disposal are more likely to have a richer vocabulary than those who don't.

如果有人因为你怼天怼地、出口成脏，进而判断你智力水平不高——因为你言语贫乏，不得不用脏话填充自己的语言系统——不用担心，科学站在你这头。2015年的一项研究发现，那些掌握了大量的禁忌性词汇的人比很少使用脏话的人更有可能掌握更加丰富的词汇量。

This challenges the long-held stereotype that people swear because they can't find more intelligent words with which to express themselves.

这就挑战了人们长期以来的成见，因为他们找不到更聪明的词语来表达自己。

As Stephen Fry once said, "The sort of twee person who thinks swearing is in any way a sign of a lack of education or a lack of verbal interest is just f*cking lunatic."

正如Stephen Fry曾经说过的那样：“认为骂街就是在任何方面都缺乏教育或言语能力的表现，真是他妈的傻逼透了。”

Psychologists Kristin Jay and Timothy Jay of Marist College and the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts (not clear if related) came up with the hypothesis that people who are well-versed in curse words are more likely to have greater overall language fluency too.

马里斯特学院和马萨诸塞州文理学院的心理学家Kristin Jay 和Timothy Jay(不清楚是否相关)提出了一个假设，那些精通脏话的人更有可能拥有更高的整体语言流利度。

For the first experiment, they gathered 43 participants (30 women) aged between 18 and 22 years, and first asked them to rattle off as many swear or taboo words as they could in 60 seconds.

第一个实验，他们召集了43名参与者(30名是女性)，年龄在18至22岁之间，并先让他们在60秒内尽可能多地说出他们能想到的所有脏话。

Next, they had to recite as many animal names as they could in 60 seconds. The researchers used animal names as an indication of a person's overall vocabulary and interest in language.

随后，参与者又被要求在一分钟内尽可能多地说出他们所能想到的动物。研究人员用动物的名称数目来计量一个人的整体词汇水平和语言能力。

As any intelligible American English taboo word or phrase was considered fair game, the participants ended up generating a total of 533 taboo words, including the rather obscure "cum dumpster" and "ass pirate".

每个成年人都能判断出哪些词语是有确切意义的禁忌性词汇，所以这个测试是公平的。参与者最终产生总计533个禁忌词，包括含义相当模糊的“cum dumpster”和“ass pirate”。

The participants also submitted to so-called FAS tasks, which are standardised verbal fluency tests.

测试者还提交了所谓的FAS任务，这是标准化的口头语言流利性测试。

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.

在第二组实验中，另外49名年龄在18岁至22岁之间的参与者(34名女性)被要求执行类似的任务——这次他们被要求写下尽可能多的以字母“a”开头的禁忌词语和动物的名称。

They also completed FAS tasks to assess their overall language fluency.

随后，他们也完成了FAS任务，以评估他们的总体语言流利程度。

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

研究人员将结果发表在《语言科学》期刊上，具有表现力的脏话的产生速度要快过诋毁性的词语，女性和男性参与者所能达到的差异不大。

They found that the ability to generate curse words was not an index of overall language poverty - in fact, they found that taboo fluency is positively correlated with other measures of verbal fluency.

他们发现掌握脏话词语的能力不是语言总体贫困的指标——事实上，使用社会性的禁忌词语的流利程度与其他类型表达方式的口头流利程度正相关。

"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 concluded.

“也就是说，大量使用禁忌词汇可能应该被视为具有更健康的言语能力，而不是掩盖其缺陷。”研究人员总结道。

"Speakers who use taboo words understand their general expressive content as well as nuanced distinctions that must be drawn to use slurs appropriately.

“使用禁忌词的演讲者能够更好地理解一般性的表达内容以及必须恰当地使用脏话技巧来表现的内容的细微差别。”

"The ability to make nuanced distinctions indicates the presence of more rather than less linguistic knowledge, as implied by the POV [Poverty of Vocabulary] view."

“感受细微差别的能力表明存在更多而不是更少的语言知识，正如POV [词汇的贫瘠]观点所暗示的那样。”

Now, of course, it should be said that the sample size for this study was small, but until a larger cohort can be assessed, we can look to one of the greatest living masters of the English language, Stephen Fry, for his view.

当然，现在应该指出，这项研究的样本量很小，当我们找到了更多的证据，或许就能更好地体悟当代最伟大的英语使用者之一Stephen Fry(《黑爵士》等的编剧导演)的观点了。