Profanity And Intelligence

Have you ever heard someone say that using profanity shows a lack of intelligence?  Ironically, believing that whether or not someone uses profanity has anything at all to do with his or her intelligence is actually a mark of stupidity.  If someone truly holds that it follows necessarily from a person using profanity--whatever the amount of profanity or the exact words used--that the person is somehow unable to find more "sophisticated" words or that the person is unintelligent or unimaginative, then the person holding that belief relies on serious errors in reasoning.

I use profanity because I feel like using it and because it's not sinful [1], not because there are not other words I could substitute for profanity, and certainly not because I am unintelligent.  I have no obligation to not do something that is not sinful (though I do abstain from using profanity in the presence of someone who asks me to do so out of love for that person), so there is no obligation for me to submit my preferences to besides not intentionally trying to offend people.  But some might mistake my habit of using profanity for evidence that I do not know what else to say, when, in fact, I am well aware of multiple ways to state what is on my mind without using profanity at all.  But, even if, hypothetically, someone truly does not know how to articulate something without profanity, this still says nothing about his or her intelligence, because intelligence is the extent to which someone grasps logic, not how well they communicate with others.

The other issue, which might surface in conversation with some people, is that whether or not profanity signifies unintelligence has absolutely nothing to do with any alleged moral hazards of using profanity.  If someone actually uses the mythical profanity-unintelligence connection as a moral argument against use of profanity, he or she is arguing from a nonexistent connection to an ungrounded moral conclusion.  It can grow quite tiring to have people make assumptions about your intelligence based upon the arbitrary linguistic terms you use, which amount to simply making sounds in a different way, but it is hilarious to me when people think that a correlation with unintelligence (in this case it might be viewed more as an act of unintelligence than a sign of low general intelligence) clearly makes something intrinsically wrong.  That does not automatically follow, and is completely a separate issue (making the claim a red herring at best).

The most intelligent people I know use profanity.  Some of the least intelligent people I know do not use profanity, or at least not around me.  I don't even need to survey those around me to know that intelligence has nothing to do with profanity whatsoever, since logic reveals that a perfectly intelligent person could use heavy profanity frequently and that an extremely unintelligent person might not ever use profanity.  Nothing about one's intelligence follows from whether or not one uses profanity, regardless of how "offensive" the words might be--and whether or not someone is offended by a word is entirely subjective.


[1].  See here:
A.  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2017/05/the-delusion-of-inverse-morality.html
B.  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2017/01/the-fallacies-of-anti-profanity.html