Cursing is often associated with people who lack intelligence or are unable to express their thoughts clearly. However, there is a growing body of research that suggests cursing may actually be a sign of intelligence. One study conducted by psychologists at Marist College found that individuals who could generate more curse words in one minute had a higher vocabulary overall. They argued that the ability to curse suggests a wide range of vocabulary and language fluency, which are indicators of intelligence. Similarly, another study from the University of Rochester found that cursing may be a sign of verbal fluency. The researchers discovered that people who could generate a larger variety of curse words were more likely to have a larger vocabulary and stronger language skills.
Comments from the Producer, Linda Thornton:
The Guidebook for Tennessee , published by the Works Project Administration in 1939, also contains an account that differs from Ingram s on pages 392 393. I have heard a lot of ghost stories and most sound alike, just in a different place with different people involved, but this is the single most unique and mystifying one that I have ever heard.
The researchers discovered that people who could generate a larger variety of curse words were more likely to have a larger vocabulary and stronger language skills. Furthermore, cursing may be a way for individuals to express their emotions effectively. Psychologist Timothy Jay suggests that people who frequently curse are often more in touch with their emotions and tend to be more expressive overall.
My experiences with the Bell Witch haunting
I lived in Adams, Tennessee growing up from about ages 14-18 (2004-2008). A couple of weeks after my family and I moved there something unexpected happened.
I was mowing on my dad's tractor (with a big 8 ft wide back-end mower), I was going down a hill when my horizon line violently was thrown around as the tractor tires hit something. I disengaged the mower, pulled the tractor around at the base of the hill I had just gone down.
My blood went cold as I look up through the swathe I had just cut. Like a buzzer going down the middle of someone's head making a lane in the grass. In that lane were 4 native American burial graves. My parents started reaching out to anyone who might be able to help us identify the graves: anthropologists, historians, accredited people, etc. Those people unanimously agreed that these 4 graves were from the Trail of Tears.
They corroborated this from what I remember because of how the graves were laid (very very shallow, with a giant slab of stone where a gravestone would be), the fact that they were interned on a hill side to keep the water from sinking in and raising the bodies since they had to bury them so quickly, and many other reasons.
I consider myself a very logically driven and rationally minded person, basically I let my empirical senses try to explain something before I'll open myself to other possibilities. Yet, there were things that happened to me and my whole family that we weren't able to rationalize with the scientific mindset or anything logical.
Event 1: The activity in our house started shortly after the mowing incident. We heard heavy knocking and pounding on the brick outer wall of the house, encircling the house (no matter where you were in the house you could hear the knocking). Some nights I would hear running footsteps accompanying the pounding. This activity happened nearly every night.
As the nights passed I started feeling a heavy presence in my room, a suffocating one, like a heavy weight sitting on my solar plexus constantly. Whatever was happening decided to latch onto me.
Event 2: Things continued to escalate. One night I was letting my golden retriever out to go pee. We had a ranch-style house overlooking the Red River. The door we were exiting was on the backside of the house facing the river. As I open the door I start hearing faint whispering something akin to leaves being blown/scratching across the ground.
I looked up at the trees to see if the wind was blowing, everything was perfectly still (it was fall in Tennessee, so tons of leaves on the ground, they were not moving either). The scratchy/blowing leave noise continued, but as it continued it grew closer and louder. It sounded like a language of some sort like how'd you imagine an incantation or something nefarious in the tone of the sound.
I looked down at my golden retriever. ALL of the hair on her back was standing up and she was snarling like a rabid wolf, yet not barking just kind of frozen in a fear response. I started getting extremely nauseous and could smell sulfur. I was completely frozen when my dog launches herself through the door's threshold and starts gnashing her teeth mid air snarling and chomping.
The voices were now coming from directly in front of me, I could hear them as if someone was standing there a foot or two away. I grab my dog mid air and pull her quickly inside, slammed the door and threw the dead bolt into place.
The door and frame shook violently as a vicious pounding started hammering on the threshold. I ran with my dog to the center of the house, flipping on every light along the way.
We sat there alone all night until the sun came up. Ginger, my golden retriever laid across my lap the entire night pressing into me while she whimpered for hours.
All I could do was pet her and try to calm her down, which was also helping me down-regulate. This was impossible though, the entire night until sunrise, the back door was thumping.
Event 3: It happened when I was coming home from football practice. I had all my gear in a gym bag over my left shoulder. This is important, because of how I entered the house. As I closed the front door behind me, I began sitting down the gear bag from my left side which caused me to look right.
The room when you first walked in was our "library" where we had a leather couch, chair, piano, book shelves, and a wooden rocking chair. There was something sitting in the rocking chair.
My peripheral vision caught it first, the chair going back and forth. As my vision centered on the chair there was a humanoid looking shape sitting there, head glancing downward at the book it was holding.
Long black hair drawn down over its head and completely void of light. To picture what I saw, imagine the silhouette of a person, but rather a "void" of light.
The light coming in around the edges of it seemed to be eaten up by the presence/void, as the light spilled over the contour edges of the humanoid shape (like how black holes are visualized, almost exactly).
It felt like I had jumped off a bridge into ice cold water, I blasted myself backwards against the door screaming and fell down. As I was falling I saw the "void" blur suddenly as it shot across the walls of the house and out through a huge bay window over looking the river.
My golden retriever was in the next room and she sprinted to chase the shadow across the walls. barking and clawing at the walls. After it left through the window my dog came to me and laid on my lap until my parents got home.
Event 4: I was fishing with my cousin Jack on the river by our house. We were right on the bend of a river, so the moon would be shining on both sides of the river racing out at two lines like a 90 degree angle from the house, super beautiful when you weren't on edge. The reason I bring this up, there was a lot of light on the river that evening. Jack was about 10 or so at the time, he reaches up and taps me, "Does that lady need help?"
I looked to where he was pointing and there was a pale woman dressed in white clothes going back and forth picking up stones just to the left of us across the river. I had seen her many times before around the property, and whenever I would get close she would disappear behind a tree or something similar would happen.
Knowing this, I told Jack as calmly as I could that it was time for dinner and he needed to go up to my Mom immediately (in an attempt to not scare him). When I walked him up and made sure he was on his way I looked back over and she was gone, but I could hear a splashing in the water below.
Event 5: Myself, my dad, his friends, and some other family members were staked out along the river bend on the gravel bar beneath the rise to our house. Nothing out of the ordinary at first, it was July 4th and we were having an actual good time for a change.
We were all spread out about 15 yards from each other. Each man had a low end gas Coleman lantern. As the sun was setting my Dad looks over at me like something was bugging him. He told me later he felt like someone had just thrown a bucket of ice water over him before it began.
The sun had just gone down when this happened. In unison all the lanterns were cranked up full blast, then just as quickly became barely a flame, then the fires roared to life again, down to barely a flame, roared to life, then they went completely out. Right as the flames went out, we heard the most god forsaken scream by some woman across the river.
Whatever it was kept on screaming despite our best attempts to call out to help. As her scream reached a crescendo, it sounded like what I could only imagine a person's throat being cut interrupted her scream. The sound of a dead weight fall of a human body tumbled down the hillside across from us and splashed violently into the water.
At this point all the guys had their flashlights out. That's when something started swimming and splashing around in the water on both sides of the river bend. The splashing receded towards the opposite gravel bar, and whatever it was got out and started pacing back and forth across the rocks there. We were pointing all of our flashlights to where the sound was coming from but we couldn't identify where it was originating. It's safe to say we were running up the hill at this point.
We all got inside the house, locked the doors, then gathered in the central living room. No body wanted to leave for fear of what was outside. We all stayed up that night because the wall pounding was more violent than it had ever been. Bam. Bam. Bam. All night like the ticking of some demonic clock. I didn't sleep for 2 days after this event.
Event 6: Lost time. I was walking through the woods near the Bell Witch Cave. One moment it was completely sunny and blue skies about mid-afternoon. The next moment it was overcast and looked like maybe 4pm.
Event 7: Night terrors. Torture dreams, being held down and brutally drawn & quartered, dreams of walking through the house and the "void" person placing their hand on my chest and "pushing" through my solar plexus, body violently shaking in the dream like a having a seizure.
Event 8: Visited the Bell house/plantation marker in a tobacco field adjacent to my family's property. Brought friends to try and prove that something crazy was happening to my family.
The rite of passage in the area is to go to the stone marker where the paranormal events happened hundreds of years ago, then dance on the stone saying "I don't believe in the Bell Witch!" I got them to promise that they wouldn't do that while we went.
Of course the moment we get there, one guy who doubted the legends in a massive way, jumps up onto the stone marker and starts screaming "I don't believe in the Bell Witch!" as loud as he could. I get so upset at him. I'm the only one that knows the way back, so I said come on guys we're leaving. In this area it's known as the Tennessee River Valley. So there's tons of flowing water etc around these tobacco fields. The reason this is important is because of what happened next.
We're making good time walking back across this crop field, hundreds of yards long. A mist starts rolling in from the river bends and begins to saturate the field. The temperature drops easily 25 degrees or so and we start seeing our breath. I begin to smell sulfur in the breeze. As the mist became a fog it began. I started hearing this wheezy and deeply cavernous sounding breath around us. like being inside a cave that was breathing.
Out of nowhere we started hearing these giant blasting sounds and I realized something was walking on the chopped tobacco stalks. (Side note: when they harvest tobacco they use a machete and cut down at a 45 degree angle leaving about 3.5 feet of brittle stalk poking out of the ground).
When you step on said stalks, they disintegrate in a very loud way as they burst apart. This starts happening all around us like an army of native spirits running around as if we were in a bandwagon battle, the blasts were coming from every single direction in the fog.
That's when I hear it, that deep cavernous noise turns into this giant sniffing sound, like some Lovecraftian beast smelling its prey just out of eye sight. At this point I yell RUN in pure panic mode.
We take off across the field trying not to trip and be skewered on the stalks (they dry out and get really sharp where they harvest them, also Robertson county is the world's largest producer of tobacco per square mile, so these fields are everywhere, fun fact).
As we are exiting the field and our feet hit the gravel road, the lower center part of my back suddenly EXPLODES in agony. I look down and there's a massive rock laying at my feet and I realized that I had just been assaulted. By the time I got to my house and examined my back in a mirror, the bruise was about the size of a basketball and was already turning black.
Event 8: Woke up outside about 3 in the morning. I was laying next to the 4 graves on the property. The night was awfully cold but I woke up soaked in sweat. We lived there for so long that I have many events to share, process, and willing to have discussions about my time there with you all.
It is really hard for me to talk about this stuff without re-traumatizing myself, but my friends and family are encouraging me to share my experiences with like minded people so I can try to find peace surrounding my trauma.
Thank you for reading.
(edit 2: thanks for all the kind words and support this community has shown me, it truly means the world to me, much love to all of you).
(edit 3: per community request, I've written down a few more of the events in the comments below in a chain I started, sort by best to find it easy)
(Edit 4: https://imgur.com/gallery/D0bDdPQ - where I lived https://imgur.com/gallery/3rLBxQb - photos from the cave
Anyone who has been to the cave will tell you that it’s lit with really dim led light strings, at least when I went, and there are no direct paths for the sunlight to come in and create such intense overexposures in the camera lens.)
(Edit 5: trying to reply to all the comments as they come, keep asking questions and I’ll try and get to you as soon as I can.)
(Edit 6: https://imgur.com/gallery/mUg7zeG - one of the scratch marks that left a scar and my left index knuckle is still malformed from where/when it was shattered in event 15)
(Edit 7: https://imgur.com/gallery/rPx9KyA - I'm making layouts of where specific events happened inside the home)
(Edit 8: This is what the thing that was following us in event 8 sounded like. I smoked cigarettes pretty heavy until recently, so it wasn't too hard to remake the sound. I'll never forget it, this sound is scarred into my memory:
After visiting the Bell's home, Andrew Jackson said, "I vow I would rather fight the entire British army single handed than face this witch again!" The haunting is the only known case where a spirit actually took credit for killing someone. John Bell's funeral was one of the largest ever seen in Robertson County, hundreds of people attended; including the gloating Spirit, who cheerfully offered mourners a concert of brawny drinking songs.
They are able to use curse words as a way to convey their feelings in a powerful and immediate manner. It's important to note that context and audience play a significant role in determining the appropriateness of cursing. The ability to control and modulate one's language depending on the situation is also a sign of intelligence. People who can curse in a casual setting but refrain from doing so in a professional or formal environment demonstrate higher linguistic intelligence. In conclusion, while cursing may often be perceived as a sign of ignorance, there is evidence to suggest that it can actually be an indication of intelligence. The ability to use curse words indicates a wider vocabulary, stronger language skills, and emotional expressiveness. However, it is crucial to remember the importance of context and to use language appropriately in different situations..
Reviews for "Unconventional Intelligence: Is Cursing a Sign of a High IQ?"
1. Mary - 2 stars: While I appreciate the effort put into exploring the topic of cursing and intelligence, I found the arguments to be lacking substance. The author focused too much on personal anecdotes and failed to provide sufficient scientific evidence to support their claims. Furthermore, they overlooked the fact that effective communication relies on using appropriate language in different contexts. Overall, I found the article to be shallow and unconvincing.
2. John - 1 star: I was extremely disappointed with the article "Is cursing a sign of intelligence." It seemed more like an opinion piece rather than a well-researched article. The author failed to present any concrete evidence or studies to back up their claims. Additionally, the lack of a balanced perspective was evident, as the article only focused on the supposed benefits of cursing while neglecting to address the negative impact it can have on relationships and professional settings. I expected a more informative and balanced view on the subject, but this article fell short.
3. Samantha - 2 stars: The article "Is cursing a sign of intelligence" lacked depth and failed to provide a well-rounded analysis of the topic. It seemed to be based solely on the personal experiences and opinions of the author, with no scientific research or studies to support their claims. The topic itself is intriguing, but the article failed to provide any substantial evidence or arguments to convince me. I would have appreciated a more balanced approach, considering both the potential benefits and drawbacks of cursing in different contexts.
4. David - 1 star: I found "Is cursing a sign of intelligence" to be a poorly executed piece. The arguments presented were weak and lacked sufficient backing. The author's reliance on anecdotal evidence and personal experiences undermined the credibility of the article. Moreover, the writing style was unconvincing and lacked a logical flow. This article could have explored the topic more effectively by including reputable studies and research to support its claims, but instead, it left me unconvinced and disappointed.