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Comment by acd | Hacker News Reader

There has outside coding been correlation studies between swearing and higher intelligence. Where those swearing generally were found to be more intelligent fluent in languages.

May it be that swearing coders are more intelligent? If coders are more fluent in use of languages are they also more fluent in code?

Articles swearing intelligence https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03880... https://medicalxpress.com/news/2017-02-higher-language-relat...

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I wonder how this applies to foreign languages. I swear quite a lot (not something I'm particularly proud of, or that I think is an indication of any other positive/negative quality I may or may not have). But I pretty much only swear in my native language, which is not English. I simply don't feel confident enough in English to use swearing appropriately, if there's such a thing.

However, coding is done in English. Period. And code comments are written in English as well. So you won't find a lot of profanity in my code comments or commit messages - even though there might have been some if English had been my native language, or the general practice was to write code, comments and commit messages in the local language.

I'd argue that swearing in particular requires a fairly deep understanding of the nuances of a language that general use does not - misplaced swearing makes you look a lot more like a fool than many other mistakes.

Funny thing, I swear more in languages other than my native tongue.

I guess I don't consider swearing in foreign languages to be real, similarly to how you do things in a video game which you wouldn't do in real life.

Hah! That's hilarious. I have the same feeling with foreign currencies. Prices are just a random number, and you happily hand over those funnily colored bills without thinking too much about it.

Yes, trips abroad tend to be unreasonably expensive for reasons I have yet to figure out :-)

Exactly right! I know perfectly well that PLN to GBP ratio is 1 : 5.5, but whenever I'm in the UK, spending £100 on something feels like spending 100 PLN, not like 550 PLN.

Now this wouldn't be a problem if the actual purchasing power[0] followed the inverse of the exchange ratio (e.g. a beer costing 5.50 PLN in Poland would cost £1 in UK), but in fact things are some 2-5x more pricey in the UK (e.g. that 5.50 PLN beer is £4 in the UK), so my trips to London also end up unreasonably expensive for uncertain reasons :).

[0] - Not sure what the correct term is for the ratio between typical price of a common thing in one country to the price of the same in another country, denominated in prior country's currency. E.g. typical price of bread in Poland, given in PLN, divided by typical price of bread in UK, given in GBP converted to PLN using current exchange ratio.

So to take this further, is there a swearing exchange rate? Eg a German swear word is worth two English ones?

I’m told (by a Russian) that Russian swearing is very intense, so that may be a concise way to go.

This is a very real phenomenon. When a large part of your exposure to English comes from movies, video games and media personalities, it can create a warped perception of what is acceptable and what isn't. Swearing in my native language immediately gives me disgust, while English swear words do not produce any emotional response.

> However, coding is done in English. Period. And code comments are written in English as well.

This was not the case at my first tech job. The office communication, the reference books, the comments and the sometimes even the commit messages were often not in English. The same is true of many large projects on Github, even today.

If that’s true, Australia is full of linguist polymaths.

Am I misreading or do they really equate swear vocabulary size with swearing frequency without providing data for this claim? Of course a large vocabulary in one general area tend to correlate with large vocabulary size in other areas? Especially among young university students when they haven't spent a lifetime dedicating themselves to one field.

> There has outside coding been correlation studies between swearing and higher intelligence. Where those swearing generally were found to be more intelligent fluent in languages.

I guess they didn't visit the casino yet.

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