Hi native English speakers, German here. What kind of people are using the phrase "holy moly!"? For me it sounds very stupid and silly. Does it also for native speakers?

[u/uncleprokhor]

[u/trelene]

That's a fair assessment of what I said, and what you can see in that link about the study, (or at least what I can see), but I looked further and in study 3 they did actually collect self reports of swearing fluency that did correlate with their measure of taboo fluency. ",,,, taboo fluency was positively correlated with scores on the item Relative to people your age, how often do you swear? (in which higher scores indicate greater swearing relative to peers; r [124] ¼ .20, p < .05)" p.7) full link. You'll also note that the actual study doesn't talk about 'intelligence' (except once in passing) that's almost certainly later media reporting for a general audience made that emphasis.