Many a time I’ve thought about getting out of writing to follow the calling of the late Billy Graham and becoming a Fuller Brush man.*

I’ve had my fill of clucking tongues accusing me of mindless laziness when I’m locked in an invisible struggle to find the right words to use.

(If they are truly good words it’s a safe bet someone else found them first. I could borrow them for a while, but that leads to my becoming a favorite topic on social media, along with the hash tag #plagiarism.)

Until now, all that’s stopped me from signing on has been the untimely demise of the Fuller Brush man somewhere in the 1960s. Plus, I look like a bar mitzvah boy in a white shirt, bow tie and rumpled suit.

But last week science came to my rescue.

You may not realized this, but there are distinguished scientists, at distinguished universities, working on distinguished research studies, paid for with distinguished government money, who aren’t frittering away their time reversing climate change.

Instead, they are studying curse words.

According to their work, writing containing curse words is perceived as more credible than writing that is curse-word free. I know you have always suspected this to be true, but even if you are skeptical and thinking, “You can’t fool me, Jay, this is just another government boondoggle, like studying the sex life of hermit crabs or sending Matt Damon to Mars,” you can’t argue with science.

Unless you’re my right-wing attorney cousin.

These are respectable studies conducted by respectable scientists, many of whom wear white lab coats and horn-rimmed glasses. Just like scientists on television.

“Hah,” you say. “If these scientists wanted to sound credible, they would have used curse words to describe their results.”

I forgive you for reading your Facebook updates ahead of the scientific journals.

Another important study found that cursing on the job makes you sound less credible. It also makes you sound incompetent.

So the scientists who discovered that cursing makes you more credible but didn’t curse when they wrote up their results are vindicated by the scientists who found that scientists who curse are less credible about cursing than scientists who don’t curse.

(NOTE: It is not necessary to read the actual study because it makes less sense than the previous paragraph.)

“Hah,” you say again, “you are a professional writer. Writing is your job. No curse words for you.”

Let me refer you to my wife who, only yesterday interrupted my laziness and daydreaming to observe, “You call this work?”

Even though she didn’t curse when she said it, I believe her. And, let me tell you, she looks sexy in her white lab coat and horn-rimmed glasses.

With apologies to my parents, who taught me never to use such language (for your information, 99 and 44-one-hundredths percent pure soap still burns on the way down), there’s good reason to risk their wrath for my art.

On the other hand, I have a large vocabulary of curse words, mainly from three viewings of The Wolf of Wall Street. Curse words are virtually interchangeable, they infuse any writing with an air of artistic mystery and, according to my lawyer, they’re in the public domain.

A hell of a lot better than in a bow tie and rumpled suit.