America, you filthy …
Here we have it everyone: A comprehensive guide to the prevalence of curse words in America. Do you prefer shit to fuck or darn to douche or cunt to gosh? We have maps, folks, and the language ain’t pretty!
These glorious odes to American tweets are given to us by Jack Grievs, a professor of Forensic Linguistics at Aston University in England. He’s spent the better part of who knows how long graphing US swear words on Twitter with attached geotagged data of over 1 billion tweets.
Golly gosh, how far culture has come …
To explain the process, Grievs says:
For any word (e.g. fuck) we measure its relative frequency in each county by diving the total number of occurrences of that word in that county by the total number of words in that county.
We take that raw map and smooth it using a hot spot analysis (a Getis-Ord Gi local spatial autocorrelation analysis).
We map the Getis-Ord z-scores to identify clusters. Specifically, a high z-score means that that county is in the midst of a region where that word is relatively common, a negative z-score means that that county is in the midst of counties where that word is less common.
What we've learned from all of this is that the bible belt is full of a bunch of fucks, northeasterners have filthy poop mouths, California needs to fall into the ocean right the shit now and Colorado is a non-douchey beam of motherfucking sunshine …
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