Do You Live in a "Bitch" or a "Fuck" State? American Curses, Mapped
Americans love to curse, no fucking question. Fuck this, fuck that, bitchass motherfucking cuntsucker jerk titslut, etc., etc. The question is, which of these bad-boy words are favored where? Who says “fuck” the most? Who says “asshole” the least? Is there a “shit” belt? (As it turns out, yes: From New York City down to the Gulf Coast.)
Jack Grieve, a professor in Forensic Linguistics at Aston University in England, has been tweeting out maps of the U.S. with geotagged data from Twitter that show where in the country we are using which swearwords.
Almost a billion tweets, from October of 2013 to November of 2014, were collected by Diansheng Guo at University of South Carolina, totaling nearly 9 billion words. Here’s how Grieve explained what happened once the data was collected:
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.
We’ve stuck the maps into the widget above so you can see all the information presented in one big ole bitchass map. Mess around with it, bad boys. Who knew that “cunt” was so popular in Maine?
Cunt
Darn
Fuck
Shit
Bitch
Damn
Faggot
Gosh
Motherfucker
Asshole
You’re all a bunch of motherfuckers.
