Profanity habits: Twitter style
5 days ago Download Squad posted a great article, "17 ways to visualize Twitter and its Tweets", which outlined some great sites for looking at various Twitter statistics.
One of the sites mentioned was TweetVolume.com where you can enter up to five keywords and see how they stack up against each other on the Twitter network.
I played around with keyword groupings like "Obama vs Clinton vs McCain" (Obama has over double the tweets of Clinton and McCain combined) and "PC vs MAC" (Mac has over triple the tweets of PC) but then an odd one struck me. How much profanity is used on Twitter?
So I decided to pit 5 of the big bad words head to head and see where the chips fell. My money was on "sh**" for sure, and I was completely surprised when "damn" took the prize.
Results:
Damn - 35,100
Sh** - 20,100
Ass - 19,200
F*** - 15,300
Bi*** - 6,380
In hindsight I should have known "damn" would be the most widely used profane word simply based on my own Twitter habits. Out of these 5 words "damn" is the only one I have ever used in a tweet (to the best of my knowledge).
Twitter feels like shouting in a public place to me, as you never know who will come across your messages. With that in mind, I try to keep my language civil. I'm sure many Twitter users feel something similar, and based on that conjecture I should have guessed "damn" would be the overwhelming favorite.
Damn.
Labels: cuss words, profanity, swearing, trends, twitter, twitter statistics, web statistics
posted by Michael Beck @ 2:14 AM
5 Comments
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5 Comments:
That's not really as surprising as it sounds. Damn is a "safe" swear word. You proved that yourself by typing it out in full in this post. That also implies, perhaps, why Ass was so high as well.
The others (Which I won't type out because you didn't, but I have used in tweets) are less likely to show up simply because many people, in their permanent online communications, avoid them in purpose.
If more Twitterers were FARSCAPE fans, I'm sure "Frell" would have been right up there with the other swear words!
To quote the BBC website:
Probably the most versatile word in the Uncharted Territories, frell is an expletive for all occasions.
Example - Your favourite coat has just been ruined by a stray shot from a pulse pistol.
"Frell! You've destroyed my frelling favourite coat you frelling piece of dren"
Translation. "Oh dear. You've destroyed my blooming favourite coat you awful little man."
i believe that d_mn is just a common and basic curse word; it is not as hard on the ears as the others, at least that is my opinion.
@Wesley I was definitely telling myself "I shoulda had a V8" after the results came out the way they did simply based on my own Twitter habits. I agree, and like the way you put it: we have "safe" swear words, and damn and ass are definitely on the list these days. I wouldn't want my four year old to hear them, "safe" or not, but we definitely are a little freer to spit them out among our adult peers.
@Marcus: I agree, and "damn" is probably the easiest of all of them on the ears.
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