An analysis of tweets has found that residents of the southeastern U.S. swear the most compared to the rest of the nation.
Daniel Huffman, a cartography lecturer from Madison, Wis., looked at around 1.5 million geocoded posts on Twitter between March 9 and April 12, 2010. He then projected the data onto a map of the continental U.S., with black showing less swearing and red indicating a greater intensity of swearing.
Swear words included in the survey were “fuck,” “shit,” “bitch,” “hell,” “damn” and “ass.” He also tracked some variations and compound words like “fucker” and “dammit.” Huffman took steps to avoid counting false positives and other words that might have skewed the data.
But, he said, “I didn’t have any actual hard numerical criteria as to how many is too many, since I was making this for my own amusement.”
Where do the least number of potty-mouths live? Perhaps not surprisingly, southeast Utah has a significant dearth of all naughty words.
Across the U.S. major cities light up as beacons of cussing, including New York, Washington, Cleveland, Seattle, San Francisco, Atlanta and the hometown of notable mouth-like-a-sailor Rahm Emanuel, Chicago.
Huffman implored readers of his blog: “Don’t tell my parents about any of this.”
See the map for yourself: Profane Mountains, Polite Plains