Hat tip to Brumar89:
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Seven words you can never say on television"... but which are said on the Internet. A lot.
a post written by Patrick Ishmael
Posted Wednesday, February 28, 2007 @ 8:15 PM
Talk about potty-mouths.
The Net's not always a kid-friendly place; there is plenty of foul language out there. And of course, the blogosphere is no different.
But how different are the Rightosphere and Leftosphere when it comes to "dirty" language? Which side produces the most profanity-laced diatribes? Via Instapundit, I happened upon this interesting challenge from InstaPunk:
<<< I propose an exercise to be performed by those who have the software and expertise to carry it out. The exercise is this:
Search six months' worth of content, posts and comments,
of the 20 most popular blogs on the right and the left.
The search criteria are George Carlin's infamous '7 Dirty
Words.' [Click this link for the list of expletives.] >>>
And this is what I found, using what I deemed -- through a mix of TTLB and 2006's Weblog Award lists -- to be the 18 biggest Lefty blogs, and 22 biggest Righty blogs. I couldn't account for the 6-month time period, and I even gave the Lefty blogs a 4 blog advantage. But it didn't make much of a difference.
So how much more does the Left use Carlin's "seven words" versus the Right? According to my calculations, try somewhere in the range of 18-to-1.
Yowsers.
How did I get this result? I searched Google using the following format and recorded the page results that were returned:
site:xyz.com "search term 1" OR "search term 2" OR "search term 3"...
Nine search terms total -- the seven profanities as single words, and two of those as their own two-word variations. I then added the individual site results together and compared them. The results are below.
[ There is a table at the site which wouldn't copy over for me. The total for the liberal blogs was 384,788 and for the conservative blogs 21,319. DailyKos was the liberal leader with 146,000 and Ace of Spades the conservative leader with 9,730. ]
Of course... is anyone surprised? Barring some mass programming shenanigans on the part of Right blogospheric bloggers, this pretty well fits, and goes beyond, the predictions most of us would have made.
Feel free to replicate the experiment and send your results, or if you have a refinement to the method or blog lists, send those, too. We're always willing to add to the profanity data bank.
And of course, this isn't scientific. But hey, it's pretty @*%#$&! close.
(Cross-posted at Gateway Pundit.)
Update @ 9:16am: Great point by reader Joe.
What? No Democratic Underground? No IndyMedia? No FreeRepublic? No Townhall? No FrontPageMag?
And thus, the numbers:
• Democratic Underground: 947,000
• IndyMedia: 206,000
• FreeRepublic: 4010
• TownHall.com (minus HH blog): 156
• FrontPageMag: 11,800
It only gets worse... 1537788-to-37285.
41-to-1.
Holy mackeral.
Update @ 11:27am: To clarify, I'm presenting this "study" to y'all as a way of ascertaining how often profanities appear on the pages of blogs, Left and Right. That's really it; the assessment of the phenomenon is for you to make... this is just a starting point.
Also, previously I wasn't taking a particular stance about the usefulness of vulgarity or making some commentary on "South Park conservatism." For our part at the News Buckit, we resist the use of profanities because, we feel, it gets in the way of the points we're trying to make.
That doesn't mean that profane posts aren't entertaining, or useful; some of my favorite blogs use a good amount of profanity. But there has to be a balancing of that language for honest and intelligent dialogue to take place, and I think we can agree that that doesn't always happen.
We invite your feedback (vulgar, or not.)
Update @ 5:24pm: John Hinderaker from Powerlineblog says the following on his News Bloggers site:
<<< ...when I looked at the chart that set forth the results of the survey, I found that 68 instances of the "seven words" were recorded for Power Line. This struck me as obviously wrong. I'm certain that six of the seven words have never appeared on Power Line at all, and the seventh (a four-letter word that starts with "s") has appeared only a time or two when we were quoting someone else.
So I ran the search on Power Line the same way it was done for the survey. What I found was that virtually all of the references that came up were in "trackbacks." This means that the language appeared on someone else's site, not ours.
I conclude from this that the survey was pretty badly flawed. Not only did it fail to distinguish between blog entries and comments, which is at least defensible, it failed to distinguish between words used on the site in question, and words used on a different site, which is not defensible.
I certainly won't dispute that this was by no means a perfect gauge of blogospheric vulgarity; it certainly leaves much to be desired. After all, I didn't exactly devote a lot of time to developing an extensive hypothesis and method. >>>
And although I'm sure John is right about his site, the only way that this very basic survey would really be blown (IMHO) is if the errors found therein were especially pronounced.
Powerlineblog is a nationally-recognized and very well-read blog that has at least 17,300 pages to its name. Yet factoring the errant vulgarity count, that means that only .4% of its pages had erroneously been found to have had one of the "seven words." (Technically, it sounds like the words are in fact there, but that's not because of anything the PB guys have done and really doesn't speak to the point of the survey.)
But that .4% is a teeny tiny margin of error. Compare that to Democratic Underground, who at this very moment are humorously reveling in their newfound linguistic primacy and who apparently have no doubt that the 947,000 hits attributed to them are accurate. That's not a trackback problem... Definitely take a look. It's a party in there.
I do understand John's point, though. There are errors, and I have to admit that my biggest concern is with the LGF number that I Googled, so if someone can shed some light on that (maybe Charles? who notes the discrepancy), I'd be much obliged. In the big scheme, however, I just don't see the test being especially flawed.
And in the end, John and I do agree.
Having said that, I think the original point still stands, even if this survey does not precisely quantify it.
The quantification can definitely be improved. The question, now, is who's going to do it... and how?
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