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| Lefty blogs use more @#$%^&* swear-words! |
| 2008-08-07 |
| Matthew Sheffield, Washington Times Are liberals more profane than conservatives? Online, the answer seems to be yes. Profanity, those taboo words banned from the broadcast airwaves, is a feature of many people's daily lives. It's much less so in the establishment media world. TV and radio broadcasts are legally prohibited from using it, most newspapers (including this one) have traditionally refrained from its usage. That's not the case with the Web, where bloggers and readers face no such restrictions. That likely comes as no surprise; what may be surprising, however, is to what degree profanity seems to be a feature more common on one side of the political blogosphere than the other. Which side is that? For answers, I turned to the search engine Google to see how common swearing is in the right and left blog universes by looking up the late stand-up comic George Carlin's "seven dirty words" in the most popular blog communities. The results showed that online liberals tend to use profanity a lot more than online conservatives. (Before I get further into the results, let me say that I am deliberately making a distinction between blogs that do not usually allow readers to make comments and those that do. This means that some sites, such as the popular Instapundit or Newsmax, were not included.) Searching for Mr. Carlin's seven words and some popular variants at the top 10 conservative Web communities yields about 70,000 results. That is dwarfed in comparison to the 1.9 million instances of profanity on liberal sites. Things aren't quite that clear-cut, however, since some Web sites have more pages than others. . . . Dividing the number of instances of profanity by the number of pages of the sites on which they appear, then multiplying the result by 100 yields what might be called a "profanity quotient." The top 10 liberal sites (Daily Kos, Huffington Post, Democratic Underground, Talking Points Memo, Crooks and Liars, Think Progress, Atrios, Greenwald, MyDD and Firedoglake) have a profanity quotient of 14.6. The top 10 conservative sites (Free Republic, Hot Air, Little Green Footballs, Townhall, NewsBusters, Lucianne.com, Wizbang, Ace of Spades, Red State and Volokh Conspiracy) have a quotient of 1.17. This means that 14.6 percent of all pages on the most popular liberal sites have profanity on them, compared to 1.17 percent of all pages on the conservative sites. That's quite a disparity. . . . I just took a quick look at DU and Kos to see if they'd picked this story up. Not yet, but if and when they do, I expect they'll condemn the m-----f------ writer for being a g--d----- Ref---liKKKan tool and repeating their s----- a-- smear that Progressives use too many m-----f------ swearwords. "We do not use too may f------ swearwords, and f--- you for saying otherwise a------!" |
| Posted by:Mike |
| #4 "Lefty blogs use more @#$%^&* swear-words" In other news, water is wet. And |
| Posted by: Barbara Skolaut 2008-08-07 19:54 |
| #3 I am seriously p!$$ed that Rantburg didn't make the list. |
| Posted by: Ebbang Uluque6305 2008-08-07 15:43 |
| #2 Meanwhile, the lefty blogs are totally clueless as to why the usage of profanity could be considered anything less than proper. "But it's what I feel like saying, and I should express myself! I'm a unique snowflake!" The idea that profanity lowers the level of discourse is completely foreign to them. And the real irony is that the English language is very poor in foul language. You can't be very fluent with using the dozen or so profane words. Languages like French or Greek have hundreds of profanities. |
| Posted by: gromky 2008-08-07 15:06 |
| #1 Reminds me of what my father used to say: "When you swear it is a declaration that you are not intelligent enough to come up with anything else to say." Seems to fit this case. |
| Posted by: sjb 2008-08-07 14:58 |