When I read in my local newspaper that, during a speech in Western Pennsylvania on October 19, Donald Trump called Kamala Harris “a s— vice president,” I had one question and one question only:
Did he use a “y”?
crap
Mapping the United Swears of America
Swearing varies a lot from place to place, even within the same country, in the same language. But how do we know who swears what, where, in the big picture? We turn to data – damn big data. With great computing power comes great cartography.
Jack Grieve, lecturer in forensic linguistics at Aston University in Birmingham, UK, has created a detailed set of maps of the US showing strong regional patterns of swearing preferences. The maps are based on an 8.9-billion-word corpus of geo-coded tweets collected by Diansheng Guo in 2013–14 and funded by Digging into Data. Here’s fuck:
Sweary links #11
It’s a while since I wrote a proper post here: time has been scarce. To make up for it, here’s a bumper set of links on swearing from around the internet.
How much do we curse?
The ever-expanding Timelines of Slang.
Scheiße! Divergence in West Germanic faecal vocabulary.
‘You whose shit comes out leftwards!’ The grammar of Hua insults.
Units of fucking measure
Shit-ton. Buttload. Fuck-ton. Shall we take a closer look at these eminently useful units of measure? Continue reading
Strong Language 