Data is a funny thing. Sometimes, you crunch the numbers and discover St. Louis is among the most charitable, creative and happy cities in America. Other times, a linguistic analysis of Twitter data reveals the St. Louis region uses a homophobic slur -- faggot -- more often than other curse words.
This distressing news comes courtesy of Jack Grieve, a professor in forensic linguistics at Aston University in England.. On Thursday, Grieve began tweeting out maps showing the relative frequency of curse words used across America. According to Gawker, the data was mined from almost a billion tweets (containing nearly 9 billion words) from October of 2013 to November of 2014.
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Broken down at the county level, each swear map is colored from dark blue (low use) to dark orange (high use). Here's how Grieve explained the methodology to Gawker:
For any word (e.g. fuck) we measure its relative frequency in each county by dividing the total number of occurrences of that word in that county by the total number of words in that county.We take that raw map and smooth it using a hot spot analysis (a Getis-Ord Gi local spatial autocorrelation analysis).
We map the Getis-Ord z-scores to identify clusters. Specifically, a high z-score means that that county is in the midst of a region where that word is relatively common, a negative z-score means that that county is in the midst of counties where that word is less common.
The maps show Missouri's Twitter users mostly sticking to PG-rated cussing. Large swaths of the state avoid "fuck," "shit," "bitch" and "damn," and there's even some support for the grade school expletives "gosh" and "darn."
The Shit Map...9 billion words of geocoded Tweets 2013-2014 pic.twitter.com/FPuxMj8ew9
— Jack Grieve (@JWGrieve) July 16, 2015Certain counties show a modest affinity for "motherfucker," "bitch," "asshole" and "cunt."
So pretty much everyone's swearing. We just don't all prefer the same words. The Asshole map. pic.twitter.com/kn65kIHPaa
— Jack Grieve (@JWGrieve) July 16, 2015But it's "faggot," for some reason, that seems to be the most popular around St. Louis.
The Faggot map... pic.twitter.com/varHMjKYdW
— Jack Grieve (@JWGrieve) July 16, 2015So, what's the deal here, St. Louis Twitter? Were a bunch of you angry that the city stood up to the state's gay marriage ban? Was it Michael Sam's stunning ESPYs speech? Was PrideFest too gay?
In any case, here are a few more maps Grieve tweeted out yesterday. You can find the rest (and a neat interactive map) in the Gawker post.
The Motherfucker map (as one word) pic.twitter.com/rsCYvrIPex
— Jack Grieve (@JWGrieve) July 16, 2015I hesitate to post this. We're doing some work on slang for a news outlet & they say any word is cool except this. pic.twitter.com/TmCh1ptoCf
— Jack Grieve (@JWGrieve) July 16, 2015The elusive Southern Midland Dialect region appears: The Gosh Map pic.twitter.com/WCSwnJqTaw
— Jack Grieve (@JWGrieve) July 16, 2015Follow Danny Wicentowski on Twitter at @D_Towski. E-mail the author at [email protected]
