The coastal crowds like to let the F-bombs fly when expressing themselves. In the Midwest, the thing to say is “douche.” If you’re somewhere in between — and extra pissed-off — f’ing douche may be called for, but one or the other is the norm. So says the fascinating research of Jack Grieve, a forensic linguist an Aston University in Birmingham. No, not Alabama — where’d he likely say “gosh” a lot — but Birmingham, UK. (Bollocks!)
Grieve looked into how people curse using Twitter data whose collection was funded by the Digging Into Data. The research has some caveats though– we don’t know, for instance, if “hell” is being used as a curse word or just a description of where the dastardly will spend eternity. Here’s Grieve’s cool research blog.
