Seven Deadly Words

For better or worse, we tend to judge people on the language they use.
This post at Cheat Seeking Missiles looks at some statistics.

Patrick Ishmael at The News Buckit picked up an Instapunk challenge and scanned lefty and right blogs to assess their usage of George Carlin’s “Seven words you can never say on television.” The results:

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. …

And the list has a few glaring omissions:

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 [Leftyblog filthies]-to-37285 [Rightyblog filthies]. 41-to-1. Holy mackeral.

Nastiest after Democratic Underground and IndyMedia were Kos with 146,000 and Huffpost with 78,200.

On the Right, the biggest blogs were pretty darn clean: The big three of LGF, Instapundit and Michelle Malkin had less than 500 between them. The milblogs tended to be the fetid ground on the right, but the spiciest of them, Ace of Spades, couldn’t even string together 10,000 nasties.
So what does this poster think the difference says?

Why the gulf? On the Right, of course, there’s a respect for social norms that just doesn’t exist on the Left. There’s also faith (I miraculously quit swearing right after accepting Christ) and respect for others.

On the Left, there’s rebellion and the urge to shock, timeworn traditions that go way back (how many remember Country Joe & the Fish’s Vietnam Rag or Pearls Before Swine’s song complete with the Morse code lyric dit dit dah dit, dit dit dah, dah dit dah dit, dah dit dah?)

But that’s not enough to explain a million profanities. There is also in the swearing, I believe, an acknowledgment that their logic is weak, their history is weak, their policy is weak, and there’s nothing they can do to change any of that. Stuck with the belief system they’re stuck with, losing the logic arguments as they do, marginalized intellectually, their frustration rises.

The difference is real. Pick your favorite explanation for it, or come up with some of your own. 

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 1st, 2007 at 12:32 pm and is filed under Vox Populi. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. | 8 views | Trackback | Print this page |

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