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:
The red–blue scale shows relative frequency. The frequency of a word in the tweets from a given county is divided by the total number of words from that county (which correlates strongly with population density). The result is then smoothed using spatial autocorrelation analysis, with Getis-Ord z-scores mapped to identify clusters. Alaska and Hawaii are not included.
Polysemy – a word’s multiple meanings – has not been controlled in the graphs, so the hell map includes straight religious uses as well as sweary ones, the pussy map includes cat references, and so on. But the graphs are nonetheless highly suggestive of differential swearword (and minced oath) clustering in different parts of the country.
Hell, damn and bitch are especially popular in the south and southeast. Douche is relatively common in northern states. Bastard is beloved in Maine and New Hampshire, and those states – together with a band across southern Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas – are the areas of particular motherfucker favour. Crap is more popular inland, fuck along the coasts. Fuckboy – a rising star* – is also mainly a coastal thing, so far.
Here’s the full glorious set in alphabetical order (click to enlarge):
As Grieve put it, ‘pretty much everyone’s swearing. We just don’t all prefer the same words’. You can see more word-maps on his research blog and various publications elsewhere on his website. He and colleagues have been measuring the 100,000 most common words in American English (as manifested in the tweet corpus), so additional maps will be appearing, and he tells me Diansheng is also collecting UK data.
For more on the method of spatial analysis used to create the maps, see for example Grieve’s ‘A regional analysis of contraction rate in written Standard American English’ (PDF), or ‘A statistical method for the identification and aggregation of regional linguistic variation’ (PDF) (co-written with Dirk Speelman and Dirk Geeraerts), both from 2011.
https://twitter.com/StanCarey/status/626378685977899008
Updates:
See my follow-up post, Sweary maps 2: Swear harder, for ~60 more sweary heat maps and a link to Jack Grieve’s Word Mapper app, where you can run your own searches.
Some composite maps, including swears not covered above, are now available on Grieve’s blog. Here’s one with bollocks, bloody, piss, and crap:
Picked up by Washington Post, Kottke, Fusion, MetaFilter, Discovery, AJC, Mental Floss, WaPo again.
*
* Grieve’s presentation ‘Mapping lexical spread in American English’ (PDF) has data on the fastest growing words on Twitter in 2014, among other delights. Four of the top 10 are based on fuck. We’re becoming sweary asf.
Strong Language 
Reblogged this on Speak Through Your Heart and Your Mind Will Follow and commented:
Here ya’ll go
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Huh. Fuckboy isn’t in my idiolect, but out of context I wouldn’t have thought it meant “asshole” at all. I’d have used it to refer to those subjected to the pederasty of Ancient Greece, say.
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I wasn’t aware of the ‘asshole, jerk’ sense either, Iva, though it’s probably inferable in context. I’d have guessed fuckboy meant something like fuckbuddy (specifically male), or boyfriend (with sexual connotation). Which it probably still does, for some people; ditto your interpretation.
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The word “fuckboy” uses “fuck” in the noun sense, used in the noun-as-an-adjective sense. Think of the exclamative phrase “you fuck!”, as shortened from “you fucker!” The addition of “boy” is a remark on the perception of the maturity level – or lack thereof – of the person the term is being used to describe.
There’s also the implication of a lack of masculinity, both in the use of the word “boy”, and the implied connotation of “homosexual”, and the whole… “gays are like women, weak and lesser to men” thing.
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I would have read it as ‘fucked up person,’ as in ‘dumb fuck.’
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I believe the origins are BlackAmericanEnglish and I’d be surprised if it’s got traction outside of the community, but I don’t know.
I’ve watched the term become more popular in the last 8-10 years originating from southern rappers and spreading across the entire rap landscape as the southern style is now dominating the field. I think the original etymology was a prison term meaning the passive or receptive male in a homosexual act used in speech not as a literally identifier but as a pejorative to undercut someones masculinity. Now essentially it’s used in place of “faggot” which depending on which community and who is using it can also be a general insult to a man like “jerk” or “asshole” not necessarily implying the sexual angle although the implication is there.
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Thanks for the interesting observations. There’s an entry for fuckboy in Jesse Sheidlower’s The F-Word, which defines it as “a catamite; (hence) a man who is victimized”, and dates it to 1954. That first citation, in the form screw-boy, is a WWII reference.
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The word “fuckboy” seems to have moved well past its origins. It is common in several areas without a big African American community, such as Idaho and West Texas. It appears that the data are reported by county, so it would not be difficult to match useage against demographic data.
“Whore” seems popular in the area where (mainly) single men work in the fracking oil fields (Montana, N. Dakota), earn a lot of money and are in search of entertainment. I don’t consider that “cussing,” but doing business. The oil workers also seem to call each other bastards. Again, that may be descriptive instead of cussing.
The Bible Belt through the center of the country says “darn” and “gosh” a lot. Southerners say shit, bitch, hell and damn. They are not keeping up with the rest of the fucking country.
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“Fuckboy” cannot refer to any type of pedophilia because within that subculture there is a term that already carries that cognitive load, “fucktoy”. It’s a curiously gender-neutral term in a subculture rife with sexist jargon. Yet it makes sense because at a high conceptual level it changes the focus of the conversation away from the demographic characteristics of the child (“boy”) and turns it instead to emphasize the nature of the relationship between pedophile and child (“toy”). So a pedophile would say “he (or she) is my little fucktoy” and never “he or she is my little fuckboy/fuckgirl.)
To outsiders the most remarkable thing about pedophilia is sexual attraction to children. But within that subculture itself the age issue is taken for granted and pedophiles categorize interpersonal relationships based upon power dynamics…”she is my little friend, “he is a my fucktoy.”
So taken out of context only a non-pedophile would think that “fuckboy” was a term referring pedophilia.
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I would offer two observations. First, cuss words change over time, partly because of confusion and poor communication. Today’s college students use expressions that are bastardized versions of those used by their parents and grandparents.
Second, there are not enough pedophiles to light up the map.
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You’re not accurate on ancient Greece; see Dover’s ‘Greek Homosexuality’ for ancient behaviour.
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Fuckboy in modern parlance refers to a male (usually straight, but not always) who is obsessed with sex and whose primary motivation in life is to get sex.
It is the male equivalent of ‘slut’ or ‘whore’ but it meant to emphatically stigmatized males for being overly sexual.
For instance a fuckboy is the type of guy who messages a girl on social media and immediately solicits her for something sexual, or who gets a girl’s phone number and sends her unwanted pictures of his genitalia.
So it would be correct to assume that it’s current usage is totally departed from its origins.
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i doubt any serious person would utter such a non-word in a serious moment- it’s so contrived as to be meaningless. But that’s just my own point of view.
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I thought its spread was because of the impending Skeleton War, guess it’s not as innocent as that. Oh well.
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These maps are so interesting! If you gathered research for the state at only my job, though, Oklahoma would be bright orange on every single one lol
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Hey your right!
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This post reminds me of your previous post on swearing in different languages called “Christ fucking shit merde!” In any event, do you plan on mapping collocations I’ve seen on Twitter such as “Allah cunt pendejo!” or “Mohammad cocksucker maricon!” etc., or would such collocations be considered hapax legomena? Indeed, you could blog on blaspheming in different languages. That would be fun.
I came to this excellent site via a link from the Washington Post. Glad to see that you don’t engage in censorship. As Justice Brandeis said, “[T]he remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.”
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Justice Brandeis put it well, and this would certainly be a terrible place to practise censorship. Thanks for the suggestions for other topics; we’ll keep them in mind.
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They did a similar study a few years ago to determine where the happiest people in the country live based on a large sample of geo-coded tweets from around the country. I think it is interesting that the word “Hell” is used more in the area that we associate with the Bible Belt in this country. In that case, was the word being used as a swear word or in reference to the place that the Christian faith refers to as Hell? And how does one use Hell as a swear word, really? Go to hell? Burn in hell?
The thing that these studies don’t account for is context, which is understandable because it would take significantly longer to analyze. Regardless, the outcome of these studies are nevertheless interesting. Thanks for the share!
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“Hell” is one of the ones (along with “bitch” “shit” “damn” and “pussy”) that’s basically a map of where black Americans live, but for some reason it doesn’t go all the way up the East Coast to NYC.
http://www.censusscope.org/us/map_nhblack.html
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‘was the word being used as a swear word or in reference to the place that the Christian faith refers to as Hell?’
Both, I imagine. Hell could be considered a swear word (albeit a mild one) in its expletive and idiomatic uses; John Kelly surveyed the word’s versatility in a post here last month.
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What the hell. Hell if I know. You can go to hell. Hell, it was here just a minute ago. Where the hell is it? If you took It, I’ll beat the hell out of you. Who the hell do you think you are? Where the hell am I? What the hell was I saying? Hell if I know.
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Oh and one more, hell Deleyla, you are cute as hell. Hell yeah!
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Haha, Thanks Mike. You’re hell-a sweet for saying that.
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My mother used “hell” as a swear word. If something went wrong, she said, “Oh, Hell!” I do the same thing. She wasn’t using it as a religious word because she wasn’t religious and didn’t believe in hell as a place. It was just a word that she could use to give expression to her anger or frustration. Me, too.
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I don’t see “ho” or “hoe”.
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They filtered out Amish Tweets.
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Reblogged this on Life As Me and commented:
Going to have to start using “hell” more
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As someone who lives in the reactionary bosom of the Inland Northwest where boy do we ever have traditional gender roles, I would like to say I am surprised at the slut/cunt belt on the other side of the Cascades, but I’m not.
I honestly never heard the word cunt used without being shocked and almost never when the speaker wasn’t a thug or drunk enough to behave line one until my time in Portland, but the whole of the west side is in love with those. It is kind of shocking how easily those words in particular and some related ones as well appear in the supposedly progressive heart of the PNW.
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It’s worth noting that the use of slut and cunt, while often pejorative, isn’t necessarily so: for many people these words have ameliorated. See for example Fritinancy’s post on Eggslut, SlutWalk, Scrabble slut, and other non-abusive uses; and Kate Warwick’s post on cunt (plus the comments) which explore that word’s varying degrees of offensiveness – in some quarters it is unremarkable or even being actively reclaimed.
None of which is to say they’re not normally used in a negative way in the US, but it would be interesting to delve into the context and connotations of their use in particular regions.
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New Mexico, and especially Albuquerque, seem to be trying to assert themselves in the Bitch map.
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I’m having trouble figuring out the red/blue thing. It looks like blue means minus but how can you have a minus use of words? You either use a word or you don’t but you can’t write not using a word — if you follow that. So what does blue mean and what does red mean on these maps? I’m confused.
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I’m guessing “less likely than the national average.”
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It’s relative. Red means it’s used more compared with less-red or blue areas. See the third and final paragraphs for detail and links on this.
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Hell, I would have never even thought of considering “gosh” as a swear word. Totally benign in my dictionary.
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I’d say it’s almost universally benign. But as a minced oath it can be considered a very mild swear or a swear-substitute, and therefore functionally equivalent in this context.
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What do negative frequencies mean? They are marked in blue and must represent using less, but I am puzzled both by the concept of negative numbers used to describe the frequency of usage and by the fact that it is not explained in the text and no one is asking.
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Negative numbers (in blue) mean a word is used less, compared with red areas. It is explained briefly in the text, with links to more detailed material on how the scale works. Maybe you skipped over the third and final paragraphs.
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Thanks, I probably did skip toward the end. But why the zero in the middle of the scale? Wouldn’t it just be enough to show low usage by having zero at the very left so one and read it as very low usage on the left up to very high on the right? That’s what confused me. Thanks for the explanation.
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What about ‘bugger’? Or is that just too British? I use that a lot.
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It’s a partial list only: no bugger, cock, dick, piss, wanker, etc. If maps for any of these materialise, we’ll update the post or do a new one.
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And what exactly does ‘fuckboy’ mean? It seems to have two different senses–passive recipients of anal sex and sexually eager men–male sluts.
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The newest definition of “fuckboy” is something akin to “loser.” See Jack Grieve’s research blog (scroll down to the post dated Jan. 3, 2015).
I just encountered another usage, in a piece about drug use in Vermont published in the 40Towns blog:
“The cityboys: the gang-affiliates they encountered up here, coming to distribute. They also refer to them as the fuckboys.”
UPDATE: And here’s a longish HuffPo piece about the history of “fuckboy.”
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Thanks for alerting me to the gang sense, Nancy. The HuffPo “history” has some useful notes on recent use, but it only goes back as far as 2002 for a word over 60 years old, and it describes Urban Dictionary with a straight face as “the respected authority on such matters”, overlooking authoritative slang dictionaries by professional lexicographers. Maybe the writer doesn’t know these exist.
Another definition of fuckboy, from Chambers Slang Dictionary by Jonathon Green, is: “1 one who is victimized by their superiors or associates. 2 a passive male homosexual, a catamite.” Green, like Sheidlower’s The F-Word, dates the word to the 1950s.
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And why exactly are “darn” and “gosh” bad? Might as well include “heck,” “stuff” (to refer to as a euphemism for “shit”), “frick” (“fuck” sub), etc.
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Who said they were bad? This comment might help explain their inclusion.
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Yeah it’s literally off the map.
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Ala Carlin’s Seven Dirty Words, “Fuckboy” is merely derivative.
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It’s too bad the twitter data did not extend back in time so that the shifting currents of profanity could be mapped, doppler radar style, and perhaps their changes in potency. The word “fart” now seems more socially acceptable than what it represents.
In the monologue which became the focus of the Supreme Court’s 1978 decision in FCC v. Pacfica Foundation, George Carlin noted that you could not say “turd” on television “but who wants to?” Yet, not too long ago, a New York newspaper used the phrase “House of Turds” in its banner headline.
On the other hand, perhaps “slut” is sinking in acceptability. In 1961-62, I was a high school senior in Southwest Missouri. When our English class studied Shakespeare’s Sonnet 55, the teacher asked the meaning of “sluttish time” and praised the student who defined “sluttish” in terms of layering of residue. (But it must have been somewhat shocking or I wouldn’t recall it now.)
Growing up in the Ozarks, I picked up the habit of using “Lord” as a mild expletive but when I moved East, I did not hear other people using it. It would be nice to see a twitter map for “Lord” and also one for “bless your heart.”
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“It’s too bad the twitter data did not extend back in time so that the shifting currents of profanity could be mapped”
Yes. Maybe in a few years diachronic maps of this type will be feasible. Already we’re seeing dynamic maps of the spread of new words, also based on Grieve’s work.
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I’d expect to see a higher density of fucks (clusterfuck…?) in regions prone to tornadoes.
My Aussie father-in-law never swears (despite being as rough as guts), apparently preferring ‘mongrel’ instead. On one particularly vexing occasion, when an average person might have let rip with ‘fucking cunt’ or somesuch (something from around the rare earth elements in the periodic table of swearing, perhaps), he had to resort to ‘mongrel mongrel’ for extra punch.
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That’s a good one, Duncan. I’ve seen mongrel used as a term of abuse, but I’ve never heard it used as a swear word, let alone reduplicated.
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My father was an officer in the British Royal Air Force from 1957-ish to 1995-ish. His go-to expletive is “PEASANT!” Anyone else hear this?
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I’ve seen a few discussions of this material that take California to task for the popularity of faggot there, since it seems so counter to what is expected of that state. But like slut and others, the usage is not necessarily pejorative. No doubt it often is, but faggot has been reclaimed in some quarters, as this Lexicon Valley podcast shows.
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My home is rather potty mouthed. 😀
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These maps don’t seem very helpful as population density doesn’t appear to be accounted for.
However, I applaud your thoroughness.
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…spoke too soon,
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Thank you for proving what the rest of the country has long known. That New York is the Asshole capital of the country!
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The 1954 ‘catamite’ cite for fuckboy in GDoS:
1954 J. Blake Ex Post Facto in The Joint (1972) 45: They were known as pussyboys, galboys, fuckboys, and all had taken girls’names like Betty, Fifi, Dotty, etc., and were universally referred to as ‘she’ and ‘her’.
Thus it equates with jailhouse punk. Though the role appears voluntary rather than imposed
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Where is “cocksucker”? That is my go to when I’m gaming.
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To be honest, “hell” and “damn” are not swear words at all. At least anymore. Many variations thereof hidingly use the words. Historically the former means a bad place where God sends his evil creatures to when they die, and the latter means to condemn to hell. Today (if used by a younger generation), “hell” still means the place, but now it’s also used as an expression; and “damn” means “send.”
HELL:
*HELLcat (nickname for a supercharged 6.2L Dodge SRT model)
*HELLmann’s (mayonaise company)
*HELLo (greeting)
*HELLuva… (really, very, bloody, freakin’)
*HELmet (what you wear while riding a bike)
DAMN:
*Great DAMN Burger (a fast-food restaurant)
*DAMion / DAMien (male given name)
*Dam (barrier; it was even said in the kids’ TV series Caillou)
My math teacher doesn’t like it when I say damn or dammit. She doesn’t allow me to in the classroom.
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To be honest, they are swear words. They’re just not very strong ones any more. Hellmann’s mayonnaise, the name Damien, etc., don’t have anything to do with hell and damn apart from some coincidental overlap in spelling.
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I live in central Virginia and I’ve never heard someone say fuckboy. In-fact, that’s a fucking stupid word tbh, everyone has a different definition of what it means which means the word is unclear and you can’t use it and have everybody in the group know what you mean.
Damn, hell, shit, bitch, pussy, dick, and fuck are all very popular here though. Hell I even hear nigga used occasionally. I don’t think asshole or douche is as uncommon as the map indicated. I am a teenager though and you can’t really hang out with teenagers without hearing a lot of profanity.
I almost never hear cunt said. The only times I hear it is when people are talking about the word itself but teenagers don’t really have it in their vocabulary as a word to truly use.
People used to say faggot more but nobody says it anymore because its considered homophobic and rude. I also don’t hear slut or whore as much as I hear hoe. Usually the people who use the word slut are girls who are saying that they are sluts and proud of it rather than people using it as an offensive term whereas hoe is more often used as an offensive term.
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Really, words like slut, whore, etc, are simply vulgar, kinda like crap or piss, but not “bad words” themselves. Slut was never profane, it’s more like the word jackass but to a girl.
“Cocksucker” is the only real extremely offensive swearword. Others like “fuck” or “shit” are used as vulgar expletives nowadays.
I would simply rank my favorite swearwords on five scales, including “not swearing” (God, Hell, Damn, Piss, etc), “quite mild” (Crap, Jesus Christ, Retard, Whore, Ass, Wanker, etc), “moderately offensive” (Bitch, Dick, Asshole, Faggot, Bastard, Shit, and, arguably, Fuck), “strongly offensive” (Pussy and Nigger as insults), and “extremely offensive” (Cocksucker, Cunt, and Motherfucker). “God” is on the mildest edge; as a religious nit I don’t know if I could consider it true swearing or not, but I sure heard I shouldn’t take the Lord’s name in vain.
I rarely ever use faggot, nigger, or cocksucker.
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Ha. And they rate it all on a “GIz score!”
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is it just me? but where is that ever present “cocksucker?
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Just a general comment, I recall the first time hearing a full grown, adult male utter the phrase, “heck-fire”. First, it was one of those occurances which snaps you out of the moment. I believe I was dumbstruck. I can not find any other way to explain the impact on my consciousness. The guy said it rather casually, as it was just his way; and I sincerely placed no judgement on him. It was just so outside my experience, that you might just as well have plunged me into an ice cold lake. But, being outside of his usual element, the realization of the impact of his statement began to dawn on him, and he began to take on the appearance of a kid caught reading daddy’s Playboy. If only a video camera had been rolling… talk about your cultural differences! I’m happy I stumbled upon this article and got to relive this and some of the other bits and pieces folks have posted over the months… thanks a lot for the opportunity.
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Why is ‘piss’ not included!?
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It wasn’t among the words Grieve originally did a map for. Piss, crap, bollocks and bloody now appear in a composite map appended at the foot of the post.
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