- December 17th, 2010
- 18 Comments »
- humor
NSFW: most used curse words in history?
Ok, this is pure fun. I took George Carlin’s 7 Dirty words (The only words you can’t say on U.S. television, or couldn’t), and put them into Google Labs Ngram viewer (which searches for usage of words in the entire google books archive). I made a guess before I ran the query – I expected all the words to rise in usage over the last 40 years. I was wrong:
Chart shown below / link to query:
As some of you know, big ranges in data hide trends. So I took out the big outliers (Shit and Fuck) and ran the same query, yielding the chart below (query here) – overall positive trend on all of them, but more interesting than the first chart:
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18 thoughts on “NSFW: most used curse words in history?”
Tits or GTFO, motherfuckers!
Pingback: What is wrong with… » Blog Archive » What is wrong with cursing online?
Major error : The ngram viewer is case sensitive. Search for the lowercased versions of all of those and the graphs change quite a bit, especially making your final interesting graph not at all interesting and almost identical to “Fuck” and “Shit”
Cool tool. Check out the word “peace”. Except for a couple of blips, in steady decline. :(
Pingback: Fun with Ngrams – Art, Science, Programming | cazh1
Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too much free time, bud. :)
@Jeb, not forgetting Beverly Hills Cop (1984). Looking at the trend, this particular cuss word may well have gone the way of Smallpox if it wasn’t for Axel Foley’s volcabulary.
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I thought for sure that cunt would be more popular, but I do understand the problem. People need to use a wider variety of cuss words.
Motherfucker did enjoy a surge of popularity related to the release of pulp fiction.
Glad to see that tits are back in the rise.
When I was on the radio, we were also not allowed to use the word “asshole”. If you include that word in the original query, it’s a nice trending addition to “shit” and “fuck”.
Interesting data problem prior to 1820-ish: “The long s is subject to confusion with the lower case or minuscule f, sometimes even having an f-like nub at its middle for the “F” word.” (Thanks, Wikipedia.) You can look at the really old books and see that Google scans the long s as an f, so “suck” becomes the “f” word. Cool!
Ken: Added a new chart based on your point.
It looks like at least 6 of the 7 DID rise in usage. The big two have crossed into almost mainstream use as general purpose expletives, dwarfing the others. The others have retained narrower definitions.
Ken: Good point – scale factors are at work in this chart. I’ll see if I can make google give me a narrower range of data.
The bump around 1900 is interesting. I wonder what caused it?
I don’t know that much about the weak spots in their data – blips like that could be bias in publishing (maybe they had access to one raunchy publisher who went out of business in a year or two) or there’s an actual trend of note. Hard to know.