The... Er... Stuff Hits the Fan

So Instapunk suggested, and Newsbuckit delivered a study of the relative frequency of George Carlin's famous "seven dirty words" within the context of the most popular blogs on both the Right and the Left, using Google as a standard to search for all occurences of the words. Lo and behold, the initial estimate was on the order of 18-1 for word occurences (later being increased to 41-1 based on the inclusion of some prominent but overlooked sites on both sides of the aisle), with the Lefties winning the day with flying colors. This should not come as a shock to anyone.

Anywho, the initial report by Newsbuckit was posted on Fark, so I perused the comment thread there to get a feel for people's reaction. Needless to say, the obviously liberal commenters got (surprise, surprise!) angry at the audacity of someone who would dare even do such research. Anger quickly turned to denial -- lots of attacking the messenger and claiming that only liberal blogs allow unmoderated comments and that the methods were completely and hopelessly flawed (the methods were crude, yes, but with a margin of 18-1 or 41-1, the larger point is indisputable). Then sprang forth anger again, as is the wont of that crowd, this time taking the form of ad hominem attacks on both the researcher, the guy (Instapunk) who suggested the research, and all the "oppresive puritan Rethuglicans" who take the time to clean up their speech a bit. While the anger didn't actually subside, a strange form of acceptance finally did come forth, in the form of "We f***ing cuss a whole g** d*** m*****f***ing lot, you f***ing c*** a**h***s -- so f***ing what?"

When I was a junior in highschool (a Catholic, all-boys highschool), Father Lawrence Frederick, a.k.a. "Father Fred", taught a very interesting segment during our religion period (we had a new religion instructor each quarter). Father Fred, a former design engineer for Nasa (he designed the seats on the Mercury space capsule, and as my highschool physics teacher, was my inspiration for becoming and engineer), was a soft-spoken, but nevertheless imposing figure. There was a famous singular moment during his particular religion class (word of which got around, so we knew to expect it) in which he was known to utter the most profane string of obscenities you could construct -- highly out of character for him. Of course, there was a point to this -- virtually all those words were "perfectly normal, anglo-saxon words for things in the English language". However, because our language is not strictly barbaric in its origins, we have other words for things, most of which originate from the more erudite languages of Latin and Greek. Thus, if one wants to show some shred of that erudition, indicating that one has the patience to learn the more difficult Latinate words in place of the simple, and socially frowned-upon alternatives, one chooses to use those words instead. And this is the point largely lost by the foul-mouthed Left.