Curse Words as Dialect Maps.

July 27, 2015 by 14 Comments

Check out the amazing maps at this HuffPo story by Lorenzo Ligato, reporting on research by Jack Grieve, a professor of forensic linguistics at Aston University in Birmingham, who published the maps on Twitter last week. The one for “fuck” is a thing of beauty: you could replace the hackneyed phrase “flyover country” by “where they don’t say ‘fuck.'” (Via Mark Liberman at the Log.)

Comments

  1. Dmitry Pruss (aka MOCKBA) says
    July 27, 2015 at 10:50 am

    Oh my Gosh 🙂
    Interestingly – does it look like “motherf*cker” is an Old Hispano Country thing, possibly a replacement for hijodeputa? Of course his methodology precludes him from mapping words which may or may not be swearwords depending on context.

  2. Bloix says
    July 27, 2015 at 5:25 pm

    Swearing changes a lot over time. My father, a New Yorker, would swear when angry or even irritated, but he would never say “fuck” – not out of prudishness, it just wasn’t part of his swear vocabulary. “Son of a bitch” and “Jesus Christ” were his main expostulations, and “damn” and “goddamn” and “shitty” and “piece-of-shit” were the usual adjectives.

    The fuck map may be a snapshot of lag rather than long-term regional variation due to cultural differences.

  3. Mike says
    July 27, 2015 at 7:15 pm

    From the article:

    And who knew the “c-word” was so popular in New England?

    Who didn’t know? If I ever hear it from an American (which is rare), 9 times out of 10 they’re from New England.

    Exhibit A
    Exhibit B

  4. Will says
    July 27, 2015 at 8:58 pm

    It’s too bad the colors saturate at z=2.3. We don’t get to see how outlying the outliers are.

  5. Lazar says
    July 27, 2015 at 11:44 pm

    @Bloix: The same for my working-class Massachusetts grandfather. But in my age group, “fuck” is so ubiquitous that I suspect it may have even fallen below “goddamn” in potency.

    And apparently it’s in keeping with my region that I find “darn” a bit silly. The few times that I’ve heard someone use it in earnest, it’s struck me as very… Ned Flanders-esque.

  6. ajay says
    July 28, 2015 at 1:57 am

    you could replace the hackneyed phrase “flyover country” by “where they don’t say ‘fuck.’”

    Which reminds me that the Bosnian for “flyover country” is “vukojebina” – “where the wolves go to fuck”. In other words somewhere so remote that it is regarded as out of the way and private even by the standards of animals which customarily live in out of the way places.

  7. Sili says
    July 28, 2015 at 8:07 am

    “where they don’t say ‘fuck.’”

    Where they don’t give a fuck, surely? They may even have run out of fucks to give.

  8. languagehat says
    July 28, 2015 at 8:38 am

    Perhaps we can sell them our fucks.

  9. Shelley says
    July 28, 2015 at 9:12 am

    I would never have guessed California is so pure.

    I love my adopted state.

  10. Y says
    July 28, 2015 at 12:02 pm

    “where the wolves go to fuck” — I heard “where the foxes tell each other goodnight”, from a German speaker. Maybe it’s a cleaner version, or just a variation.

  11. Vicente says
    July 31, 2015 at 2:35 pm

    If we can find enough fucks by us, we could sell them.

  12. David Marjanović says
    August 1, 2015 at 1:07 pm

    I heard “where the foxes tell each other goodnight”, from a German speaker.

    “Where fox and hare tell each other goodnight” – so remote that basic biology doesn’t apply anymore.

    I only know this expression, like so many others, from reading. The closest to native I have would be “at the ass[-end] of the world”.

  13. Y says
    August 1, 2015 at 3:16 pm

    I heard it from my grandmother. I got the sense of “this is the ned of the world, where the animals bid each other farewell and go no further”.

  14. Y says
    August 1, 2015 at 3:16 pm

    That is, “the end”.

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