New York truly has its own unofficial language, filled with slang words that may warrant a perplexed look or two from a non-NY-native. But one thing that a New Yorker’s vocabulary is missing is, apparently, (and though hard to believe) swear words!
According to this new study, NYC is one of America’s least foul-mouthed places, coming in second behind Minneapolis.
In order to find out which swear words were most popular across the country, tweets from all 50 U.S. states and 320 cities were analyzed to find the most commonly-used profanities and variations of those words and then matched up with the tweet’s location.
Some key findings were that the f-bomb is America’s most commonly used swear word with 11.62 uses for every 1000 posts on Twitter, and while Minneapolis residents swear the least, Atlanta is America’s most foul-mouthed city.
As for when people choose to swear, Tuesdays are apparently an American’s favorite day of the week to swear online, while when it comes to timing, spikes in swear words are seen within the hour of 1 a.m.
Historic events also seem to rile up people’s vocabulary, at least on social media. The pandemic years (2020 and 2021) were no doubt a stressful time, and research from Storyful found that profanities rose by 41% on Facebook from 2019 to 2021 and by 27% on Twitter.
Whether casually throwing it into conversation or using it to express extreme emotion, curse words are being used more than ever, though while New Yorkers definitely say some questionable things, at least we can say we don’t have the world’s worst potty mouths…at least according to this survey!