Instapunk experiment on blogospheric language showing interesting results

Via Instapundit, I followed this link to a post over on Instapunk regarding the outpouring of sadness over at the well-known leftie site Huffington Post over the fact that VP Dick Cheney wasn’t killed in Afghanistan the other day. (If you missed it, check out Dean Barnett’s posts on the subject. You should also see Patterico’s devastating response to Glenn Greenwald on the matter.) Instapunk notes a trend in this and other leftie-vs-rightie verbal salvos:

Which, come to think of it, is the real distinguishing characteristic between the firebrands of the left and the firebrands of the right. There are plenty of verbal attacks launched by both right and left in the war of words that constitutes political discourse. You couldn’t have a free political system without them. What matters is the quality and tenor of those attacks. Political passion is fueled by emotion, and emotion in an adversary situation results quite often in extreme analogies, ridicule, unfairness, and even cruelty. Yet there is a vast difference between employing verbal wit as a weapon of ridicule and employing the foulest lowest-common-denominator cusswords available to describe one’s political foes and to wish for their physical destruction. The latter is not wit, which it resembles only insofar as word choices have the power to shock. When endless repetition makes them a thudding refrain used again an again and again without any attempt at irony or illuminating juxtapositions, it’s merely gutter-mouthed drivel. Its only intent is to injure, not to educate, persuade, or delineate.…

Well, I propose an exercise to be perfomed by those who have the software and expertise to carry it out. The exercise is this: Search six months’ worth of content, posts and comments, of the 20 most popular blogs on the right and the left. The search criteria are George Carlin’s infamous “7 Dirty Words.”

I am absolutely certain that the left will far exceed the right in the number of usages of all these words, which will go a long way toward proving that it’s the right which is still concerned with ideas while it’s the left that’s obsessed with the lowest kind of hateful invective.

It didn’t take long for someone to come up with a method and some results. We take you now to The News Buckit where Patrick Ishmael writes up his response to Instapunk’s challenge:

But how different are the Rightosphere and Leftosphere when it comes to “dirty” language? Which side produces the most profanity-laced diatribes? Via Instapundit, I happened upon this interesting challenge from InstaPunk:…

And this is what I found, using what I deemed — through a mix of TTLB and 2006′s Weblog Award lists — to be the 18 biggest Lefty blogs, and 22 biggest Righty blogs. I couldn’t account for the 6-month time period, and I even gave the Lefty blogs a 4 blog advantage. But it didn’t make much of a difference.

So how much more does the Left use Carlin’s “seven words” versus the Right? According to my calculations, try somewhere in the range of 18-to-1.

Yowsers.

You should take a quick hop over there to see the results. He’s got a spreadsheet up that shows the number of hits on each site and the disparity between the righties and the lefties on who wins the Blogospheric Blue Streak award. As soon as I saw this – and no, I was not surprised by the results, based on my own wanderings of right- and left-wing sites – I wondered where HoodaThunk? would fall in that list. The method used is a simple Google search with specific parameters. As reported in that post at the Buckit:

How did I get this result? I searched Google using the following format and recorded the page results that were returned:

site:xyz.com “search term 1″ OR “search term 2″ OR …

Nine search terms total — the seven profanities as single words, and two of those as their own two-word variations. I then added the individual site results together and compared them. The results are below.

If you’re going to try this on your own blog, make sure you notice that the “OR” between the search terms must be in all CAPS. If you don’t know the full list of words being used for search criteria, check the post at New Buckit and you’ll find the link.

HoodaThunk’s rating was pretty surprising for anyone who knows me. After all, the posts go back as far as 2003 and, while I’ve really tried to clean up my jargon since the birth of my daughter, I’ve never been known to really hold back where my… colorful language has been concerned. Running the entire set of 7 bad words against my blog resulted in exactly 12 posts with any of these words in them. And one of those was quoting a comment left by some lefty troll over at Michelle Malkin’s site. While the results of the left-vs-right searches over at News Buckit didn’t surprise me, the results here actually did. Guess I’m doing better than I thought.

Fox reports on a “whooping nosedive”?

Is it just me or has anyone else noticed a certain… change over at FoxNews.com with regard to their headlining? It seems to me that the headlines are more sensational, more supermarket tabloid than they used to be. This morning’s, however, is just showing some real lack of attention. Here’s the screenshot:

It’s that story at the bottom that’s got me: “Sales slip a whooping 21 percent…”? A whooping 21 percent? Now, maybe this is some of that new-fangled kid-talk, but shouldn’t that be a “whopping” 21%?

Please, don’t get me wrong. I’m very, very pleased that Rap music is apparently 21% less appealing this year than last. There’s not a whole lot about that whole genre of music that I find worthy of keeping around. I’m just a little concerned about the editorial efforts over at FoxNews.com and that they might be slipping. And the slip is starting to look like a whooping amount.