Um… who’s “obsessed” with dirty words again?

Whose blog rhetoric is more potty-mouthed, the dextrosphere or the sinistrosphere?  Instapunk issued a challenge recently:

…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."

Newsbuckit responded.  Here’s his method:

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 "search term 3"…

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.

His results:

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.

There are tables with the results for individual blogs at his post.

Instapunk had predicted this result:

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.

Eh.  That would only be true if being concerned with ideas and being obsessed with the lowest kind of hateful invective were mutually exclusive.   Also if the 7 Dirty Words is an accurate proxy for hatefulness.

It’s not always.  Example:  In some circles (not mine) it’s apparently perfectly acceptable to use "fucking" as an adverb with positive connotations.  I bet this accounts for a fair number of occurrences.  Even though it’s coarse, it’s not "hateful invective."

We all know that political blogs are often echo chambers.  Righties read and comment on righty blogs.  Lefties read and comment on lefty blogs.  No surprise that common discourse trends might have evolved differently in the two populations.  Maybe words that play as coarse among righties don’t play as coarse among lefties.   If so, the results probably indicate that the separation is going to get worse.  I mean, I don’t enjoy reading text that’s peppered with obscenities.  I tend to avoid it.  That explains why I don’t often read the popular lefty blogs to hear their side of an issue.  Perhaps I’m linguistically challenged and not appreciative enough of cultural diversity, but I find it tiresome.

Maybe I’m being overgenerous.  But bear in mind that the set of search criteria, the proxy for hatefulness, was selected by a righty blogger.   I doubt that the lefty bloggers would have chosen this set as a proxy for hatefulness (for one thing, anyone could have guessed that the left uses the words more).   So here’s a question I’d like to have answered:  what seven words or phrases would the left prefer to use to "prove" that righty rhetoric is the more hateful?

And do I really have to point out that using your opponents’ individual words as a proxy for their ideas doesn’t really demonstrate  concern with ideas?