It’s map time again! An advertising firm called Marchex conducted two research studies: 1. Which state uses the most profanity; 2. Which states are the most polite. Marchex examined more than 600,000 phone calls from the past 12 months. The phone calls were placed by consumers to businesses across 30 industries, including cable and satellite companies, pest control centers, auto dealerships, etc.
For the first survey, they scanned the calls for curses words include “ass,” “fuck,” and “shit” and then had analysts link the frequency of the naughty words with each of the 50 states. For the second survey, members of Marchex’s research team listened for the keywords “please” and “thank you.” Essentially, this survey also studies who has the most patience with call center operators and customer service departments.
Here’s the map. Where does your state fall? I was shocked that New York was only listed as “Occasionally Profane,” until I realized that there’s a good part of upstate NY that’s probably way more polite than the areas that I’m from, hahaha. Click to enlarge, I know it’s hard to see.
Results also showed the following data:
- 66% of curses come from men
- The calls that contain the most cursing are more than 10 minutes long. So the longer someone is on the phone, the more likely that call is to devolve.
- Calls in the morning are twice as likely to produce cursing as calls in the afternoon or evening.
It looks like Ohio needs to take some etiquette classes…
[Source]
