Yeah, nah, get fucked with that:
Australians’ proud reputation as a pack of cunning linguists has taken a hit from a study finding they come only third in the swearing stakes online.
The research found Australians were more restrained – online, at least – than potty-mouthed Poms and vulgar Americans.
“What the feck?” as the Irish would say – “feck” being their preferred profanity relative to other countries’ use of the word, according to the research.
For the British it’s “cunt”, and for the US it’s “asshole”. For Australians, disappointingly, it’s “crap”.
“We were super surprised by that,” says Dr Martin Schweinberger, from the University of Queensland’s school of languages and cultures.
“We expected it to be ‘fuck’ or something.” […]
But there is a heartening twist to the tale that shows Australians are not here to fuck spiders.
One is that the Global Web-Based English Corpus (GloWbE) dataset the researchers used did not include blogs for Australia – and blogs are typically more sweary than general online content. But it did include them for other countries.
“If we had blog data for Australia it might have pushed us to second place,” Schweinberger says.
Fairly sure if this blog had been counted I could’ve taken us to the top. Still, now Australia has something to aspire to…
