Naturally, I am fascinated by the InstaLinked experiment InstaPunk posed last night:

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.

Anyone care to take up the challenge?

Naturally, I wanted to see how I ranked. Copying George Carlin's seven dirty words directly into the template, I was shocked by the results -- which indicate 141 uses of these words here at Classical Values.

I wondered what was going on, as I like to think that I take pride in keeping foul language to a minimum. When I began to look closely, I saw that the vast majority of the posts involved either:

quotes from other people, or

comments left by visitors to the site

Whether it's a good idea for me to quote the foul language of others or allow commenters to use foul language is debatable. But in any case I don't think it is logical to suppose that other people's words are an accurate depiction of what I say. Fortunately, I'm not large enough hits-wise for most people to care very much, which means that if I wanted to be really foul-mouthed, I could get away with it more easily. However, while I don't have an exact estimate, the fact is that I've written millions of words over the years, so looking at the big picture my Carlin rating is pathetically small. In comparison to DailyKos, my rating is so pathetically small as to be infinitessimal. (Daily Kos's 146,000 compared to my 141, is a ratio of more than 1000 to 1!)

Still, I'm wondering whether there are search commands that rule out quotes and comments, because I just don't think it's fair to use the words of others to rate my language. Especially commenters, because I have absolutely no control over what they say unless I delete them -- which I refuse to do unless my hand is forced. (In fact, if there was an official rating system, someone could easily screw it up by creating a "Comment F*CK bot" to simply insert comments containing the "F" word, which would require installing yet another tedious MT plugin.)

Of course, as Patterico thoroughly documents, foul-mouthed comments are only held against some bloggers:

If you are a conservative, they represent you. They represent me. They represent every conservative thinker in the country. The significance of such commenters cannot be overstated. But if the hateful commenters are liberals -- why, then, they're just isolated crackpots who can and should be ignored.

those who rely on anonymous blog comments to make an argument should be presumed to have no argument at all. [...] Unless of course those comments were made by conservatives and one can establish a connection to the content or theme of the blog.

It is my general policy to try not to police commenters here, and I don't consider myself responsible in any way for anything I have not said. (As I said repeatedly, I was horrified by many of the comments to this post on the Muhammad cartoons, but I left them deliberately, as a sort of permanent archive. They contain 74 uses of the "F" word alone.)

I especially appreciated InstaPunk's discussion of the distinction between ideas and verbal graffiti:

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. A simple test: is there an actual punchline anywhere in sight? Or is there only an irrational need to scrawl the ugliest possible graffiti on the biggest possible wall?

While it's a bit off-topic, even gutter drivel of the sort calculated to to injure (as opposed to "educate, persuade, or delineate") can be accomplished without resort to Carlin's dirty words. Here's a ho-hum example I photographed last year:

Naif that I am about the ultimate meaning of words, at the time I wondered whether it might fall into the category of speech Dave Neiwert routinely condemns as "eliminationist rhetoric."

Whatever it is, there's nothing dirty about inviting the lefties to "go sit on it."

LINGERING QUESTION: Has anyone ever run an experiment like this to determine which side uses more "eliminationist rhetoric"?