Developer Tom Hume has been playing with the APIs that are part of the Guardian's newly released Open Platform developer tools, and what did he head for? Expletives.
He started with a list of commonly used swearwords (we can attribute much of this to one Charlie Brooker, I feel) and searched the Guardian's content archive of the last 10 years. He also weighted the results so that they reflected the different proportion of stories each year.
The conclusion? "Good news! The Y-axis runs from 0 to 0.9%; even a liberal rag like the Grauniad seems to be pretty resistant to the tidal wave of filth which some might have you believe is flooding the English language nowadays..."
I can't put it any better than Hume:
"1. Swearing is growing slowly year-on-year, across the board.
"2. Unusually, in 2001, swearing stayed more or ess level. 'Bastard' declined after 2001 – probably an after-effect of 9/11, after which most other swearing grew.
"3. 'Wank' is massively underperforming over the last decade, whilst 'cock' is flat.
"4 'Shit' has grown disproportionately and steadily since 2005, whilst 'fuck' has gone as far as it can."
CP Scott would be delighted, I am sure.
• Update: You might be interested in this excerpt from the Guardian's own Style Guide, which gives its journalists advice on using swearwords. (See 'swearwords', under S in the index):
"We are more liberal than any other newspapers, using language that our competitors would not. But even some readers who agree with Lenny Bruce that 'take away the right to say fuck and you take away the right to say fuck the government' might feel that we sometimes use such words unnecessarily.
"The editor's guidelines are as follows:
"First, remember the reader, and respect demands that we should not casually use words that are likely to offend.
"Second, use such words only when absolutely necessary to the facts of a piece, or to portray a character in an article; there is almost never a case in which we need to use a swearword outside direct quotes.
"Third, the stronger the swearword, the harder we ought to think about using it.
"Finally, never use asterisks, which are just a cop-out."
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