Swearing spiked on Mumsnet after every announcement of a school closure

[BuffySummersReportingforSanity]

I do enjoy how much attention the Economist has devoted to just how much we fucking swear. Also I didn't know we had a "swearometer".

www.economist.com/international/2021/05/22/how-the-pandemic-has-upended-the-lives-of-working-parents (subscription required to read)

Is this news?

I mean is it? Really?

I think non-mumsnet swearing went up too. Couldn't journalists (with kids) just observe their own household's swear jar?

Also... my 10 year old is a Life member of the NT and after hearing a swear-laden rant (not our household I might add though it's been known ) went down the garden to let off a few 'fucks' and came back and described it as a word that feels nice to say. Apparently it has a good flavour.

Soz NT, you've got her for life...

I wonder if it just picks up Fucks et al or MN favourites like Cockwomble or Wankbadger?

So much fucking love for the data team from me.

I handle similar analyses IRL and this makes me incredibly fucking happy (Not me crunching data,, we have a team, I just get to smile at pie charts)

@SirSamuelVimes

Back to the fucking coal face, data team! We've loads more fucks for you to count! (And a few cunts too).

@RowanMumsnet do advertisers really not like our swearing? What do they say about it? And conversely, are there any that are more interested in advertising on the site because of the swearing? This is fascinating!

I don't know that individual bigger brands have a big problem with swearing, although I guess they might not tell us about it if they did. I do know that a while back we had a problem with the automated filters on some kinds of advertising - lots of the big ad platforms had a blacklist of words that advertisers' content couldn't appear next to, which included not only swear words but also things like 'breasts' and 'sex'. We had to try to explain to them that yes, a forum mostly populated by mothers was going to include quite a lot of references to bodily parts and sexual functions, and that it wasn't necessarily Adult Content in the way they assumed...

Needs to go in here

And now, a message from our data team (hopefully addressing some of your questions on this thread):

Thanks MNers for all the appreciation and we are glad you enjoy the swearometer. We started the swearometer during the Brexit process in 2019 when we noticed that we could measure the Brexit craziness through increases in swearing on the Politics and Brexit forums, and - when things got particularly mad - across the site. We did try the swearometer for the full range of MN swearwords, but found that 'fuck' and 'shit' dominate so widely that the others made little difference and if anything made the results more noisy. Also swearwords that are used to refer to a disliked individual (eg 'bastard' or a number of words beginning with c...) are more likely to be about private individuals (eg someone's DH or DP) then a news item.

The Covid swearometer has been spot on - the peaks not written in to the Economist graph are when Boris cancelled Christmas (19th December) and we even got a small swearing peak for Dominic Cummings' Rose Garden appearance.

Mumsnet language is a pleasure to work with and as a team we do our best to show the diversity of opinion and expression through data analysis to share the difficulties faced and insight derived from our brilliant users. We have also done work in the pandemic on studying mental health related language to understand the impact on mental health of both parents and children throughout this pandemic (we found that concern for children's mental health peaked last August before the return to school and during the recent set of school closures).

We'd love to hear what you think we should be looking into too!

Interesting. I wonder if automated filter word blacklisting is part of what’s driving the use of ‘gender’ where ‘sex’ is both appropriate and correct...

lots of the big ad platforms had a blacklist of words that advertisers' content couldn't appear next to, which included not only swear words but also things like 'breasts' and 'sex'. We had to try to explain to them that yes, a forum mostly populated by mothers was going to include quite a lot of references to bodily parts and sexual functions, and that it wasn't necessarily Adult Content in the way they assumed...

I think this is a form of bastard societal sexism right here, that the only forum that advertisers could conceive of (hurr) as regularly featuring the words "breasts" and "sex" was a porn one. (Yes, I have been on the internet before, and know what it's like...) I mean, god forbid women be discussing the functionality and health of an important part of our bodies and its role in feeding our children.

Breasts?!? Seriously?! That’s what they’re called.

I put a filter on my phone to block websites with adult content (DD1 often plays on my phone and I didn’t want her to accidentally see anything by searching for something innocent). It blocked MN too.

Thank you @RowanMumsnet and data team - really interesting stuff!

Right, I'd best fuck off back to work.

Yep it is interesting stuff isn't it - there's a thesis to be written in this I'm sure

anyway if you have any more ideas for things our team should analyse do shove them our way...

Great thread as I love Mumsnet and the Economist. When I was undergoing IVF, the most balanced, well-informed and humane article I read was in there. They cover a lot more than Economics (it's best to start reading from the back).

I love the Economist. I never open it but I learn about ten things, from the global effects of a dip in the price of gold to the political dynamics in Mozambique to the global market for high-end computer chips to the measurable hard impact of racism. Their data team has done some really interesting work adding to the globally published figures on Covid impact.