It's no secret to anyone who spends time on the internet that liberals talk a lot dirtier than conservatives. In public, anyway; I don't know whether this holds true in private conversation or not. Notwithstanding the fact that this is common knowledge, there has been a lot of buzz about this survey of liberal and conservative sites. It begins with the "seven words you can't say on television," and purports to count how many times those words appeared on 18 of the top liberal and 22 of the top conservative blogs. The result was striking: liberals used the "bad" words 18 times as often as conservatives.

That didn't really surprise me, but when I looked at the chart that set forth the results of the survey, I found that 68 instances of the "seven words" were recorded for Power Line. This struck me as obviously wrong. I'm certain that six of the seven words have never appeared on Power Line at all, and the seventh (a four-letter word that starts with "s") has appeared only a time or two when we were quoting someone else.
So I ran the search on Power Line the same way it was done for the survey. What I found was that virtually all of the references that came up were in "trackbacks." This means that the language appeared on someone else's site, not ours.

I conclude from this that the survey was pretty badly flawed. Not only did it fail to distinguish between blog entries and comments, which is at least defensible, it failed to distinguish between words used on the site in question, and words used on a different site, which is not defensible.

Having said that, I think the original point still stands, even if this survey does not precisely quantify it. There is no doubt that many liberals often use offensive language on the web, while conservatives rarely do. Some of this probably has to do with age; many liberals who write on the web are just kids, so immaturity is not surprising. I think some of it has to do with anger; liberalism, in today's political world, is closely associated with anger and, in far too many cases, hate. And I think that to some degree, it is symptomatic of the sloppy thinking that is common on so many liberal web sites. It is, after all, a great deal easier to string swear words together as an insult, than to string ideas together logically, as an argument.

UPDATE: This post generated a surprising number of comments, most of them from liberals who argued 1) that liberals cuss more on their web sites because they have more to be angry about, which confirms the point I made in the last paragraph of my post, or 2) that it is contradictory for me to say that this survey's methodology was flawed, but the conclusion that liberals use more bad language on their web sites is nevertheless true. The latter is a logical error of such stunning proportions that it tends to confirm my observation that sloppy thinking is common on the left.