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Name: Redcar.
Age: At least 700 years old.
Appearance: Blue.
Are you trying to be funny about my home town? Not at all.
Because if you are I’ll put your teeth so far down your [expletive deleted], throat you’ll be talking through your [expletive deleted]. Calm down, I only described Redcar as blue because people from the North Yorkshire coastal town are most likely to swear on Twitter.
Twitter? Don’t get me started with Twitter. Functionally illiterate [expletive deleted] trying to express themselves in 140 characters or less. Or fewer, to be grammatically correct.
Don’t be a pedantic [expletive deleted]. Who did this study? Researchers at University College London. They studied 1.3m UK tweets last week.
Was there a peak time for rude tweets? Yes, 9pm on Monday 1 September when Manchester United forward Danny Welbeck signed for Arsenal.
Were the offending tweets from the more lunkheaded type of disappointed gooner? Possibly. The researchers used geolocation data to create a UK map highlighting centres of coarse tweeting.
So where else scores high on the profaneometer? Clackmannanshire, East Ayrshire and Falkirk.
Where are the least sweary Twitter users? Oxford and Orkney.
Stuck-up [expletive deleted]. How rude! Why do you think people from Redcar are so sweary – is it to do with the melancholy way the sun sets over the steelworks or how the North Sea breeze carries a message of loss and woe in the form of torn-up betting slips from the town racecourse, perhaps?
[Expletive deleted] off! Economically, Redcar has revived since the steelworks reopened in 2012, and the sea front has been popular with tourists since Victorian times. Fair enough.
Why, there are lots of attractions in Redcar. The RNLI Zetland Lifeboat Museum, Kirkleatham Owl Centre, and nearby there’s Tocketts Water Mill too. Lovely. What was the name of that water mill again?
Tocketts. Sorry, thought you said something else.
And there’s the Redcar Beacon, the town’s “vertical pier” shortlisted last year for the Carbuncle Cup honouring Britain’s ugliest new building. Yes, that really is a pile of [expletive deleted].
Don’t tweet: “Redcar, you’ll know this. What rude word begins with “f” and rhymes with Friar Tuck?”
Do tweet: “The UCL study discovered that only 4.2% of tweets contain any kind of profanity. How pleasingly counterintuitive.”
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