Marylanders Curse How Much?

What's so great about being nice? 

Nice never got anybody anywhere, right?

According to a finding from the Marchex Institute, those are some questions Marylanders might use to rationalize the institute's recent findings: We curse and act impolitely on consumer telephone calls.

Whether that says anything about Marylanders as a people is between you and your robocaller, but it's statistically true, according to the institute - only Ohio had more cursing measured on more than 600,000 phone calls from the past 12 months. 

Virginia, our neighbor to the south, on the other hand, was fifth for most courteous.

Marchex released the findings just in time for National Etiquette Week, monitoring calls placed by consumers to businesses across 30 industries, including cable and satellite companies, auto dealerships, pest control centers and more.

The Institute scanned for curse words from A to F to S (use your imagination). Analysts then linked the frequency of those words with all 50 states.

The data placed Ohioans in the Top 5 “Least Courteous” category. Apparently, residents there have a harder time saying “please” and “thank you,” which were the keywords that Marchex’s Call Mining technology scanned for when aggregating data.

Washington state led the list of states where people are least likely to curse, followed by Massachusetts (second place), Arizona (third place), Texas (fourth place), Virginia (fifth place).

Ranking behind Ohio in the “sailors” category — states where people are most likely to curse — were: Maryland (second place), New Jersey (third place), Louisiana (fourth place), Illinois (fifth place).

Ohioans curse more than twice the rate of Washingtonians, according to the data. Washingtonians curse about every 300 conversations. Ohioans, on the other hand, swore about every 150 conversations.

The data also found that:

• two-thirds of curses come from men
• the calls that contain the most cursing are longer than 10 minutes. So the longer someone is on the phone, the more likely that call is to devolve.
• calls in the morning are twice as likely to produce cursing as calls in the afternoon or evening. (Coffee anyone?)

To read more, click here.

Have an opinion on whether Maryland is more or less profane than the institute says? Tell us what you think. Well, maybe clean it up a little before you do.