This article was published on August 27, 2016

Study: Liberals suck at spelling, conservatives love profanity


Study: Liberals suck at spelling, conservatives love profanity

We’re just over 70 days from the presidential election and things are heating up. In heated conversation and debate, it’s not uncommon to drop the occasional four-letter word. It seems, however, that Trump supporters are dropping a lot more of them than Clinton supporters.

To conduct the study, Grammarly analyzed comments in the largest Reddit communities for both candidates. Overall, there were a lot of similarities, save for one major difference — Trump supporters are more apt to use profanity. In fact, Trump’s supporters dropped four-letter words 135 percent more often than Clinton supporters. While the latter used the word “shit” in 1.76 percent of comments, the former’s used it in 4.46 percent.

“Fuck” was also notable, as it appeared in 5.61 percent of Trump supporter comments and only 1.8 percent of Clinton supporter comments. Surprisingly, “bitch” was the least-used curse word of either of the two groups at just .11 percent and .56 percent (Clinton and Trump, respectively). I say surprising because ‘Trump that Bitch’ seems to be a rally cry from Trump supporters.

There’s even a t-shirt.

Screen Shot 2016-08-26 at 2.37.14 PM
Credit: Amazon

Aside from profanity, Trump’s supporters also used “politically incorrect” language 88 percent more often than Clinton’s. This should come as no surprise though, Trump himself has spoken out on his hatred of America’s PC culture.

Grammarly also did what Grammarly does and check for spelling and grammatical errors. The two sides were actually remarkably similar. Trump’s supporters made 2.1 mistakes for every 100 words compared to Clinton’s 1.8. In both, the the most common errors were in apostrophe usage, followed by misusing “then” and “than.” Clinton supporters made more spelling mistakes.

For all the differences, there’s one phrase that both used at near-equal levels: “America’s demise.”

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