Quentin Tarantino Loves Swear Words — And These Interactive Charts Show Just How Much
Quentin Tarantino's been in the news for far worse lately, but his penchant for screenplays filled with swears and slurs makes headlines whenever he finishes a new film. He's faced scrutiny for decades over his brazen usage of the n-word, which spurred FiveThirtyEight's 2015 effort to quantify the usage of all the dirty words in Tarantino's oeuvre1.
A few days ago FiveThirtyEight consolidated some of their tasty datasets, so Stephen Black took the Tarantino data and dropped it into Tableau, a web-based data viz service, for our collective ease of perusal.
Thanks to the rigor of FiveThirtyEight's data collection and to Tableau's wealth of options, you can break down the numbers by words, word groups (compound cusses) and even track usage through the films over time. Here's what that graph looks like for all variants of "shit":
Yes, "Pulp Fiction" and "Jackie Brown" are neck-and-neck in fecal fecundity towards the end of their runtimes. You can check out which Tarantino films fling the most of a given curse and how fast they fly — "Pulp Fiction" has the highest total number of curses, but "Reservoir Dogs" handily trumps its swears-per-minute (4.5 to "Pulp's" 3.2). If lines and charts aren't your thing, there's even an option for a word cloud:
Pound-for-pound that's probably the objectively foulest image ever posted to Digg dot com. If you want to keep exploring Tarantino's potty-mouth at Tableau, be our guest.
[Stephen Black via Reddit]