SNEAK PEEP
This is sort of what I'm working on these days - I don't know where it's leading, though.

You'll need to click on the image to see it clearly. What you are looking at is a screen shot of the Wordsmith Concordancing program of the top 30 movie scripts in my database (330 scripts) containing the F word. This is a kind of representation of all the instances of the word in the entire script. On the left you have the names of the movie, sometimes abbreviated for convenience. The plot on the right, looking something like a DNA test, is a graphic representation of where exactly the word appears in the script; dark clusters represent scenes where the F word appears in rapid succession; usually scenes where two or more people fight together.


Kevin Smith (Jay and Silent Bob strike back and Chasing Amy) and Quentin Tarantino manage to fill up quite a few of the top slots. If they aren't Tarantino films, then a case could be made that they are Tarantino wannabees, or very much like Tarantino films. Well, OK, Scorcese was doing that sort of stuff long before him. But the really weird thing is the football film (Any Given Sunday, Oliver Stone), in which no one is actually killed or blown to pieces. IMDB describes it as "An aging football coach finds himself struggling with his personal and professional life while trying to hold his team together." - no indication of the potty-mouth level of the film, which comes in at #10 out of 320 films.

I've used charts like this to show my students about language usage, since they all know the F word, and have more than an inkling about it's power and mystery, they should at least have the benefit of knowing how directly, statistically linked it is to the onset of fights and fighting, killers and killing.

At least that's what I think I'm teaching them.

Oh Fuck it!