It's May, and a new Prey novel is in the stores. Or perhaps it's September and it's a Virgil novel. Either one works.

Within a week of its release, [1] a large number of people write in to the website, specifically to complain about how much swearing there is in this latest book. Never before has there been so much use of "the F word" [2] in a Sandford novel. [3] The email writer (I'm not calling them fans because I do not believe they are fans, whatever they may claim [4]) has read every single John Sandford novel up to this point, but this latest one is nothing but filth, filth, filth, pure unadulterated profanity and swearing, for its entire length. The email writer goes on to say that while normally they donate books they don't like to a library, this one is going straight in the trash. [5] Even recycling is too good for this horrible, wretched violation of the English language. [6]

This happens for every book. [7] Every. Single. Book. From this, it's pretty easy to imagine that the swearing-per-capita in the books is on a steady — and perhaps exponential — increase. [8]

That didn't feel right to me. Sure, some books would have more swearing than others, but it didn't feel like a huge, out-of-control increase. It didn't feel like anything, really. Some books had more, but others would have less. But was there anything I could do to find out what, if anything, was going on? [9]

Well, yes. Yes there was. I'm an almost-but-not-quite stereotypical nerd. [10] I've also got access to digital copies of all of the books. Not in some eBook format or other, but in the original (and the edited) .doc files that the author uses. [11] It's easy enough to do a search for the word "fuck" or for "shit" and take down the total count. It's easy to divide into those numbers the total wordcount for a given book and get an (approximate) per-capita of the swearing. And, with that, it's easy to chart all that data. [12]

And as I said, I'm a nerd. So I did exactly that.

Here is the result. It's a Postscript file, so don't click unless you can handle those. [13] The first page shows the raw numbers (book wordcount, instances of swearing, and per-thousand-words swearing). The second page is a chart plotting the raw swearing numbers (by category and with the total). The third page is a chart plotting the same data per thousand words.

The Prey books in general have more swearing than anything in the Kidd series (the first one of which still holds the record for lowest swearing-per-capita of any of the books).

The first two Virgil novels are not appreciably different from the Prey series in terms of swearing, but the most recent two are substantially lower. The most recent Virgil novel, Bad Blood, has the second lowest swearing-per-capita of any of the books. [15]

The two non-series books, The Night Crew and Dead Watch, do not approach Prey levels. [16]

And the kicker is that the highest content of swearing in any of the books rates at 4.713 instances of swearing per thousand words. That's a bit more than one instance per page. If, in a book that's has multiple murders and extreme violence, you are worried about swearing that reaches an average of once per page, you may have your priorities in the wrong order. [17]

Not that this will make any difference in the complaints. I know it won't, because I've already been met with outright denialism. No matter how accurate your data may be, someone will still say "Well you're wrong!" and leave it at that. [19] Or they'll share an anecdote about how they met a policeman and he didn't swear at all. [20] You can show them charts and graphs and get a response insisting that you're lying, or that you just can't do math. [21] Or that you're promoting some evil liberal agenda by defending an obvious pornographer. [22]

So really, in the end, it doesn't matter what you can prove. To the people who've already made up their minds, proof is a four-letter word. [23]