Swimmer Reax
A swimmer reacts during the women's competition at the Aquatics World Championships. Reuters/Hannibal Hanschke

We might not like to admit it, but everyone does it. Helen Mirren does it. Minions do it. H---, even we do it! We're talking about swearing, of course. And a forensic linguist has created some colorful maps to highlight who says what in the U.S.

Now, if these maps show us one thing, it's that curse words are subjective. Of course, some words are roundly identified as a curse word. But others? Not so much. Some words like "darn" and "gosh" wouldn't even register as offensive in the Northeast. Call us traditional, but we'd classify only the late George Carlin's words as "dirty."

Caution: NSFW Language

The maps show that certain areas of the country are prone to use different swears. A------, for example, is used more in the Northeast, while f--- seems to be concentrated on the coasts and b---- in the South.

These maps are part of a larger project that Jack Grieve, a professor at Aston University in Britain, has been working on with Andrea Nini, also of Aston, and Diansheng Guo and Alice Kaskoff of the University of South Carolina. The research looks at 9 billion tweets. taking into account the language and location of each.

The research has shown that usage of specific words grows over time. Grieve worked with Quartz to assemble some maps to see how words like "baeless," "xans" and "unbothered" grew in usage.

From the maps, Grieve points out that a divide between North and South is clear -- the lexicons of the two areas seeing a strong disparity. Also, he noted that African-American English often drives new words, as they first appear in black communities in Chicago and Detroit.

Earlier research by Bert Vaux and Scott Golder helped produce maps have shown how various regions use different words for the same thing. The New York Times even created an interactive tool to locate your dialect. It did not include swear words.

Not fit to print? Perhaps.