IvГЎn and I have a good time each week doing our Curmudgeon’s Corner podcast on current events. But last week we got a comment from a listener (OK, it was my mom) saying we just plain swore too much and it detracted from the show.

Of course, I had to check this out with numbers. Our March 12th show was 102 minutes long (plus a few seconds). In that time by my count IvГЎn swore 99 times, and I swore 33 times. That gave us a total of 132 times, or on average once every 46.5 seconds.

Of course, that’s if you listen to the whole show. As part of our March 20th show where we respond to my mom’s comments (and give some additional stats), I compiled a “supercut” of JUST the swearing from the episode she was reacting to. In this version, the March 12th show is reduced to JUST the bits with swearing. You get all 132 instances, compressed into 7:38, or an average of once every 3.5 seconds… for almost eight minutes.

Now, if you are offended by such things, don’t hit play. But we actually found this rather amusing, and on the podcast I promised to make this also available independently from the podcast itself. Here it is:

As amusing as this was to listen to once or twice, IvГЎn and I actually agree that our use of “bad language” was excessive in that episode. Quite a bit so. And that is not necessarily out of the norm for the episodes we have done in the past.

We are going to try to clean it up a little bit in future shows. We sometimes don’t even notice we are doing it, but it seems like putting in a bit of effort here is probably worth it. We’d like to get a few more regular listeners, and we know from previous comments from other folks that my mother is not the only one turned off by this kind of language.

We won’t try to avoid it entirely… it is a normal part of how normal people talk, especially when they get emotional about what they are talking about. But, yes, averaging more than once a minute is a bit too much. Maybe we can get it down to one every five minutes. Or maybe even ten?

Tune in to find out. :-)

Edited 11:57 UTC to add a link.

Edited 2017-04-15 17:09 UTC to fix audio player, which had stopped working at some point.