Atheists will all tell you that atheism isn’t a religion, but I think these days it’s becoming one. I constantly see more and more people posting links to posts proclaiming that “science” beats “religion” every time, even though the majority of the world’s religious population are perfectly normal people who also believe in “science”. And plenty of the world’s not-religious people are blithering halfwits.

Perhaps I’m getting old, but there’s a sneering pompousness about atheism these days that doesn’t really reflect my own point of view. Sure, I don’t believe in gods. And yes, I think that people who do are a slightly odd. I also think you’re slightly odd if you want to drive a car with an automatic gearbox, but I won’t align myself with a group of people whose only entertainment in life is slagging off people who have automatic gearboxes. It just seems a bit too negative.

So from now on I’m not an atheist. My religion is “none”. I don’t believe in a god, and I don’t believe in taking pot-shots at people who do.

Who’s with me? I need money to build our church.

As you probably know already, I am not a great gun fan. Like everyone else, I spend my lunchtimes sitting watching videos that already agree with my point of view. Because, y’know, otherwise how would you learn anything? Anyway – one of the things that is often cited by people on my side of the debate is the vast number of gun deaths in America compared to other civilised countries. And, sure enough, there they are on the list, right up there with all the places you’d not like to live. But I think this is a kind of meaningless statistic – of course hardly anyone in the UK is killed with a gun. There aren’t any guns there. There are very few snowmobile-related deaths in Afghanistan.

I would assume that, every hour, about the same volume of the population in America and the UK decide “Right. That does it. I’m going to do that twat some serious damage”. Then, with the finest murder weapon they can get their hands on, off they trot. Americans obviously have it comparatively easy as they can either use one of their own guns or pop to the supermarket and buy an AK-47. But us Brits are resourceful souls. We could run someone over with the car, or throw a waffle iron into their bath, or push them out of their bathroom window. How hard can it be?

Instead of comparing firearm murder rates, what we really want to compare is any-old-weapon murder rates. And, actually, Americans do way better on that list. They have 4.7 homicides per 100,000 people – this compared to a world average of 6.9. They’re still behind most of the places I’d like to live (UK 1.2; France 1.1; China 1.0; Switzerland 0.7) but they’re ahead of some surprising locations (Russia 10.2; Saint Lucia 25!). So perhaps it’s not such a bad spot after all.

Another thing to think about is the fact that a gun is probably a more sure fire murder weapon (ha, ha) than whatever the angry but resourceful Brit might have come up with. So presumably America has a higher successful-murder rate but Britain will have higher rates of other injuries. There aren’t so many clear numbers on this, but the Wikipedia page about American crime has a section devoted to comparisons. Summary: probably not.

Of course, there are probably quite a few murderers in the UK who run out of steam while trying to find a murder weapon, or their weapon of choice fails entirely to injure the person they were after. I’ve no statistics on that. Hopefully they got it worked out some other way. Maybe it’s for the best.

There are some people who spend their lives determining what makes an R-rated film and what makes a PG-rated film. And, of course, there are all sorts of factors. But if you took the visuals out and compared just the dialogue? What words appear in R-rated films but not PG-rated films? And vice versa?

I used the Internet Movie Script Database and several computer programs to build a list of the most common words in the 519 R-rated films they had scripts for, and the most common words in their 332 PG-rated film scripts. Obviously the majority of the words contained in these scripts are pretty unsurprising. The most common word in both is the, which is also the most common word in the English language. Where it starts to get interesting is where the proportions differ.

Some differences you’d expect – the word fucking has the greatest disparity, occurring in 80% of R scripts and only 33% of PG ones. The rest of the top four are taken up by fuck, fucked and fuckin. In at 5th is asshole (56% of R; 31% of PG). Then comes jesus, shortly followed by christ, so obviously it’s the two words together that are making the difference. It’s amusing to see that “jesus christ” is used in language so much more often than either “jesus” or “christ”.

Shortly behind our lord and saviour is motherfucker and the top ten is rounded off nicely by bullshit and fucker (29% of R; 6% of PG). Some of the words I might have expected to appear in the top ten are nowhere to be seen – murder is way down at 20th and gun comes in at a miserable 517th (just 18% of R-rated films and 12% of PG-rated ones). It’s interesting that cigarette (in 12th) beats joint (in 13th), which in turn beats drugs (29th).

Of course, there must be some words that appear in PG films but not R films, right? Well, there are, but the difference is less distinctive. The biggest hitter is the word ship, which appears in 40% of PG films but only 23% of R ones. It’s followed closely by bows, excitement, cloud, larger and tower (41% of PG; 26% of R), but sadly I think any statistician would tell you this was irrelevant on a data set of this size.

Without further ado, here are the words that appear the most in R-rated films compared with PG-rated films. The words are sized by discrepancy.

 

And, in case you’re interested, here is the entire list in a big spreadsheet. Want to guarantee a PG rating for your film? Steer clear of any sort of fucks, don’t mention cigarettes (other drugs are ok) and don’t blaspheme. Perhaps add a nautical theme and your film is practically guaranteed a PG. Unless its primary visuals involve people being gunned down while conducting sexual acrobatics with a chain-smoking Shetland pony.

It’s possible that films are rated on more than just dialogue.