Survey: Virginians are Polite, Thanks

Virginia isn't just for lovers — it's also for nice people.

That's the finding from the Marchex Institute, a data analysis firm.

Just in time for National Etiquette Week, Marchex released findings on the most courteous and the least courteous states in the nation.

The Institute examined more than 600,000 phone calls from the past 12 months. You know, the calls that "may be recorded for training purposes."

The calls were placed by consumers to businesses across 30 industries, including cable and satellite companies, auto dealerships, pest control centers and more, says Marchex.

The Institute scanned for curse words from A to F to S (use your imagination). Analysts then linked the frequency of those words with all 50 states.

The data placed Ohioans in the Top 5 “Least Courteous” category. Apparently, residents there have a harder time saying “please” and “thank you,” which were the keywords that Marchex’s Call Mining technology scanned for when aggregating data.

Washington state led the list of states where people are least likely to curse, followed by Massachusetts (second place), Arizona (third place), Texas (fourth place), Virginia (fifth place).

Ranking behind Ohio in the “Sailors” category — states where people are most likely to curse — were: Maryland (second place), New Jersey (third place), Louisiana (fourth place), Illinois (fifth place).

Ohioans curse more than twice the rate of Washingtonians, according to the data. Washingtonians curse about every 300 conversations. Ohioans, on the other hand, swore about every 150 conversations.

The data also found that:

• two-thirds of curses come from men
• the calls that contain the most cursing are longer than 10 minutes. So the longer someone is on the phone, the more likely that call is to devolve.
• calls in the morning are twice as likely to produce cursing as calls in the afternoon or evening. (Maybe people are grumpier before their coffee kicks in.)

To read more $@#%^!!, click here.

Think your state is more or less profane than they say? Tell us what you think. Well, maybe clean it up a little before you tell us.