Fair warning: We’re defining “man” here in a much more nerdy way than, say, the tree-chopping, Dos Esquis-swigging sense. Here, we’ll be talking about male tweeting tendencies when computed from raw data through a field of study called sociolinguistics.
The study here was originally uncorked by Fast Company and is taken from a paper called “Discriminating Gender on Twitter,” which is being presented at a language conference in Scotland this week. The paper, put together by Mitre, takes a look at different factors from a person’s Twitter–their handle, full name, description and tweets–and how they can be used to assess a person’s gender, which they did with 92% accuracy when taking a look at all four of the above-mentioned fields.
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But really that’s nothing new, as names are already strong predictors of a person’s gender. So the study hones in even more, looking explicitly at the language used in the tweets themselves. Using a technique called n-gramming, which analyzes diction and syntax, they were able to not only differentiate between the tweeting tendencies supposedly separating men and women, but uncover the words both genders supposedly use the most.
Here’s their slightly ridiculous list:
Take the findings here with a grain of salt, or rather, entire horse-sized licks. Fast Company mentions a few other similar studies, the findings of which are actually pretty interesting. Here, however, there’s no note of discrimination between age, usage rate and a host of other factors, and these words don’t seem to accurately represent the entirety of Twitter’s user base.
Why, for instance, would males be prone to “http” and “google”? (Unless the study primarily took a look at overzealous tech bloggers or something. Even when embedding a link, doesn’t “http” automatically get shortened?) And the female set is even more eyebrow-raising.
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However, I guess if you’re interested in tweeting like a man (at least according to this data), you can avoid a lot of the words used in the first box, particularly stuff like “etsy” and “yummy.” You can even throw in a sporadic “google” to really screw with the system.
But if you’re looking to Twitter to put hair on your chest, I’m sure most folks would agree with me and think that’s sooo sad. LOL. Hehe. Chocolate. Bed.
Chris Gayomali is a writer-reporter at TIME. Find him on Twitter at @chrigz, on Facebook, or on Google+. You can also continue the discussion on TIME’s Facebook page and on Twitter at @TIME.