Eff Count

I measure poverty of language using an F-count. An F-count is the number of times you use a word derived from the regex f[kuc]{3} in one minute. Larger values indicate poverty of language. Surprisingly large values have been measured in certain gyms.

I measure it like this: The richer the language, the more vile it can get WITHOUT swearing. English is an impoverished language. As the MalGlico page demonstrates, we can't even form pejoratives without saying EffYuCeeKay?. --AnonymousDonor

Where are people getting this from? English has lots of ways of forming pejoratives - bad, poor, vile, hateful, terrible, stupid, awful, blasted, idiotic, stinking, horrible, foolish, lousy, pathetic, rotten, damned, damnable, uncool, even crappy - that are just as good as the F-word.

BillyConnolly? did a great routine in the mid to late 80s about this. He observed that people accused him of having a poorly developed vocabularly because he swears a lot. He disagreed and said something along the lines of, "Give me a replacement for F*** Off that is equally as expressive and I will happily use it... It certainly isn't Go Away!". ["Go away" doesn't have the right vowels.] He also claimed that it was universally understood: no matter how little English someone might know - including the old guy at the airport who was excessively eager to carry his luggage - they always understood what "F*** off" meant.

The EffCount can also be used to measure the difficulty and unpleasantness of a task. Simply count the number of times you have to say the F-word while completing it. For me DIY has a very high F-count. putting up shelves has an F-count of 8, whereas wallpapering a room reached 40.

The F-Count sounds like less of a measure of the poverty of a language, and more of the poverty of the user's lexicon.

The F-count for the Linux kernel source can be found here: http://www.durak.org/sean/pubs/kfc/