Swearing At Swearengen
My wife and I started watching the HBO series Deadwood a few weeks ago, but we've had a hard time getting into it because of the overabundance of profanity. We're no prudes, but hearing the word "fuck" so often actually seems to interfere with our ability to follow the plot. I'm a bit of a history buff as well, and a lot of the profanity in the series seems anachronistic to me.
After seeing this post over at the Nonist [Link], which contains some interesting links about the history of Deadwood, South Dakota, I decided to do a little research on the historical accuracy of the series, and found this very informative site that not only addressed my skepticism about the veracity of the obscenities used on the show (they are indeed anachronisms), but also provides a comparison of each character in the series with their historical counterpart, if they even existed. Turns out that, far from being a true snapshot of the town's history, it's riddled with fictional, or composite characters, and plays freely with the timeline of various events and relationships, often creating them out of whole cloth in order to make some dubious point, or arouse our prurient interest.
Once again, Hollywood demonstrates that they just can't stop...[ahem]...fucking around with history.
[Link: HBOs Deadwood: Fact & Fiction]
And of course, there's a site that's actually keeping a running average of the number of times the f-bomb is dropped in each episode.
[Link: The Number of Fucks In Deadwood]