6 March 2011
The internet dating site OkCupid periodically publishes data about dating trends and what strategies are successful on its site. It’s not hardcore statistical research, but it appears to be generally valid and they’ve got a huge (if somewhat biased by self-selection) collection of data with which to work. On 8 February, they published information on what questions to ask on a first date to find out if the person you have just met is a candidate for soul mate.
The last question they address is “Is my date religious?” The good statisticians at OkCupid suggest that to find the answer to this question, you should ask “Do spelling and grammar mistakes annoy you?” Could there really be a connection between religious faith and prescriptivism? The folks at OkCupid seem to think so, but the connection may not be what you think.
(Scroll to the end of the OkCupid blog post to find the question and data.)
According to the OkCupid data, there is a rather strong correlation between faith and prescriptivism, but it runs the opposite of what you might think. By a 2:1 margin, people who think grammar mistakes are no big deal are at least moderately religious. It is the atheists and agnostics who are more likely to whip out the blue pencils and correct the errors of others.
This correlates with earlier data they published that those whose dating profiles are written at a higher proficiency level tend to be less serious about religion. Now the standard tools for measuring writing proficiency (which I’m pretty sure the OkCupid folks used; they’re widely available and it’s not like the service is going to invest in developing its own linguistic tools) are crap and don’t really tell you anything about a person’s real writing ability, but here we have a correlation between professed religious belief and a measurement of some arbitrarily selected aspects of writing proficiency.
It also fits in with a question that puzzled me when I was doing my research for Word Myths. When working on the chapter on political correctness, all the examples I could find of people getting upset over the political implications of particular words and phrases were progressives and liberals (e.g., feminists upset over rule of thumb, the false etymologies of picnic and nitty gritty). I searched in vain for examples from a conservative perspective because I did not want to appear to be coming from one particular side of the political spectrum. Now religion is not politics, but there is a connection between religious belief and conservative politics, at least there is today in the States. Is prescriptivism in the mix as well? The data from OkCupid would make it seem so. Sounds like a nice Ph.D. dissertation, too bad I’m doing medieval lit and not sociolinguistics.
