Philly rudest? Twitter ‘study’ full of it

To those media outlets calling Philly the nation's rudest city because of a new Twitter study:

Yo mama!

Cow flatulence smells better than this study and how it's been reported.

Zombies' faces have fewer flaws.

Not that Philly cares. Some folks here are proud of their spirited in-your-face frankness - and not ashamed about the legendary pelting of a bogus scrawny Santa with snowballs.

But a so-called study by a Ukrainian outfit of just two phrases - good morning and F-bomb + you - is as scientific as the man in the Moon.

Basically, a Ukrainian company, Vertaline, created "heat maps" that crunch how often tweets contained the two phrases.

They're cool, considered as interactive utilities with entertainment value. As for information value, take it with a grain of salt.

Indeed, the founder and CEO of Ukraine-based Vertaline admitted as much in an email late this morning:

"It is better to accept maps as fun. There is no serious science theory in current study," wrote Oleksandr Bondar in an email, noting that results varied from day to day.

If you go to the maps - http://twitter-heatmap.vertalab.com - other places outdo Philly in use of the F-bomb phrase on almost all of the 11 tested dates (July 14 to 24). Dallas wins out several times, with Los Angeles, Houston, Toronto-Cleveland and Tennessee also dropping more F-bombs on various days.

Philly was actually the politest place on June 20 - if you buy that tweeting "good morning" means anything.

Maybe it means Philly has lots of Good Morning America fans. Or that a colleague's tweets that begin "Good Morning" get retweeted a lot. Or that Philly, duh, simply has a lot of people.

Bondar acknowledged the results tended to reflect population patterns.

In any case, we're not talking about a ton of perpetrators anyway.

Out of more than 4 million tweets one day, fewer than 10,000 you-know-whats appeared in the 462 "specific locations" measured.

That averages out to a couple dozen per area.

One prolific potty-mouth could almost account for that.