Herndon: America's Most Obscene City

They sure love to swear

When most DCians think of Herndon and Reston, they think of some far-away place off in the hinterlands of Virginia. They're sleepy little communities off on the borders of the Metroless frontier, somewhere near Dulles.

But now? They're the capital of filth.

Those two little tech-happy cities love to swear. More specifically, they love to google naughty words, reports (if that's the right word for it) Business Insider.

The mischievous scamps who write for them took each of George Carlin's 7 Dirty Words -- which include @#$#, %@#$, @#$#@$ and most disgustingly, %%$### -- and entered them into Google's Trends feature, which ranks the frequency of searches.

Breaking the numbers down for each of those words, Reston shows up as the fifth most obscene city in the country -- eat your heart out, Toledo!  And, strangely, the fine citizens of Herndon show up as No. 1. That's a lot of dirty googling! Well(?) done!

So what inspired the good people at Business Insider to conduct this ground-breaking research?

Says the site, "During the summer of 2008, a defense attorney in an obscenity case planned to use Google search data in a Pensacola, Fla. court to prove that the city's morals were abnormally lax, as indicated by residents' search terms."

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Restonian, on the other hand, has a more plausible explanation. "They claimed they were doing this because such statistics can play a role in obscenity trials, but we all know they really started typing cuss words into a search engine for the same reason scientists strap missiles to dolphins -- because it's fun."

There's one possible explanation for why Herndon shows up so high (besides having a strangely high population of perverts). With AOL's HQ around, it's likely that legions of giggling teenage boys all across the country are having their dial-up search traffic routed through the company, skewing the results.

But that's not nearly as fun as the idea of all of Herndon's residents simultaneously typing "poop" into a search engine.

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