It is a generally assumed principle, much like the sun rising in the east or bears hibernating in the winter, that Canadians are an unfailingly polite people. They don't like to argue; they apologize for mistakes that others make.
We accept that Canadians are exceedingly polite — and now we have some data to prove it. Two doctoral students at McMaster University, a bit outside of Toronto, compared millions of geotagged tweets from the United States and Canada from 2015. They looked at the top 10 percent of words most likely to be used by Canadians and compared them with the top 10 percent most likely to be used by Americans.
They found that Canadians, true to form, are just way nicer on Twitter. This is a word cloud of each country's most-used words — note that some on the American side had to be blurred out, as they were not appropriate for the university's website:
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The most disproportionately Canadian words on Twitter are things like "amazing," "great," and "favourite." Of course, the word "agree" is on the Canadian side of things, too.
The words way more likely to show up in American tweets — some of which are blurred out in the above image — include "damn," "hate," "ass," and some racial slurs that we will not repeat here.
You can explore the most Canadian and American words here, on a site built by McMaster University's Daniel Schmidtke and Bryor Snefjella. They've also done interesting work comparing word usage in England and Scotland, as a way to understand how the English language changes when it crosses over countries' borders.
