Sod's law: cartoonists map Britain's rudest slang with cunning linguists

If you've ever doodled something rude in a notebook during a boring meeting and wondered whether it could ever be "proper work", two British cartoonists who go by the name Modern Toss have some encouraging news. Twenty-one years ago, Jon Link and Mick Bunnage were sketching angry little cartoons on their commute. Now they've got a University of Sheffield linguistics department on speed dial, a piece in the New York Times, and an interactive map of British swearing that's about to go on show in Bermondsey, London.

The headline exhibit at Having an exhibition yeah?, Modern Toss's 21st anniversary show, is a prototype device called the UK Swear Map. Push one of 12 buttons and you hear a regional voice reading out a local insult, all channelled through an old phone receiver mounted, appropriately, off the coast of Norfolk on the map itself.

To give you a flavour of what to expect, Liverpool gives you "blert", Sunderland offers "cheb", Belfast contributes "ballix", Portsmouth's is "dinlo" and south-west England weighs in with "grockle".

From sketchbook to census

None of this is guesswork. Modern Toss built the map with Dr Chris Montgomery and colleagues at the University of Sheffield, who ran an actual swear census to gather the material. For a creative team best known for machines that dispense insults for a token, it's a step up in rigour: real linguists, a real dataset, a real research question about how English is spoken rather than how it's written down.

Dr Chris's point—that swearing is a basic part of how people express identity, humour and belonging, yet almost never gets recorded properly—is obvious once someone says it, and invisible until they do.

Regional dialects are fading, and AI language tools, trained mostly on tidy written English, tend to flatten or mishear regional accents altogether. A map of local swearwords, daft as it sounds, is doing a job that no formal archive is: capturing English exactly as people actually talk... mess and all.

Why creatives should care

The biggest lesson here isn't really about swearing itself. It's about what happens when you take a joke seriously enough, for long enough, that it becomes something else entirely: research, archive, cultural record. The map is funny. It's also, by any sensible definition, proper fieldwork.

Modern Toss haven't diluted their voice to make the project credible; they've kept the voice and let the credibility come to them. Jon puts it simply: they've spent years "turning filthy data into charts and daft interactive art", and this has just given them the chance to do it with academic backing.

That's a fair summary of two decades of practice: relentless commitment to one distinctive tone, applied to whatever format will carry it, from greetings cards to Channel 4 animation to a seven-minute choral rendition of the Periodic Table of Swearing at Brighton Dome.

That consistency is the real trick. A studio or freelancer chasing every trend ends up with a portfolio that says nothing in particular. Modern Toss have spent 21 years saying the same thing in the same register, and the world has built infrastructure around them for it.

There's also a structural idea worth stealing. The map is explicitly unfinished: this is a prototype, and the public can add their own words and recordings via this form. Rather than treating the archive as a finished deliverable, Modern Toss have turned it into an ongoing, crowd-fed project, keeping both the work and the press attention around it alive well past launch day.

The rest of the shithouse

The map shares the show with the return of the F***yeux Tapestry, a 103-metre cartoon parody of the Bayeux Tapestry originally stitched together with hundreds of participants at Somerset House. Its timing is neat: it's back in London just as the real Bayeux Tapestry goes on display at the British Museum, giving anyone who fancies both versions a very odd but very doable double bill this autumn.

Beyond that, the exhibition packs in more than 100 works: token-operated swearing machines, oversized stone heads, big paintings, a wind-powered sculpture shaped like a finger, and a five-metre ceiling mobile hung with four life-size flies. Every ticket includes tokens for the interactive pieces, including the studio's long-running Periodic Table of Swearing.

Jon will also run live sittings in the Modern Toss Portrait Booth, sketching visitors from inside a custom booth and posting the finished drawings back out through the wall: part theatre, part mildly menacing vending machine.