#strong-language — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #strong-language, aggregated by home.social.
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What kind of profanity is this?
Regular readers will be familiar with Strong Language, a group blog about swearing that I co-founded with James Harbeck in 2014. If you’re interested in swearing as a linguistic or cultural phenomenon, I recommend bookmarking or subscribing to it.
New posts by our excellent contributors are less frequent now, but that makes it easier to catch up if you haven’t visited before or feel like browsing the archives. The blog has over 400 posts: fascinating and colourful explorations of profanity for readers not averse to such material.
I also contribute to Strong Language now and then, and this post on Sentence first introduces the last few that I wrote. What follows below is not very sweary – there’s one reference to a strong swear – but if this type of language freaks you out like it does Ned Flanders, or just plain doesn’t interest you, you may prefer to bail out here.
From “Be-bop-a-Lisa” in Simpsons Comics no. 6 (1994). Script & pencils: Bill Morrison; Inks: Tim Bavington; Colours: Cindy Vance. Editor: Steve Vance
I’m interested in how people refer to swearing: as bad language, explicit language, dirty language, adult language, and so on. The adjectives form an intriguing set. ‘Strong bad mature filthy language’ examines the patterns that emerge and explains why I proposed Strong Language as the name for the blog.
The title of the present post, you may have twigged, alludes to Amy Winehouse and her song ‘Me & Mr Jones’, which contains a line I borrowed more directly for ‘What kind of “fuckery” is this?’. The post delves into that word’s meanings and use, originally literal but now usually (and variously) figurative.
Also in a pop-cultural vein, John Boorman’s 1987 drama film Hope and Glory has a scene that depicts swearing as a rite of passage for a group of boys in London during World War II. My short post puts the scene in context and discusses its effects.
Most recently, I wrote about a remarkably successful euphemism in ‘Another freaking f-word’. This use of freaking first appeared in 1928, as far as we know, so its centenary is just around the corner. In the post I look at why and where it has become so freaking popular.
#blogging #etymology #language #linguistics #popCulture #pragmatics #profanity #slang #strongLanguage #swearing #usage #words -
CW: Strong language! And racism etc.
I finally got around to starting Deadwood, of which I collected all three seasons and the bonus movie from op shops. And crikey does it go hard on the colourful language! Quite amazing for a show from the bleepin' USA.
"I may have fucked up my life flatter than hammered shit, but I stand here before you today beholden to no human cocksucker, and holding a working fucking gold claim, and not the U.S. government telling me I'm trespassing, or the savage fucking red man or any of these other limber-dick cocksuckers passing themselves off as prospectors had better try and stop me."
OK. Give the man another whiskey, I guess.
https://trakt.tv/shows/deadwood
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0348914/ -
Another freaking f-word. New post for @stronglang about "freaking" as a euphemistic intensifier:
https://stronglang.wordpress.com/2026/01/22/another-freaking-f-word/#language #swearing #euphemisms #slang #freaking #linguistics #StrongLanguage
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Related: an old @stronglang post on multilingual swearing:
https://stronglang.wordpress.com/2015/01/01/christ-fucking-shit-merde-on-the-variable-power-of-multilingual-swearing/#swearing #language #linguistics #multilingualism #bilingualism #profanity #StrongLanguage
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Fun, end of day read: the saga of Hendrix, a blue-and-gold macaw with a real gift for strong language.
“One day he will call you baby and the next day he’s calling you a...hmm. MFer I guess is the politest way to type it out.”
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#Quangobaud #Wordpress #ScienceFiction
releasing this bit early as I've only got two parts left to draft but the rest still needs to wait till it's all complete for a continuity read-through
it's the penultimate chapter but the conclusion of the story in which you might be able to tell my mood
update 2025-07-30 this story is actually being de-listed by Wordpress! Y'all should read it just for that!
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“Despite consistently enthusiastic reviewer comments, no editors have yet accepted our work for publication—it seems to be the type of paper that editors are nervous to touch. Currently, the work is under review for a fourth time, for possible inclusion in the 2025 IEEE International Conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN), in a paper titled “Oh F**k! How Do People Feel About Robots That Leverage Profanity?”
#stronglanguage #robotics #sociology
https://mastodon.social/@ieeespectrum/114675943485797239 -
"You can’t join if you can’t swear." New post at @stronglang on swearing as a childhood rite of passage in wartime London:
https://stronglang.wordpress.com/2025/05/29/swearing-as-a-rite-of-passage/#swearing #profanity #film #language #JohnBoorman #WWII #StrongLanguage
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**Vulgarity in online discourse around the English-speaking world**
“_Australians might well be disheartened when they discover that they are not the top users of profanity among English-speaking countries. Their deep national attachment to the vernacular dates back to the original mix of slang, dialect and underworld jargon that gave rise to Australian English — fueled by anti-authoritarian sentiment, the colloquial part of the language expanded to become the feature that best distinguished the established citizen (or old chum) from the stranger (or new chum).”
Schweinberger, M. and Burridge, K. (2025) 'Vulgarity in online discourse around the English-speaking world,' Lingua, 321, p. 103946. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2025.103946.
#OpenAccess #OA #Article #DOI #Linguistics #Swearing #Vulgarity #StrongLanguage #English #Language #Academia #Academics @linguistics
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**Linguistics expert explains why the c-word 'still has the ability to shock'**
_“The sounds are blunt, there are only four sounds in it, it's a very short sharp word. It's normally delivered with quite a lot of emphasis that it's being used as a profanity and for that reason, that still has the ability to shock.”_
#English #StrongLanguage #Words #Language #Linguistics @linguistics
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Nancy Friedman has an enlightening and safe-for-work discussion of "smut" over on the Strong Language blog
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Why we swear like a trooper, trucker, sailor, fishwife.
Updated my @stronglang post with notes from Ashley Montagu's 1967 book The Anatomy of Swearing:
https://stronglang.wordpress.com/2022/12/11/trooper-trucker-sailor-fishwife-what-we-swear-like-when-we-swear-like-a-something/#swearing #profanity #linguistics #language #StrongLanguage #AshleyMontagu #idioms
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I keep on getting sent Garron Noone videos ... I had to clip this bit #RobotsAre... #Warning #StrongLanguage