#swearing — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #swearing, aggregated by home.social.
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CW: F-Bomb
#Frustration #Ire #Swearing #Apps
NO! I do NOT want to have to install your fucking app in order to use your product.
If the shitty, spyware app is mandatory then tell be *BEFORE* I make a purchase. Scum.
Fuck you.
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Useless Facts, Badly Drawn #504: Swearnet.
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#swearnet #movies #facts #movietrivia #censorship #language #swearing #comcis #webcomics #uselessfacts #uselessfactsbadlydrawn -
"In my research, I have noticed that while all western countries write in cursive, Ireland is the only country to speak in cursive." --- Bernard O’Scanaill #language #literature #university #HigherEd #linguistics #edchat #swearing www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle...
Readers reply: which countries... -
UK: Urban Swear Map Update! preply.com/en/blog/uk-c... #language #research #swearing #edchat #English #linguistics
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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 -
If you're in need of some sweary fun, here's an interactive Periodic Table of Swearing: https://ptos.moderntoss.com/
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If you're in need of some sweary fun, here's an interactive Periodic Table of Swearing: https://ptos.moderntoss.com/
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If you're in need of some sweary fun, here's an interactive Periodic Table of Swearing: https://ptos.moderntoss.com/
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If you're in need of some sweary fun, here's an interactive Periodic Table of Swearing: https://ptos.moderntoss.com/
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Australia may be well known for the plethora of unfriendly animals that want to bite you or do you in like snakes, spiders, sharks, crocodiles, and drop bears; but now here is something else you can beware of.
The Australian Swearing Owl more commonly known as the Frogmouth Owl, will help to make your stay here upsetting and enraging. Hunting by night the owl will sit in a tree by day and spend the whole time swearing and cursing loudly and profusely. This, along with its huge beak, distinguishes it from the beautiful and cultured owls found in the #NorthernHemisphere.
It has an incredible vocabulary consisting solely of the foulest and most disgusting language, particularly if tourists are known to be in the area.
#SuperbOwlSunday #owl #owls #AustralianBirds #AustralianFaunaWillKillYou
#Australia #swearing #cursing #cussing -
Australia may be well known for the plethora of unfriendly animals that want to bite you or do you in like snakes, spiders, sharks, crocodiles, and drop bears; but now here is something else you can beware of.
The Australian Swearing Owl more commonly known as the Frogmouth Owl, will help to make your stay here upsetting and enraging. Hunting by night the owl will sit in a tree by day and spend the whole time swearing and cursing loudly and profusely. This, along with its huge beak, distinguishes it from the beautiful and cultured owls found in the #NorthernHemisphere.
It has an incredible vocabulary consisting solely of the foulest and most disgusting language, particularly if tourists are known to be in the area.
#SuperbOwlSunday #owl #owls #AustralianBirds #AustralianFaunaWillKillYou
#Australia #swearing #cursing #cussing -
Australia may be well known for the plethora of unfriendly animals that want to bite you or do you in like snakes, spiders, sharks, crocodiles, and drop bears; but now here is something else you can beware of.
The Australian Swearing Owl more commonly known as the Frogmouth Owl, will help to make your stay here upsetting and enraging. Hunting by night the owl will sit in a tree by day and spend the whole time swearing and cursing loudly and profusely. This, along with its huge beak, distinguishes it from the beautiful and cultured owls found in the #NorthernHemisphere.
It has an incredible vocabulary consisting solely of the foulest and most disgusting language, particularly if tourists are known to be in the area.
#SuperbOwlSunday #owl #owls #AustralianBirds #AustralianFaunaWillKillYou
#Australia #swearing #cursing #cussing -
Australia may be well known for the plethora of unfriendly animals that want to bite you or do you in like snakes, spiders, sharks, crocodiles, and drop bears; but now here is something else you can beware of.
The Australian Swearing Owl more commonly known as the Frogmouth Owl, will help to make your stay here upsetting and enraging. Hunting by night the owl will sit in a tree by day and spend the whole time swearing and cursing loudly and profusely. This, along with its huge beak, distinguishes it from the beautiful and cultured owls found in the #NorthernHemisphere.
It has an incredible vocabulary consisting solely of the foulest and most disgusting language, particularly if tourists are known to be in the area.
#SuperbOwlSunday #owl #owls #AustralianBirds #AustralianFaunaWillKillYou
#Australia #swearing #cursing #cussing -
Smokers in the park (swearing) #smoking #shirtless #swearing #men #gay #buddies #gaymale #smokers #aivideo #cigarettes
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Does #swearing make you stronger? Science says yes.
There’s a growing body of scientific evidence that this is indeed the case. The technical term is the “hypoalgesic effect of swearing.” #Cursing can also improve physical strength and endurance, according to a new paper published in the journal American Psychologist.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/12/does-swearing-make-you-stronger-science-says-yes/ -
Does #swearing make you stronger? Science says yes.
There’s a growing body of scientific evidence that this is indeed the case. The technical term is the “hypoalgesic effect of swearing.” #Cursing can also improve physical strength and endurance, according to a new paper published in the journal American Psychologist.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/12/does-swearing-make-you-stronger-science-says-yes/ -
Does #swearing make you stronger? Science says yes.
There’s a growing body of scientific evidence that this is indeed the case. The technical term is the “hypoalgesic effect of swearing.” #Cursing can also improve physical strength and endurance, according to a new paper published in the journal American Psychologist.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/12/does-swearing-make-you-stronger-science-says-yes/ -
Does #swearing make you stronger? Science says yes.
There’s a growing body of scientific evidence that this is indeed the case. The technical term is the “hypoalgesic effect of swearing.” #Cursing can also improve physical strength and endurance, according to a new paper published in the journal American Psychologist.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/12/does-swearing-make-you-stronger-science-says-yes/ -
I just sent my sister a text ~ 'shit just got real because NOAA is forecasting 5 to 7 inches of snow Saturday'.
My sister, who never swears, texted back ~ 'FUCK ME'.
🤣 ❄️ 😰
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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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Another freaking f-word
I never fully adopted freaking as an intensifier, euphemistic for fucking, partly because I swear fairly freely, and maybe also because fecking was available in my Irish English dialect. But I like having freaking available, and with its hundredth birthday round the corner, it’s a good time to showcase it.1
Freaking substitutes for its ruder cousin in all sorts of lexical and syntactic contexts, modifying adjectives (that was freaking amazing), verbs (let’s freaking go), and nouns (how is it still freaking January?), among other word classes; it’s also used as an infix (un-freaking-real) and in set phrases like freakin’ A – euphemistic, obviously, for fucking A.
From “Be-bop-a-Lisa” in Simpsons Comics no. 6 (1994). Script & pencils: Bill Morrison; Inks: Tim Bavington; Colours: Cindy Vance. Editor: Steve VanceOrigins and use
The earliest known use of this freaking – the first citation in Green’s Dictionary of Slang, Jesse Sheidlower’s The F-Word, and the OED – is in the 1928 novel Georgie May, where author Maxwell Bodenheim uses two freakings and a freakin’, including:
“Gawd, ah hate the hull, freaking pack uh you,” she cried, between her sobbing.
The next example those dictionaries list is in Nelson Algren’s The Man with the Golden Arm (1949):
“You point that freakin’ finger at me ’n you’re one dead pointer.”
That 21-year gap doesn’t mean no one was using it in the meantime. I found the line “You freaking fool!” in the 1937 screwball comedy Nothing Sacred, available on YouTube and the Internet Archive at around the 47m 40s mark:
Films and TV, with their heightened emotions and industrious regulators, are a natural home for this expressive but family-friendly expletive. A chart from COCA shows its use concentrated in those media, occurring at over four times the rate in fiction generally and over six times the rate in speech:2
Frequency of “freaking” in different genres. Graph from COCA.As Wiktionary notes, “Freaking (or fricking) is often used in motion pictures as a substitute for fucking so that characters can be shown to swear without the motion picture incurring censorship or a higher certificate than it otherwise might.”
Less discerningly, the Encyclopædia Britannica says freaking is “used to make an angry statement more forceful”. That’s not wrong, but it’s misleadingly narrow: freaking can amplify all sorts of emotions, even joy – ask Ned Flanders.
WikiHow knows this. An article by Wits End Parenting and Elaine Heredia says you can use freaking “to emphasize how great something or someone is” and that it “can be a positive or negative word based on context”. It adds that the word “isn’t a sin to say”, in case you were wondering.
Data
Freaking is on the rise but has been levelling off, according to data in COCA and Google’s Ngram Viewer. Rows under the dates below show frequency (i.e., number of uses), number of million words in the sample, and (hence, by division) per-million figures for direct comparison:
Frequency of “freaking” in five-year segments from 1990 to 2019.That levelling off is despite global use. Geographically, freaking is most popular not in the US but in Singapore, per the GloWbE corpus (freakin has the same top two, reversed). Malaysia comes in third, followed by Canada, Australia, and the Philippines:
Frequency of “freaking” in 20 countries where English is spoken (GloWbE, 2012–2013).Jack Grieve’s eye-catching swear maps of the USA, meanwhile, allow us to zoom in on what States are especially partial to freaking and freakin. Californians’ relative coolness towards them came as a surprise:
Browsing the word’s collocates (freaking/freakin’ ___) in COCA shows the company it keeps. High-ranking +1s include the adjectives awesome, amazing, hilarious, crazy, cool, hot, stupid, hard, and huge; nouns like idiot, mind, thing, break, genius, clue, and deal; and occasional verbs, like love, hate, kidding, and kill.
Some of these invite us to extrapolate the full phrases, or chunks: big freaking deal; give me a freakin’ break; not have a freaking clue; out of my/your/etc. freaking mind; Are you freakin’ kidding?
Other language corpora, such as the 14-billion-word iWeb, show a similar pattern of collocations:
Easily topping the +1s are the preposition out and the pronoun me: a sign of how well freaking [me] out caught on as an idiom, with multiple senses, after being coined in the 1960s. That’s a different usage, of course: not the intensifier freaking but the verb freak (or rather the verb phrase freak out) in the present progressive tense.
This album is the OED’s first citation for intransitive “freak out” in the sense “renounce societal norms, esp. by embracing pacifism, rejecting conservative values, and adopting a nonconformist appearance”.Pragmatics
Zappa fits right in here: freaking offers outsider energy for any self-defined freak (or geek) who cares to use it.3 The word’s gently countercultural flavour is also apparent in dictionary citations, where Tom Wolfe’s name recurs.
What makes freaking effective as a minced oath, and attractive to mild and novice swearers, is that it offers proximity to (and thus evocation of) strong swearing while remaining relatively benign. We see this niche exploited expertly by a child in the vampire comic 30 Days of Night: Return to Barrow:
Comic written by Steve Niles and drawn by Ben TemplesmithA little later the boy defaults to freakin’, this time automatically obeying his father’s no-swearing rule, and making the word more casual by dropping the g:
Freaking is not always a straightforward substitute for fucking, however. The particular way that it lands caused slight consternation for slang expert Michael Adams when his son started using it at the age of seven:
. . . he’s not just saying That’s freakin’ cool or No freakin’ way. No, he’s saying things like What the freak?! which is a long way from Oh, my gosh on the euphemism scale. There’s the underlying profanity. There’s the phonetics. There’s the fact — apparently — that What the hell? and What the freak? — while parallel — signify differently.4
Films redubbed for TV broadcast have mixed fortunes with it, as my post “Freak those monkey-fightin’ melon farmers!” shows. “I don’t need full freakin’ forensics” in Die Hard 2 (1990) is passable, if implausible in a police station, while “Freak you!” in Casino (1995) is comically underpowered.
In his 2016 book In Praise of Profanity (which I reviewed here and recommend), Michael Adams discusses how the vowels, consonants, and pragmatics of various “partial euphemisms” for fuck – feck, frak, frick, frig, and their freaky fraternity – do their work:
. . . although people usually think euphemisms work because they substitute for profanity, in fact many euphemisms are themselves partially profane, because they more or less cover up profanities—usually less—that are still inscribed in the situations of their use, and our minds’ eyes see through them to the profanities . . . . what makes profanity and the relevant euphemisms pragmatically powerful and interesting is that the euphemisms are often both euphemisms and profanity, a fact not unknown in linguistic circles but too often overlooked when we calculate the logic of language attitudes.
We’re advocates of strong language here at Strong Language, but we know it’s not suitable for all occasions: sometimes a softball is called for. And among the many euphemisms for fucking, freaking has, in a century or so of use, established itself as a truly effective and useful option. It may be mild, but it’s got freakin’ game.
Tyrese Gibson in Fast Five (2011)*
1 The OED also lists an obsolete, mid-17thC sense of freaking (adj.): “Of a person: inclined to change his or her mind, mood, or behaviour suddenly and unaccountably; given to freakish ideas; capricious, fickle, whimsical.” One of its fans was Samuel freakin’ Pepys: “He told me what a mad freaking fellow Sir Ellis Layton hath been” (Diary, 25 January, 1665).
2 I was unable to separate the verb freaking from the intensifier using part-of-speech tags in COCA, GloWbE, and iWeb, so these uses are combined in the graphs. To fortify the data somewhat I checked 300 examples in each corpus and found that, in COCA, 76% were the intensifier and 24% were the verb (freaking out, or plain freaking with the same sense); in GloWbE it was 74% and 26%, and in iWeb 68% and 32%. So you can consider the graphs broadly indicative but with that significant caveat.
3 We still don’t know where freak came from: origin unknown, the dictionaries say, though the OED offers speculation. Skeat says freak in the sense “whim” is of Germanic origin, being frec “bold, rash” in Old English.
4 Adams has also analyzed the use of freaking in the TV series 13 Reasons Why, tracing a character’s graduation from euphemistic to full-bore profanity.
#censorship #comics #corpusLinguistics #euphemisms #expletiveInfixation #freakOut #freaking #fuck #fucking #infixation #intensifiers #mincedOaths #phrases #popCulture #slang #swearing
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Does swearing make you stronger? Science says yes.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/12/does-swearing-make-you-stronger-science-says-yes/
Fucking knew it :)
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**Do we swear more with friends or with acquaintances? F#ck in social networks**
"_Our findings show that Americans use fuck most frequently, while Australians least frequently but they are highly creative with spelling variants of the word._"
Laitinen, M. et al. (2025) 'Do we swear more with friends or with acquaintances? F#ck in social networks,' Lingua, 320, p. 103931. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2025.103931.
#OpenAccess #OA #Research #Swearing #SocialMedia #Sociolinguistics #Academia
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My interest in (1) tennis and, unrelatedly, (2) the linguistics of profanity means that just now when I saw the phrase "WTA RG F" my brain briefly decided that it meant "what the actual Roland-Garros fuck"
#swearing #tennis #WTAF #profanity #abbreviations #language #RolandGarros
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Added a new example of fucking ambiguity to my @stronglang post
https://stronglang.wordpress.com/2015/05/13/fucking-ambiguity/#language #swearing #semantics #profanity #ambiguity #wordplay #words
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@jackyan
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2eWDmUl4_Y
#BrianBlessed #StephenFry
And to relax after all that serious science here's some entertainment.
#Skins #swearing -
#Algospeak or how to workaround puritanism and censorship on social networks, a short video by a linguist https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O0SjTKfg26c
#sex #covidPandemic #swearing #sadness (yes, TikTok censors that)
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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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Ah, yes, a groundbreaking study on how much the Linux kernel swears like a sailor ⛵. Because, clearly, the most pressing issue in open-source software is how often it cusses, not trivial matters like security or stability 🤷. Don't forget to enable JavaScript to truly experience the glory of interactive #swearing charts 📉.
https://www.vidarholen.net/contents/wordcount/#fuck*,shit*,damn*,idiot*,retard*,crap* #LinuxKernel #OpenSource #Humor #InteractiveCharts #TechNews #HackerNews #ngated -
Ah, yes, a groundbreaking study on how much the Linux kernel swears like a sailor ⛵. Because, clearly, the most pressing issue in open-source software is how often it cusses, not trivial matters like security or stability 🤷. Don't forget to enable JavaScript to truly experience the glory of interactive #swearing charts 📉.
https://www.vidarholen.net/contents/wordcount/#fuck*,shit*,damn*,idiot*,retard*,crap* #LinuxKernel #OpenSource #Humor #InteractiveCharts #TechNews #HackerNews #ngated -
Ah, yes, a groundbreaking study on how much the Linux kernel swears like a sailor ⛵. Because, clearly, the most pressing issue in open-source software is how often it cusses, not trivial matters like security or stability 🤷. Don't forget to enable JavaScript to truly experience the glory of interactive #swearing charts 📉.
https://www.vidarholen.net/contents/wordcount/#fuck*,shit*,damn*,idiot*,retard*,crap* #LinuxKernel #OpenSource #Humor #InteractiveCharts #TechNews #HackerNews #ngated -
Ah, yes, a groundbreaking study on how much the Linux kernel swears like a sailor ⛵. Because, clearly, the most pressing issue in open-source software is how often it cusses, not trivial matters like security or stability 🤷. Don't forget to enable JavaScript to truly experience the glory of interactive #swearing charts 📉.
https://www.vidarholen.net/contents/wordcount/#fuck*,shit*,damn*,idiot*,retard*,crap* #LinuxKernel #OpenSource #Humor #InteractiveCharts #TechNews #HackerNews #ngated -
"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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"Because I'm from Glasgow the swearing came very naturally. Sometimes a 'fucking' in the middle of a sentence can propel it forward with a new energy. But often I would swear because I couldn't remember my lines."
Peter Capaldi on making The Thick of It: https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2025/may/18/the-thick-of-it-interview-armando-iannucci-peter-capaldi-rebecca-front
#swearing #acting #TheThickOfIt #TV #television #comedy #PeterCapaldi #profanity
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Could some #Eurovision-conoisseur tell, how come it wasn't ok for Miriana Conte to sing Kant (singing in Maltese), and there was some talk that it might not be ok for KAJ to sing Perkele (Devil, damn etc. in Finnish), and especially on #BBC it is forbidden to #swear, but UK is sending What The Hell Just Happened. And the #EBU nor BBC haven't said anything about Hell.
#Euroviisut #ESC #ESC25 #ESC2025 #swearing #swearword #swearwords #curse #curseword #Eurovision25 #Eurovision2025
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Painting on paper, 20 x 30 cm: Ambiguous impulses for your mental cinema!
#kunst #contemporaryArt #mentalCinema #analogArt #painting #rubberStamp #reliefPrinting #saveBioDiversity #climateActionNow #systemChange #endFossilFuels #makeArtNotWar #noAFD #NoRacism #NoFascism #humanRights #humanDignity #Нетвойны #monkeyThinking #monkeyDreaming #speechBubble #fck #swearing #gasmask #soldier #suffocate #asphyxia #atmosphere #biosphere #airPollution #hold #stop #stopThem #protest #wait #help #raisedHand -
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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Montagu's book devotes one long chapter to the peculiar history of the word "bloody", which, he writes, "accumulated so much magic that it provided an unfailing source of energy for use in all sorts of refined meanings."
#swearing #words #bloody #expletives #etymology #AshleyMontagu #language #profanity #books
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MIT Technology Review: A woman made her AI voice clone say “arse.” Then she got banned.. “Joyce doesn’t use her voice clone all that often. She finds it impractical for everyday conversations. But she does like to hear her old voice and will use it on occasion. One such occasion was when she was waiting for her husband, Paul, to get ready to go out. Joyce typed a message for her voice […]
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Ars Technica: “Just give me the f***ing links!”—Cursing disables Google’s AI overviews. “The existence of this “curse to disable Google AI” trick has been making the rounds on social media in recent days, and it holds up in Ars’ own testing. For instance, when searching for ‘how do you turn off [adjective] Google AI results,’ a variety of curse word adjectives reliably disabled the AI […]
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Ars Technica: “Just give me the f***ing links!”—Cursing disables Google’s AI overviews. “The existence of this “curse to disable Google AI” trick has been making the rounds on social media in recent days, and it holds up in Ars’ own testing. For instance, when searching for ‘how do you turn off [adjective] Google AI results,’ a variety of curse word adjectives reliably disabled the AI […]
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Ars Technica: “Just give me the f***ing links!”—Cursing disables Google’s AI overviews. “The existence of this “curse to disable Google AI” trick has been making the rounds on social media in recent days, and it holds up in Ars’ own testing. For instance, when searching for ‘how do you turn off [adjective] Google AI results,’ a variety of curse word adjectives reliably disabled the AI […]
