#swearing — Public Fediverse posts

Music with explicit lyrics is in decline, report shows

https://www.nme.com/news/music/music-with-explicit-lyrics-is-in-decline-report-shows-3955180

#music #swearing

Music with explicit lyrics is in decline, report shows

https://www.nme.com/news/music/music-with-explicit-lyrics-is-in-decline-report-shows-3955180

#music #swearing

Please enjoy my new animated film: weird and just shy of 7 minutes, this took me weeks to shoot, draw, animate, edit and sing. It has my filthy fingerprints all over it; no art-stealing robots were involved. There’s some swearing.
Enjoy watching with a friend or perhaps privately; or maybe hiding, ashamed.
#StopMotionAnimation #OriginalMusic #bgm #Film #Animation #Satire #music #swearing
https://makertube.net/w/14feEmXmfSuPd958ZvWZQq

Please enjoy my new animated film: weird and just shy of 7 minutes, this took me weeks to shoot, draw, animate, edit and sing. It has my filthy fingerprints all over it; no art-stealing robots were involved. There’s some swearing.
Enjoy watching with a friend or perhaps privately; or maybe hiding, ashamed.
#StopMotionAnimation #OriginalMusic #bgm #Film #Animation #Satire #music #swearing
https://makertube.net/w/14feEmXmfSuPd958ZvWZQq

Controversial Kyrgios swears at umpire on Wimbledon return

Nick Kyrgios (left) throws a shoe to fans as he and Alexander Bublik pack up after their men’s…
#Tennis #AlexanderBublik #NickKyrgios #swearing #umpire #wimbledon
https://www.europesays.com/tennis/29877/

When should you stop singing lullabies with curse words to your child?

#lullabies #swearing #children

When should you stop singing lullabies with curse words to your child?

#lullabies #swearing #children

⚠️Warning⚠️ #PoliticalCorruption #AbuseOfPower #Swearing

RE: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:76e4qryfph6q4wmz3li6v2l6/post/3mndj2yqoec2c

Woah Little Dude, Chill! This 3rd Grader Wants To Begin His Cussing Career With “Pissfucker

https://web.brid.gy/r/https://thehardtimes.net/blog/woah-little-dude-chill-this-3rd-grader-wants-to-begin-his-cussing-career-with-pissfucker/

Swearing helps people perform better when peak performance is needed, study finds

https://www.psypost.org/swearing-helps-people-perform-better-when-peak-performance-is-needed-study-finds/

#psychology #neuroscience #cognitivescience #brainscience #swearing #cussing #cursing #cusstowin

Swearing helps people perform better when peak performance is needed, study finds

https://www.psypost.org/swearing-helps-people-perform-better-when-peak-performance-is-needed-study-finds/

#psychology #neuroscience #cognitivescience #brainscience #swearing #cussing #cursing #cusstowin

Trump to host swearing-in ceremony for new Fed chair Kevin Warsh

ANI | Updated: May 19, 2026 11:19 IST Washington DC [US], May 19 (ANI): US President Trump will…
#Economy #CEREMONY #ethics #FederalReserve #FederalReserveSystem #Inflation #investments #iranwar #oilprices #powell #swearing-in #trump #warsh
https://www.europesays.com/3001606/

Odious Offord appears on the tv news and I immediately swear at the tv.

I hope this doesn't stop. I'd hate to accept that Reform are the acceptable face of fascism.

#UKpol #swearing #Reform

Odious Offord appears on the tv news and I immediately swear at the tv.

I hope this doesn't stop. I'd hate to accept that Reform are the acceptable face of fascism.

#UKpol #swearing #Reform

Useless Facts, Badly Drawn #504: Swearnet.
.
.
#swearnet #movies #facts #movietrivia #censorship #language #swearing #comcis #webcomics #uselessfacts #uselessfactsbadlydrawn

Useless Facts, Badly Drawn #504: Swearnet.
.
.
#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...

"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...

Who do Brits swear at the most? "Londoners are the worst offenders for swearing at their buddies (22.37%), while partners are more likely to be sworn at in Derby than in any other UK city (35.29%)." #language #research #swearing #edchat #English #linguistics #HigherEd #AcademicSky

"the dinner table is not the place for obscenities, so keep this in mind when dining with friends in the UK." #language #research #swearing #edchat #English #linguistics

"Our findings revealed that UK residents are most unlikely to use foul language in front of kids (71.81%) and elders (67.34%)." #language #research #swearing #edchat #English #linguistics preply.com/en/blog/uk-c...

Study: The Cities That Swear t...

UK: Urban Swear Map Update! preply.com/en/blog/uk-c... #language #research #swearing #edchat #English #linguistics

UK: Urban Swear Map Update! preply.com/en/blog/uk-c... #language #research #swearing #edchat #English #linguistics

What kind of profanity is this?
https://stancarey.wordpress.com/2026/04/06/what-kind-of-profanity-is-this/

#language #swearing #slang #profanity #linguistics #words #StrongLanguage

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

Origins 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

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:

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:

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.

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:

A 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.

*

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

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.

Origins 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

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:

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:

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.

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:

A 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.

*

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

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.

Origins 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

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:

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:

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.

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:

A 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.

*

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

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.

Origins 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

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:

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:

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.

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:

A 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.

*

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

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.

Origins 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

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:

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:

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.

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:

A 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.

*

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

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

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

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

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

#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)

#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)

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

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

"The first time I tried to use a harsh swear phrase a French neighbour told me that it didn't sound good at all"

"chuckles are the most common reaction"

On French reactions to non-French people swearing in French:
https://www.thelocal.fr/20250620/the-neighbours-laugh-at-me-should-foreigners-try-swearing-in-french

#swearing #France #French #language #multilingualism #bilingualism #profanity