I saw this flyer yesterday when walking around the Cheesman Park neighborhood, Denver, CO. At first… I was thinking that this woman’s intentions seem to be quite sweet. But then it occurred to me… umm… isn’t this a quite similar way that the witch lures Hansel and Gretel into her gingerbread house?? I mean… it is literally signed ‘The Crone.’ #message#found#denver
Est-ce que des chercheurs sérieux et assermentés ont un jour fait une étude bénéfice-risque poussée, concernant le fait d'ôter ses chaussures quand on entre dans une maison ou un appartement ?
Non, parce que là, je viens de me cogner le pied-nu contre le chambranle d'une porte, et je pense que j'ai deux orteils cassés et putain d'enculés de bâtards de fils de chiens de saloperie de merde vas-y comment je suis vénère, fermez bien vos gueules là les maniaques de la chaussure sale, putain !!!
#TheMetalDogArticleList #BLABBERMOUTH
The Dying Planet Weeps
Death metal fans are spoilt for choice these days. If you like to keep it filthy and old school, there are countless new bands decimating the target, and most of the old bands are still out there terrorizing the world too. If you prefer your death metal to sound vicious, technical and modern, there...
We’ve logged yet another fucking year here at Strong Language, so that can mean only one thing: It’s time for our annual awards recognizing excellence in swearing. It’s our ninth go-round — check out our posts from ’15, ’16, ’17, ’18, ’19, ’20, ’21, and ’22 for a trip down memory lane. The awards are also an opportunity to pay tribute to the patron saint of Strong Language: Malcolm Tucker, the deliriously obscene operative played by Peter Capaldi on the BBC political satire The Thick of It from 2005 to 2012. We’re not the only ones keeping Tucker’s spirit alive these days. For instance, there’s someone going by “Malcolm Tucker” on TikTok, posting choice soundbites like Tucker’s Law (an outtake from the 2007 “Spinners & Losers” special): “If some cunt can fuck something up, that cunt will pick the worst fucking time to fuck it up, ’cause that cunt’s a cunt.” (I can totally see Malcolm having this on a tea towel.)
Meanwhile on Twitter (X, whatfuckingever), “John Bull” has been imagining Tucker’s reactions to the omnishambles of the Rishi Sunak era in British politics.
TUCKER: The mortgage crisis is going to make a lot of voters homeless.
RISHI: Yeah. Agreed. That's why I plan to put chessboards in parks
TUCKER: You fucking what?
RISHI: You know… um… Give them something to do.
TUCKER: How the FUCK did you survive school? https://t.co/Sazxz4vaoS
And as we’ll see, echoes of Tucker can also be detected on TV shows staffed by Thick of It alums. But let’s not beat around the proverbial bush: who swore it best in 2023?
Best Fucking Swearing of 2023
This year’s top honors go to the coiner of a sweary word that encapsulates how our online lives have been gradually degraded thanks to various digital platforms getting downright shitty. Cory Doctorow gifted us with the highly appropriate term enshittification in a blog post on Jan. 21 (fleshing out an idea he had floated the previous November):
Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a “two sided market,” where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, holding each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.
Nancy Friedman was on top of enshittification early on, tracking how the term quickly caught on in a Feb. 1 Strong Language post and correctly predicting that the word was “primed for neologistic success.” Since then, Doctorow has explored such variations on the theme as enshitternet (appearing, appropriately enough, on his Craphound site). By July, Juliet Bennett Rylah of The Hustle observed, “If one of the major dictionaries doesn’t choose ‘enshittification’ as its word of the year, we’ll be surprised, because this concept is everywhere.”
While no dictionary program enshrined enshittification as their Word of the Year, it has received end-of-year recognition from a number of other language watchers. Rebecca Solnit hailed the term as her personal WOTY, and Dave Wilton of Wordorigins.org included it among his twelve Words of the Year (one for each month). And over at the Because Language podcast, listeners voted enshittification as their top choice of all the Words of the Week featured in 2023. On their year-end episode, they invited Doctorow on to discuss the term further (starting at 1:24:25 here).
We’ll see how enshittification fares at the American Dialect Society‘s Word of the Year selection, which I’ll be overseeing on Jan. 5. (Another strong candidate is assholocene, which appeared in a New Yorker article on “What to Call Our Chaotic Era.”) Even if the dictionaries didn’t bestow WOTY honors on enshittification, Dictionary.com has already created an entry for the word, so its place in the lexicon seems fairly secure. [Update: The American Dialect Society selected enshittification as its 2023 Word of the Year. The press release is here. And check out Nancy Friedman’s coverage in her post, “The Sweary WotYs.”]
Best Fucking Swearing on Television
We have lauded HBO’s Succession in the past (in 2019 and 2021) for setting a high bar for creative swearing in scripted television. The fourth and final season of the series did not disappoint, and we want to give the show its flowers one last time. It’s not surprising that Succession has been a Tucker Award favorite, since its sweary lineage can be traced back to Mr. Tucker himself. Series creator Jesse Armstrong worked on The Thick of It and brought back veterans from the show (like Tony Roche and Georgia Pritchett) to populate the writers’ room. And as we’ve noted before, Brian Cox’s portrayal of family patriarch Logan Roy carries some of the DNA of Peter Capaldi’s Tucker, as both actors revel in the particularly piquant Scottish variety of swearing.
I had the opportunity to interview Armstrong for the Wall Street Journal as Succession came to a close, and I learned all about the writers’ process in constructing colorful dialogue for the characters. One thing that came through was how the writers didn’t simply write invective in a free-standing way — sweary insults were always grounded specifically in situational context, appropriate for the character doing the insulting and the one being insulted, often telling you something about the power dynamic between the characters. A few bonmots from Season 4, which are best enjoyed in the context of the show:
Logan: Happy Christmas, you clock-watching fucks.
Matsson: I’m about to take a shit in your husband’s mouth and I’m pretty sure he’s gonna tell me it tastes like coq au vin.
Roman: A little bachelor party for POTUS Scrotus?
But the high point was a speech that Logan gave to rally the staffers at his news channel, ATN, which built into a sweary crescendo (from Episode 2, “Rehearsal”).
I don’t wanna know about 3% week-on-week. I wanna know that we’re killing the opposition! I wanna be cutting their throats! Our rivals should be checking in, up back of their chauffeured cars because they can’t believe what we did! So fucking spicy. So true. Something everyone knows but nobody says because… they’re too fucking lily-livered. They cannot believe what we said and the fact that we fucking said it! They’re fucking jam smears on the highway. Now… Anyone… Anyone who believes that I’m getting out please shove the bunting up your ass. This is not the end. I’m gonna build something better. Something faster, lighter, meaner, wilder. And I’m gonna do it from in here. With you lot! You’re fucking pirates!
Giving Succession a run for its money was Slow Horses, the Apple TV+ spy thriller based on Mick Herron’s Slough House novels and starring Gary Oldman. Showrunner Will Smith (no, not that one) got his start on, you guessed it, The Thick of It, and followed that show’s creator Armando Iannucci to the similarly sweary Veep. Oldman plays Jackson Lamb, a rude and slovenly fellow who heads Slough House, a kind of purgatory for British spies cast off from MI5. In the show’s first episode, Oldman set the tone with the line, “Another day dawns on MI-Fucking Useless.” In the second season this past year, Oldman continued to deliver such winning lines as “Fuck me with a wire brush” and “I’ve got hemorrhoids that are more fucking use than you.”
Elsewhere in TV-land, we want to recognize a show far less likely to use profanities: Star Trek: Picard. On Season 3, Episode 4, Admiral Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) bemoans how long it took for his Starfleet vessel to escape a gravity well, saying it took “ten fucking grueling hours.”
This was evidently the first time Picard was ever portrayed uttering the word fuck, and it set off some debate in Star Trek fandom. In an interview with , Picard showrunner Terry Matalas said he was “really torn” about having Picard use the word, but decided it was a powerful expression for the character in the moment. John Orquiola critiqued the choice in an article for Screen Rant, “Picard Drops An F Bomb – Star Trek’s Cursing Is Going Too Far,” writing: “Powerful moment it may be, hearing Jean-Luc Picard drop an F-bomb in Star Trek: Picard season 3 feels like a defeat. But given the circumstances of why he said it, Picard feeling defeated in that instance was also the point.”
Best Fucking Swearing in Film
There were some extremely sweary movies this past year — as measured in terms of fuck usage, the leaders were Fair Play (201), Strays (180), and Old Dads (173). (According to the handy Wikipedia page keeping track of these stats, those three are still far behind Wolf of Wall Street‘s 569 F-bombs a decade ago.) But we’re all in favor of quality over quantity, and thus we must give special recognition to American Fiction, directed by Cord Jefferson, for particularly effective use of the F-word. In the movie, adapted by Jefferson from Percival Everett’s novel Erasure, the protagonist Thelonious “Monk” Ellison (Jeffrey Wright) is a frustrated novelist who is told his work isn’t “Black” enough. Monk writes a book satirizing the tired tropes portraying African Americans in fiction called My Pafology and submits it to his publisher using the pen name Stagg R. Leigh. His novel ends up being an unexpected success, even after he petulantly decides to retitle it Fuck. In an interview with podcaster Pablo Torre, Jefferson said he actually wanted to call the movie Fuck, but he changed his mind. That was probably for the best — and anyway, there already is a movie called Fuck, a 2005 documentary about the word. (It has 857 F-bombs, for those keeping track.)
Even if the movie didn’t ultimately get called Fuck after Stagg R. Leigh’s novel, the word still has figured in the promotion of American Fiction. You can almost see the whole title of the book in one of the trailers, though in another shot, the title is artfully pixelated.
Need another reason to catch our Livestream Q&A Screening of AMERICAN FICTION? Join us tonight and snag a free limited-edition AMERICAN FICTION baseball cap, available while supplies last. Reserve your seat now: https://t.co/T5icSLXKXo. pic.twitter.com/iUT4KhDA7w
Another oblique use of profanity in movie promotion got some attention this past year, when a poster for Barbie in France featured a racy double entendre. As The Hollywood Reporter explained, “The French version of the poster looks innocuous enough… But the French tagline: ‘Elle peut tout faire. Lui, c’est juste Ken‘ — meaning ‘She can do everything. He’s just Ken’ — has an NSFW double-entendre meaning in French slang, where ken is another word for ‘fuck.’ So the tagline becomes: ‘She knows how to do everything. He just knows how to fuck.'”
https://stronglang.files.wordpress.com/2024/01/barbie-french-1.jpgWhen news spread about the poster, some thought it was an accidental pun, but a French marketing executive told THR, “It’s definitely deliberate; there’s no way a French speaker wouldn’t have noticed the dirty pun.” Warner Bros. would neither confirm nor deny that it was intentional, “but they made no secret of their delight in the social media buzz the poster has generated, in France and abroad.”
French twitter losing its mind right now because they translated the Barbie poster literally and accidentally made a pun that reads ‘She knows how to do everything. He just knows how to f*ck.’ https://t.co/jGSgJIrr3F
— Mathilde Merouani (@MathildeMerwani) June 16, 2023
Best Fucking Books about Swearing
We continue to live in a golden age of sweary scholarship, and 2023 brought us three excellent additions to the swearologist’s bookshelf.
Words from Hell: Unearthing the Darkest Secrets of English Etymology by Jess Zafarris. “With an emphasis on understanding where the foulest words in the English language came from — and the disgusting and hilarious histories behind them — this book demonstrates the true filth of our everyday words. But this book is more than just a list of vulgar words and salacious slang. It’s a thoughtful analysis of why we deem words as being inappropriate as well as revealing ‘good words’ that have surprisingly naughty origins.”
On This Day in History Sh!t Went Down by “sweary historian” James Fell. “The hilarious, irreverent guide to world history you never knew you needed, featuring 366 profanity-filled tales of triumph and terror, science and stupidity, courage and cowardice.”
Best Fucking Swearing in Music
In our 2021 installment, we noted that “many of the songs ruling the pop charts these days are written in a confessional mode by performers who aren’t afraid to curse a bit to get their emotional point across.” One chart-topping example from that year was “Drivers License,” Olivia Rodrigo‘s break-out break-up song (“Can’t drive past the places we used to go to, ’cause I still fuckin’ love you, babe”). Well, Rodrigo did it again in 2023, with another #1 Billboard hit with notable profanity. In “Vampire,” she describes someone as a “bloodsucker, fame fucker, bleedin’ me dry like a goddamn vampire.” In the radio edit, however, “fame fucker” was replaced by “dream crusher.” Rodrigo shared a video featuring other “clean” phrases she could have used as a substitute, including “tree hugger,” “whale blubber,” “Mark Zucker,” and “garlic butter.”
Meanwhile, Andre 3000 surprised everyone with an instrumental album, New Blue Sun, on which he didn’t rap or sing but instead played the flute. Still, he found an outlet for his verbosity in the song titles, one of which was: “The Slang Word P(*)ssy Rolls Off The Tongue With Far Better Ease Than The Proper Word Vagina. Do You Agree?”
And let’s also recognize The Offspring for their excellent response to accidentally releasing a clean version of a vinyl reissue. They shared a suitably profanity-laden apology with their fans:
Any fan of The Offspring knows that we enjoy cussing on occasion, because sometimes there’s just no substitute for a properly placed curse word. So you must understand how we were completely fucking horrified to find out that the 15th anniversary re-issue vinyl release of ‘Rise and Fall, Rage and Grace’ had the ‘clean’ versions of ‘You’re Gonna Go Far, Kid,’ ‘Nothingtown’ and ‘Stuff Is Messed Up’ on it. We have no idea how this shit happened, we didn’t even know there was a clean version! We and Roundhill are working to fix this bullshit ASAP. We will let you all know how and when this will be remedied but rest assured, goddamnit., that it will be fuckin’ fixed! Thank you all for your patience, and please accept our deepest fucking apologies.
Best Fucking Swearing in Politics (International)
When Chile held a referendum asking voters to approve a conservative proposal for a new constitution, language got heated. A controversial commercial on the “In Favor” side called out progressives in the opposition by featuring one speaker who angrily said, “Yo voy a votar ‘A favor,’ y que se jodan” (“I’m going to vote In Favor, and fuck them”). Responding to backlash over the line, the head of the rightwing coalition pushing for the new constitution doubled down. But the “En Contra” (“Against”) supporters got the last laugh, by responding to “que se jodan” with the slogan “¡Que no te jodan!” (“Don’t let them fuck you!”). The clapback even got featured in a https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/17/world/americas/chile-election-results-constitution-referendum.html showing an En Contra rally in Santiago. Since the referendum failed, the slogan must have done its job. (As for the verb joder, John Rigdon’s Great Little Book of Dirty Spanish Words says, “Don’t be alarmed, it may translate to the F-word, but it’s not as strong as you think.”)
There weren’t any huge sweary stories on the U.S. political scene in 2023, but a few moments are worth remembering. In a House hearing, Texas Rep. Jasmine Crockett argued against an impeachment inquiry of President Biden by saying that there was no evidence of misconduct — unlike egregious wrongdoing by former President Trump, such as storing classified records in a Mar-a-Lago bathroom. Showing images of the bathroom, Crockett said, “These are our national secrets. Looks like in the shitter to me.” As The Daily Beast noted, this is likely the first time that “in the shitter” has entered the Congressional Record.
There was another notable entry in the Congressional Record in 2023. In a House Oversight Committee hearing in February, a former Twitter employee recounted how the company handled Chrissy Teigen‘s tweet in which she referred to Trump as a “pussy ass bitch.” That insult was made back in 2019, but we were glad that it made a reprise so that it could be thoroughly analyzed.
Finally, as we say good-bye to 2023, let’s take a moment to remember the great Richard Belzer, an actor who never shied away from colorful language. When Belzer died in February at his home in France, his friend Bill Scheft told The Hollywood Reporter, “His last words were, ‘Fuck you, motherfucker.'” Rest in fucking peace, Belz.