Another freaking f-word

Stan Carey10 Comments

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.

Two frames from a comic. 1. Ned Flanders smiles, his eyes closed briefly as he trims a hedge and listens to music. He says: “I *know* this music must be the tool of the devil, but that *sax* riff is just *freakin’ heavenly*!” 2. He startles, his eyes wide open, his hand raised to his open mouth. He says: “*Golly*, did I just say the *‘f’ word*?”
From “Be-bop-a-Lisa” in Simpsons Comics no. 6 (1994). Script & pencils: Bill Morrison; Inks: Tim Bavington; Colours: Cindy Vance. Editor: Steve Vance

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“Don’t give a f#@&”

Nancy Friedman3 Comments

Note: This post was originally published in a slightly different form on Fritinancy, my Substack newsletter.

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“DON’T GIVE A F#@&” shouts the headline on a two-page ad in a recent Sunday New York Times. Instead of giving a f#@&, we’re instructed to “give an e.l.f.” — to substitute a three-initial brand name for a four-letter taboo word.

Full-page ad from e.l.f. headlined DON'T GIVE a F#@&
“DON’T GIVE a F#@&.” New York Times, November 2, 2025, page A9. Photo: Nancy Friedman.

E.l.f. is a cosmetics brand — the initials stand for eyes, lips, face, and the name is pronounced as an acronym, elf — that calls itself “a different kind of beauty company.” (Where is the entrepreneur bold enough to launch “the same kind of beauty company”?) Founded in 2004 and based in Oakland, California (my hometown!), e.l.f sells its potions online, in U.S. retail chains such as Target, and in brick-and-mortar shops in 17 other countries. The company has partnered with singer-songwriter Alicia Keys on a sub-brand, Keys Soulcare, and recently made headlines for its $1 billion (!) acquisition of Rhode, Hailey Rhode Bieber’s line of “edited, efficacious, and intentional” skincare and makeup products.

How “different” is e.l.f.? Here’s the facing page of that ad:

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Jackson Lamb and the Slow Horses Learn How to Spell Profanity

Michael Adams2 Comments

As dawn rises on Aldersgate Street, small creatures rampage in the trash, and frosty tendrils of winter reach into the London fall. Various occupants of Slough House arrive swearing, as one tends to do if one is seconded to MI-5’s dust heap or, more accurately, reclassified as the very dust. Louisa Guy swears according to the fashion of the day:

“A body’s been dumped in the street. Broad daylight.”

“Here?”

“Central London […] More specifically,” Louisa said, “outside a fuck-off restaurant near the Mall” (RT 143)

Fuck-off stands for ‘you’re too ordinary to be here.’ Roddy Ho’s swearing isn’t about something that happened on the street but instead is merely an interior overestimation of his sex appeal: “Bitch was ripe was how he read it. Bitch was ready” (RT 11). His big mistake, however, is saying the same thing to Shirley Dander, who rightly clocks him — the dangers of thinking aloud.

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A Shit Ton of Infixing and Interposing Lands on Slough House, Everyone Survives

Michael Adams1 Comment

The intelligence officers of Slough House, good at everyday profanity, are proficient infixers and interposers, too. An infixing, remember, is when one inserts profanity into the structure of a word, at a stress appropriate point (unfuckingbelievable); an interposing inserts the profanity between words in a fixed or idiomatic phrase (go to hell < go the fuck to hell). Infixings and interposings occur infrequently in speech, but when it comes to any variety of profanity, the slow horses are well ahead of the common herd.

Jackson Lamb infixes and interposes with abandon. As he points out to River Cartwright, whose grandfather had been a powerful spook in his day, “But no, you’ve got a grandfather. Congratufuckinglations. You’ve still got a job” (SH 37). The infixing drips with disdain for both grandfather and grandson, well-earned in the grandfather’s case — if you don’t already know that and why, then you really need to read the books.

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Espionage Novels That Give a Fuck about Profanity

Michael Adams2 Comments

A couple of years ago, people I know were talking about the Apple TV series Slow Horses, the television version of Mick Herron’s Slough House novels. I love espionage novels, and I like espionage television series, too, but I can’t afford another streaming service — I have children on the cusp of university! — so I hadn’t seen any episodes of the series until I was flying in a plane. I watched three episodes (generously provided by the airline) and afterwards concluded that while the episodes were sweary, they were sweary in a reflexive, unaesthetic way, whereas the novels were full of clever and innovative swearing, and for that reason alone the books were more worth reading than the television show was worth watching.

Some authors and their audiences prefer their books clean of profanity, or they hide the profanity behind a fig-leaf of literary technique. We can have it both ways: we all know that the profanity is there, but we don’t have to own it, and we don’t have to behold it in all its glory. Other authors and readers, however, let it all hang out — they celebrate profanity and insinuate that, at least in telling some stories, profanity is essential language. Mick Herron’s series of spy novels, focused on the spies assigned to Slough House — spies who make big mistakes but can’t easily be fired, so are warehoused there until they’re killed or quit — revel in bad language, which is necessary to its comedy and to the development of character and narrative cohesion: in Herron’s case, at least, profanity is a term of art.

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