hell

“Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards”

sesquiotic3 Comments

Remember when vulgarity in American politics still seemed almost surprising? When it was considered noteworthy that Donald Trump swears a lot? When he forced The New York Times to be less tight-ass about censoring swears? When he made headlines around the world by calling certain countries “shitholes”? Well, those days are fucking gone forever.

Or nearly. Because there’s always some new shit. Trump saying swearwords? Yawn. Trump saying swearwords on his social media account? Meh. Trump saying swearwords on his social media account on Easter Sunday in the course of threatening war crimes? Hmmm. And doing so with… suspiciously scrupulous spelling and punctuation (if not capitalization)? Oh, come the fuck on.

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Profanity in American Sign Language

Stan Carey7 Comments

Sign languages are as expressive and systematic as spoken languages, and that includes taboo words. As Benjamin Bergen writes in What the F, ‘Signers use rules of grammar, some of them specific to profanity, just like speakers of spoken languages.’ There’s also great variation in how a given idea may be conveyed – not just between sign languages or their dialects but within them.

If Cory O’Brien’s terrific post on the middle finger in American Sign Language made you want to increase your rude repertoire in ASL, look no further. The video below features a host of signers demonstrating some favourite insults and profanities. It also shows how much fun swearing can be.

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‘What fresh hell’: the pitch-perfect chorus of our collective news outrage

John Kelly10 Comments

It’s all too common these days. After a flight, a long meeting, a night’s rest, or any other blissful reprieve, we check the headlines. “Okay, I’ve been colouring my hair all morning and haven’t looked at the news once. Deep breath,” as one tweeter steeled herself. “What fresh hell have I missed?” What fresh hell indeed: While hell is a very mild taboo by Strong Language standards, the phrase is still the perfect expression for the experience of all the news, in its unrelenting cascade of controversies and outrages, in the Trump era.

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Great balls of fire

Iva Cheung6 Comments

We’ve had yet another month of record-breaking temperatures—and a corresponding spike in Google searches for hot as balls,

Google Trends graph for "hot as balls" from January 1, 2004, to August 15, 2016. It shows large spikes at July 2015 and July 2016.

a phrase that’s gotten popular as balls (mostly in the U.S.) in the last ten years or so. Although Urban Dictionary has an entry for the phrase from 2001, it became undeniably mainstream five years later during the heatwave of 2006. Lin-Manuel Miranda and Chris “Shockwave” Sullivan created this video in response to the scorching weather that year: Continue reading →

The vagina(-shaming) monologues of King Lear

John Kelly5 Comments

Many extol King Lear as Shakespeare’s greatest play. Some even vaunt it as the very height of the Western canon. For their claims, they point, inter alia, to the strength of the tragedy’s language.

Take the mad monarch as he roves the wild heath: “Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!…Singe my white head!” (3.2.1-6). Or the broken father when he cradles his deceased daughter: “Thou’lt come no more,/ Never, never, never, never, never!” (5.3.306-07). The Bard’s language plunges us into the depths of Lear’s despair.

But King Lear doesn’t just feature some of Shakespeare’s strongest language. It also showcases some of his, well, strongest language. And when we give it a closer look, much of it is truly below the belt.

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