From Brian Buirge and Jason Bacher on their GFDA site (“Because sometimes, being your own worst critic isn’t enough”). The poster:
There are t-shirts with the individual pieces of advice, and free downloads of wallpaper for them.
Syntactically, there’s a wide range of uses for fucking on the poster: mostly modifying nouns, but also verbs (“Know when to fucking speak up”) and adjectives (“Make it fucking sustainable”). And as in “my hot self” (here), there’s a reflexive broken into its two parts, with a modifier (fucking in this case) intervening between them — really the only natural way to modify a reflexive, since “Believe in fucking yourself” isn’t going to convey the intended sentiment.
The idea seems to be that every piece of advice is more forceful and memorable with a fucking in it.
December 1, 2010 at 12:44 pm |
At an RAF cadet camp many years ago, the sergeant told us something like the following story: ‘there was this fucking airman who went into fucking town, and he met this fucking bird in the fucking pub. Well, to cut this fucking story short, they missed the fucking bus home and started to fucking walk. Then they saw this fucking field, so they climbed over the fucking fence and had fucking sexual intercourse.’
I think he was trying to tell us that this sort of use wasn’t particularly clever or shocking, just boring and unimaginative. If you want to hear fuck being used really imaginatively, just watch Eddie Izzard.
December 1, 2010 at 4:59 pm |
Yes, modifier fucking is inclined to become bleached of its sexual meaning, to become a mere emphatic.
And, yes, Eddie Izzard is a genius at imaginative vernacular language.