Arnold Zwicky's Blog

In this morning’s e-mail, an ad for CafePress offerings, including this t-shirt:

(Shown here in cardinal, one of the nine colors available; cardinal is, after all, Stanford’s school color. By the way, there’s nothing on the back of the shirt.)

For Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, see Mark Liberman’s “Annals of Bowdlerization: Whiskey Tango Foxtrot”, here. The expression is military code for WTF, which is an initialistic avoidance of exclamatory what the fuck (or another WH the fuck expression — see Ben Zimmer on the inherent ambiguity of WTF, here).

This entry was posted on March 18, 2011 at 8:28 am and is filed under Slang, Taboo language and slurs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.