In a Details (April 2013) interview of Matthew McConaughey (by Adam Sachs), this unlikely passage describing McConaughey’s interaction with a red songbird in New Orleans:
They’re staring at each other now. Then a flash of rencognition seems to pass across the songbird’s glassy features and he chirps out an excitable tune that, to my untrained ears, translates roughly as:
It’s him! Mr. all right all right j.k. livin himself! The bongo-banging, chisel-chested playboy philosopher king inexplicaby here among the vines and branches of my garden paradise on the grounds of this crumbling old Treme mansion! The fuck is he doing here?
The fuck, indeed.
That’s the fuck standing for what the fuck.
(Background: j.k. livin — for just keep livin — is the name of a foundation founded by McConaughey.)
I don’t recall having seen or heard this truncation before, and it’s hard to search for without picking up lots of occurrences of the full idiom. (Similarly for the hell as a truncation of what the hell.)
Note that we need to distinguish the emphatic interrogative use of the fuck (as above) from the emphatic exclamatory use in things like:
A: Clean up this mess. B: The fuck I will!
(where B’s response conveys ‘I won’t’).
March 26, 2013 at 8:27 am |
See also: dafuq.
March 26, 2013 at 8:53 am |
Beautiful. That’s a gold mine.
March 26, 2013 at 9:46 am |
Éamonn McManus on Facebook:
March 26, 2013 at 9:49 am |
From William Salmon on Facebook:
I have in fact read the book, but I didn’t catch these examples.
March 26, 2013 at 6:06 pm |
I first consciously noticed this in 2009, coming from a black woman, late 20s, from Chicago. LIked it and have since adopted it as an exclamation. My kids have picked up on it and have naturally branched it out into “the hell” and “the heck”, but we haven’t been able to expand it into something like “the hell is that”.