Language Down Under:
Several ways to take fucking English in this context: in particular, defiantly (not some other fucking language) or boastfully (really fucking great English) or descriptively (English full of fuck). Or all at once.
Archive for the ‘Taboo language and slurs’ Category
Aussie English
September 22, 2011The news for penises
September 14, 2011Episode 20 of Monty Python’s Flying Circus includes segments of television news as reported for special audiences: The News for Parrots, The News for Gibbons, and The News for Wombats (the parrot segment also has A Tale of Two Cities “specially adapted for parrots”). Here at AZBlog, penis-related material has been piling up for months, so now it’s time for The News for Penises, in five chapters. (I exclude material on gay porn and my XXX-rated collages, though these are penis-heavy, because I report on these regularly on my XBlog.)
F**k You, Penguin
September 14, 2011A gift from my friend Ellen Evans: Matthew Gasteier’s 2009 book F**k You, Penguin: Telling Cute Animals What’s What — combining my first totem animal (the penguin), taboo vocabulary, and taboo avoidance, all in one package.
confirmed bachelor
August 28, 2011From Aaron Hicklin’s Editor’s Letter “The Marrying Kind” in the September issue of Out magazine (p. 32):
Until very recently, British newspapers had a sly euphemism for known homosexuals who had resisted the kinds of sham marriages that were once par for the course. In the words of obituary writers, whose job it was to find substitute words for “gay,” they were “confirmed bachelors” — an infinitely lonely construction. Reading those obituaries, you would never get the impression these men (there was no equivalent phrase for women) had ever loved, or been loved in return. These were not confirmed bachelors in the American sense (commitment-phobic straight men on the merry-go-round of short-term relationships). They were men who were never getting married because they couldn’t.
The piece is about same-sex marriage, of course, but my interest here is in the expression confirmed bachelor.
Uncle Tomming
August 27, 2011Via Jeff Shaumeyer on Facebook, this appalling church sign in Harlem:
Jeff thought it was the first time he’d noticed Uncle Tom used as a verb. Turns out that the slurs Uncle Tom and plain Tom got verbed at least 50 years ago.
Satanic fast food
August 23, 2011Roz Chast in the August 15 & 22 New Yorker:
As Mark Liberman observed in his recent LLog discussion of Satan sandwich in the political news, Satan here is a shit-avoidance term, with demonic overtones as a bonus. Chast has taken this and run with it.
In connection with the state fair food-on-a-stick theme, note Satan-on-a-stick among the offerings. There’s also a Satanburger, with the common libfix -burger; along these lines, Chast could have included a Satan dog (a hot dog wrapped in Satan) on the board.
SOS
August 19, 2011
Reversal in the heat of the sexual moment
August 12, 2011From the gay porn flick Born To Be Bad (seen in a segment of the compilation The Best of Rod Barry), a pornstar to his sex partner Rod Barry, who’s jacking himself off and is close to coming:
You wanna fuck your shooting load! You wanna shoot your fuckin’ load!
Rather than, um, re-shoot the scene, the director just left the spoonerism in. Well, the guy got it right on the second try.
bork (the portmanteau)
August 11, 2011Heard last night on a radio show about food:
… mixing beef with pork to make something called bork
Yes, a somewhat unsavory-sounding portmanteau.
Vajazzled!
August 9, 2011Mike Hale, “Like Ross, Rachel and Company, but With Faster Hook-Ups” (on the tv show Friends With Benefits), NYT Arts section, August 8:
… it combines a single-camera, mildly absurdist style and raunchy humor with stock sitcom situations. It’s the kind of show in which a lamely suggestive joke about a vajazzled woman – one with a bejeweled genital area – giving birth (“The kid came out looking like a disco ball!:) is followed by reaction shots of everyone in the scene laughing.
That’s the verb vajazzle, a portmanteau of either vagina or the euphemism vajayjay with bedazzle.