Chick Happens and Lit Happens, here. And now, from the pets department at CafePress:
(This, from Anabellstar Designs!, is just one of several designs for Sit Happens available from the company.)
Meanwhile, for more shit allusion/avoidance, see Mark Liberman’s recent discussion of Satan sandwich in the political news.
Caught on tv recently, an ad for Oreo Fudge Cremes, viewable here, in which four exclamations (about the marvels of the cookies) go past very fast:
Whoa! … Get out! … Shut the front door! … Franklin Delano!
The last two are euphemized exclamations, neither of them clearly tied to specific taboo exclamations. But that didn’t stop a commenter from being outraged on behalf of the kiddies.
Two recent stories from ADS-L about putatively indecent language: on slut and uterus.
In the Washington Post blogs yesterday, three devious ways of reporting the slur dick (boldfaced below):
Mark Halperin suspended from MSNBC after calling Obama a vulgar name on ‘Morning Joe’ (Video)
By Sarah Anne HughesMark Halperin, a political analyst on MSNBC, called President Obama a word that starts with “D” and is synonymous with a part of the male anatomy Thursday on “Morning Joe.” [Try to disregard the somewhat confused notion of synonymy here.]
MSNBC issued a statement suspending Halperin at 10:30 a.m.
“Mark Halperin’s comments this morning were completely inappropriate and unacceptable. We apologize to the President, The White House and all of our viewers. We strive for a high level of discourse and comments like these have no place on our air. Therefore, Mark will be suspended indefinitely from his role as an analyst.”
The incident took place after host Joe Scarborough asked Halperin what he thought Obama’s strategy was at a press conference held Wednesday, Halperin asked, “Are we on the seven second delay?”
After getting the go ahead from Scarborough that the show had the safety precaution of filming seven seconds before it went live — enough time to bleep out any bad words — Halperin said, “I thought he was a [shortened version of Richard] yesterday.”
Item 1: a Ms. magazine blogger asking me about the use of rape ‘vanquish, beat’ in certain communities and contexts.
Item 2: (from Ben Zimmer on June 12, a link to) the story about Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban proclaiming
Our fans punked the shit out of the Miami fans.
after the NBA finals in which the Mavericks beat the Miami Heat.
The two items are connected.
Just posted on my X blog: “Today’s remarkable underwear”, with more ways of referring to a man’s genitals. In a description of Pulse mesh underwear:
A perfect men’s underwear pick for those who like to show off the goods.
Then in a description of Male Power’s Super Sock:
It’s not a jock (there are no legstraps), it’s not a thong (there is no butt strap), just a waistband and pouch that holds your boys.
And, most indirectly of all, in a description of the Good Devil Suspend Pouch:
A perfect pouch that covers the essential areas and holds everything in place …
Jon Lighter on ADS-L:
Letterman last night said that Weinergate shows you should “never twitter photos of your deal.”
Finally got around to watching The Social Network (a.k.a. The Facebook Movie) this morning. Stunning movie — a tragedy of ambition realized and of friendship betrayed, dark in many places (and visually dark in many scenes), alienating (despite being, in some sense, “about” social connection) — well written, directed, and acted. (The presentation of women in the movie is distressing, but possibly accurate from the point of view of the men depicted in it.)
There’s a lot to be said about works of art based on real-life events. They’re never true in detail to what happened (insofar as that can be known), and since they’re other people’s projections of their own artistic visions onto a found story — their re-workings of that story — they’re often both factually and emotionally false to the original. (But there are so many attractions to a found story.) So you shouldn’t take the movie to be a realistic presentation of Mark Zuckerberg’s progression from Cambridge MA to Palo Alto CA as Facebook rises.
Two linguistic points: Jesse Eisenberg’s portrayal of Zuckerberg’s speech, and the fate of fuck in the extra material on the supplement disk to the main DVD (about the creation of the movie).
In the movie, Eisenberg’s speech style is intense, fast, machine-gun. (This is a definite heightening of the real Zuckerberg — who has even been known to laugh and joke.) I thought this came from the way Eisenberg was directed, but it turns out (as you can see from watching him on the supplement disc to the movie) that this is quite close to Eisenberg’s everyday speech style (though Eisenberg is very much given to laughing and joking, while still being serious about the craft of acting).
Then there’s the bleeping on the supplement disk. Two fucks get through in the movie (“my fuck-you flip-flops” and “the fuck bus”), plus at least one avoidance via freaking; apparently, two non-repeated fucks in a PG-13 movie is one over the regulation limit. (Yes, there are such things.) But on the supplement disk, all the fucks — and there are a fair number — are bleeped out, most entertainingly in an instance of the exclamation fucking shit!, where the final nasal of fucking is preserved, and shit gets by. All the taboo vocabulary besides fuck is untouched, in the film and on the supplement disk.
The ways of taboo avoidance are remarkable.
Having posted recently on the alternative shag (of obscure origin), I was moved yesterday to wonder about other alternatives. There are a lot, some of them definitely on the obscene side themselves (a lot depends on who you talk to, but shag is still problematical for some British speakers, and frig for some American speakers, and of course the phallic denominal verbs dick and bone are as obscene as the nouns they are derived from, whatever level of obscenity that is for you).
The alternatives don’t necessarily share the full syntax of fuck; there’s a separate story for each one, and a lot of variation.
On Sunday I got a long-overdue haircut (no, this isn’t going to turn into an IM-like message on the moment-to-moment details of my life); I’d gotten much much too shaggy. In describing this to friends, I said that I’d gotten (satisfyingly) deshagged.
Deshagged would seem to imply a previous stage in which I was shagged, in the sexual sense. (I have in fact been shagged, often, though not for a very long time now.) But that’s not the way the morphology of deshag works.