Showing posts with label Swearing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Swearing. Show all posts

Wednesday, October 17

Fan-fucking-tastic!

Interesting piece on NPR about swearing was on today and this article accompanied it. It is a bit of a long read but quite interesting. It discusses the historical context of swearing as well as societal implications and the loved FCC and their regulations. Here is an excerpt:

The Clean Airwaves Act assumed that fucking is a participial adjective. But this is not correct. With a true adjective like lazy, you can alternate between Drown the lazy cat and Drown the cat which is lazy. But Drown the fucking cat is certainly not interchangeable with Drown the cat which is fucking.

As it happens, most expletives aren't genuine adverbs, either. One study notes that, while you can say That's too fucking bad, you can't say That's too very bad. Also, as linguist Geoffrey Nunberg pointed out, while you can imagine the dialogue How brilliant was it? Very, you would never hear the dialogue How brilliant was it? Fucking.


Please to enjoy.