I promised to record audio of my translated passages from Beowulf, and I have. As a bonus, I’ve also recorded the introduction in the original version, for those who want to have an idea of how Old English was pronounced. (I have not recorded the full fight scene in Old English, because pretty much no one’s going to listen to seven and a half minutes of a language they don’t understand.) Here they are!
tl;dr: I’ve translated the intro to Beowulf and the fight scene between Beowulf and Grendel into modern rural Western Canadian English, complete with lots of rude language. Why? Because I wanted to. Here it is.
Slightly longer introduction:
Some time ago, I was thinking about the famous opening of Beowulf (“Hwæt!”), and how it gets translated. And I considered that people are always advised to translate into their native idiom. Well, in my native idiom – the dirtbag vernacular of the Bow Valley in Alberta – it could be “Fucken A!” (also sometimes written “Fuckin’ eh!” but that’s an argument for another time).
So, for fun, starting with that and in that style, I translated the first 19 lines of Beowulf. I left it at that for some time, with the intention of translating more eventually. Well, I’ve now translated the fight scene between Beowulf and Grendel – or, in my translation, Wolf-boy and Grinder (see the end for notes on my translations of names). And, because it’s a gleefully crude translation, revelling in the potential of English strong language, I’m presenting it here on Strong Language.
Continue readingThe following article appeared in the online news site the Baltimore Banner on 23 March 2026:
Putting aside the fact that this headline is a wonderful example of the infinite expressiveness of language—expressing a thought that no one would ever have imagined prior to reading it—its use of cornhole is remarkable, for that word is an apparent violator of Gresham’s Law as applied to language—that “bad” meanings will drive out “good” ones. For cornhole is both a noun referring to a wholesome beanbag game, played by children and serious adult competitors alike, and a verb meaning to engage in anal intercourse.
Remember when vulgarity in American politics still seemed almost surprising? When it was considered noteworthy that Donald Trump swears a lot? When he forced The New York Times to be less tight-ass about censoring swears? When he made headlines around the world by calling certain countries “shitholes”? Well, those days are fucking gone forever.
Or nearly. Because there’s always some new shit. Trump saying swearwords? Yawn. Trump saying swearwords on his social media account? Meh. Trump saying swearwords on his social media account on Easter Sunday in the course of threatening war crimes? Hmmm. And doing so with… suspiciously scrupulous spelling and punctuation (if not capitalization)? Oh, come the fuck on.
Continue readingI never fully adopted freaking as an intensifier, euphemistic for fucking, partly because I swear fairly freely, and maybe also because fecking was available in my Irish English dialect. But I like having freaking available, and with its hundredth birthday round the corner, it’s a good time to showcase it.1
Freaking substitutes for its ruder cousin in all sorts of lexical and syntactic contexts, modifying adjectives (that was freaking amazing), verbs (let’s freaking go), and nouns (how is it still freaking January?), among other word classes; it’s also used as an infix (un-freaking-real) and in set phrases like freakin’ A – euphemistic, obviously, for fucking A.
Strong Language 