Author: John Kelly

“Eat shit” and “Oh fuck”: Sweary First and Last Words in Michael Erard’s “Bye Bye I Love You”

John Kelly3 Comments

We will not go gentle into that good night here at Strong Language. We will rage. Oh, we will rage, all right, uttering our shit’s, fuck’s, and damn’s until the bitter-ass end.

And that’s true for a lot of us, according to Michael Erard in his latest book, Bye Bye I Love You: The Story of Our and First Last Words, out now from the MIT Press. Apparently some of us even come into speech, let alone leave it behind, kicking and screaming—and swearing!

The story of first and last words that Erard, a linguist and author, tells in Bye Bye I Love You is intelligent, humane, cross-disciplinary, beautifully written, and comprehensive, offering a historical and cultural account of our first and final utterances as much as a linguistic one.

Germane to my fellow vulgarians here, I was fascinated to learn that cursing does have a place amid the mama’s and famous last words we associate with our initial and ultimate speech acts. (And as Erard well explains, these verbal bookends are indeed far more complex than those associations.)

The front cover and spine of Michael Erard's "Bye Bye I Love You: The Story of Our First and Last Words." The cover has a white background with the main title in a greenish blue font blending into gold, which is mirrored in the background of the image.
Bye Bye I Love You by Michael Erard (2025, MIT Press)
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“Jumos”: a slurry-sounding typo dredges up a slangy, sweary past

John Kelly8 Comments

One of the stranger items to surface so far from Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury—whose sweary account of the Trump White House I recently covered—is the curious case of jumos.

On the 2016 Trump Tower meeting with a group of Russians, Wolff writes that Bannon said: “The chance that Don Jr. did not walk these Jumos up to his father’s office on the 26th floor is zero.”

Putting aside Bannon’s explosive implication that Trump himself met with the Russians, despite White House denials to the contrary, Bannon’s statement had many scratching their heads: What is a jumo? Specifically, it had Maggie Serota wondering in her January 3rd Spin article: “Did Steve Bannon Invent a New Slur?”

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“What a fucking idiot”: Michael Wolff’s sweary account of the Trump White House

John Kelly6 Comments

Whoo-ee, 2018 started off with a fucking bang, didn’t it? Right on the heels of our third annual Tucker Awards for Excellence in Swearing drop the juicy profanities in Michael Wolff’s controversial Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House.

As excerpts and early reviews ahead of its January 9th release are proving, Wolff’s account—apparently based on over 200 interviews with the president, his inner circle, and other staff conducted over 18 months, much as embedded in the West Wing—is blistering. Trump’s former chief strategist Steve Bannon, of all people, called the Trump Tower meeting with Russians “treasonous,” according to Wolff. 

Wolff’s account is also a very sweary one. As Ben Zimmer, who authors our reliably politics-packed Tucker Awards, observed on Twitter:

Zimmer’s right, so let’s highlight some choice examples we’ve seen so far. Bannon clearly positions himself as a Tucker favorite, if Wolff’s reports are confirmed. 

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A matrix of -shits

John Kelly27 Comments

Recently, my father and I were enjoying a pleasant train ride through the Irish countryside to visit some family friends. Our conversation, as it does, went to –shit. Chickenshit, specifically.

I don’t recall what occasioned our chuckling about chickenshit, not that one ever needs a reason, but soon our chatter turned to other piles of -shit, e.g., bullshit, batshit, jackshit, the shit-list goes on. This put to mind, of course, Strong Language, where we’ve been well covered in –shit words over the years, memorably Kory Stamper on dipshit, Mark Peters on frogshit, and Ben Zimmer on ripshit.

I was curious about how English’s many species of –shits, whether they be formed by compounding or affixation, relate to one another. So, naturally, I made a matrix—a matrix of –shits—comparing them by kind and degree.

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“Shitburger”: swearing, made to order

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First there was the nothingburger. Now there’s the shitburger.

In a March column for the Wall Street Journal, Ben Zimmer traced nothingburger’s rise from 1950s Hollywood gossip to Capitol Hill politics. But earlier this week, we got a fresh round of nothingburgers when various people in the Trump camp used it—initially—to describe Donald Trump Jr.’s meeting with a Kremlin-connected lawyer during the presidential campaign in June 2016. 

That all changed after Jr. tweeted out emails showing just how eager he was to get dirt on Hillary Clinton from Russia in that meeting. Stephen Colbert had fun with this metaphor of the month during an opening monologue Tuesday night: “Yesterday, Reince Priebus said this whole story is a nothingburger. Well, these emails have turned into an all-you-can-prosecute buffet.”

Others reacted with a much more colorful variant: shitburger. Twitter, as ever, dished up some telling examples:

https://twitter.com/JHova_83/status/885224481958096897

https://twitter.com/vaswati16th/status/885844480095662080

Unlike a nothingburger, between the two buns of a shitburger there is a there there—and it’s, um, well, yeah.

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