shit

What’s your favorite swear word?

Michael Adams5 Comments

Sometimes, people ask me, “What’s your favorite swear word?” I don’t know why. Also, I don’t know what to say. I’m interested in profanity but not especially invested in one word over another. It’s not a competition. They all have their uses, or we wouldn’t use them. I’d have to say something like, “Well, Fuck! is best when I’m frustrated beyond words, and my favorite profane put down is probably No shit, Sherlock …” but it feels like I’m putting far too much thought into a taxonomy of swearing preferences — who has time for that?

Apparently, some people have the time, as well as the concentrated interest in finding a favorite swear word, because in the middle of my “I don’t really have a favorite …,” the questioner interrupts with an enthusiastic, “My favorite is clusterfuck,” or the like. The conversational gambit wasn’t supposed to ferret out my favorite swear word but to allow the other person to share hers.

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“Type shit”

Nancy Friedman5 Comments

This is a guest post by Heddwen Newton, an English teacher and translator based in Germany and the author of the English in Progress newsletter. The post originally appeared on the English in Progress website.

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I curate a newsletter that keeps up to date (or at least attempts to keep up to date) with Gen Z and Gen Alpha slang, and “type shit”, also spelled as “type s”, “type shi” or “type shiii”, threw me for a loop when I found it on this teacher’s ban list:

List of "banned words in class," including bruh . . ., bro, on God, say less, Gucci, rizz, bussin, low key, high key, gyah, finna, and type S___
Via Reddit

Apparently, the young ’uns are saying it to affirm whatever was said before. Here’s an example given by a Reddit user:

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“Skippin’ like a dipshit”

Nancy Friedman3 Comments

What an enshittified election season we’ve been living through in the U.S. of A.! I’m speaking here of language, of course: of Donald Trump’s “shit vice president” remark, in reference to Democratic candidate Kamala Harris, covered in this space just a few days ago by Ben Yagoda (and which even the usually dainty New York Times printed without expurgation); of traded accusations of “bullshit” by TV host Anderson Cooper and radio host Charlamagne tha God on Cooper’s CNN show over the network’s lopsided reporting on Trump and Harris; and of “chickenshit” hurled at the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times, whose billionaire owners separately broke with tradition and prevented their papers’ editorial boards from endorsing a presidential candidate.  

But the shit compound that drew the most – and the most gleeful – coverage was uttered in an address given by Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, the Democratic vice presidential candidate, at a rally in Madison, Wisconsin, on October 22. The word was dipshit, and it wasn’t about anyone on either ticket.

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The sweary WotYs

Nancy Friedman5 Comments

The calendar year 2023 was a miserable one in countless ways — wars, abortion rights, record high temperatures, the decline and fall of Twitter/X — but it was the best of times for the mainstreaming of strong language. At the American Dialect Society’s 34th annual word of the year vote, held on the evening of January 5 in New York City, no fewer than six sweary lexical items — a historical record — were nominated for WotY honors. Two of them won in their respective categories, and one, enshittification, was named overall word of the year.

Here’s how it went down. (Note: I was not present at the vote but followed along as best as I could via various Bluesky accounts.)

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