swearing

Another freaking f-word

Stan Carey14 Comments

I 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.

Two frames from a comic. 1. Ned Flanders smiles, his eyes closed briefly as he trims a hedge and listens to music. He says: “I *know* this music must be the tool of the devil, but that *sax* riff is just *freakin’ heavenly*!” 2. He startles, his eyes wide open, his hand raised to his open mouth. He says: “*Golly*, did I just say the *‘f’ word*?”
From “Be-bop-a-Lisa” in Simpsons Comics no. 6 (1994). Script & pencils: Bill Morrison; Inks: Tim Bavington; Colours: Cindy Vance. Editor: Steve Vance

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Jackson Lamb and the Slow Horses Learn How to Spell Profanity

Michael Adams2 Comments

As dawn rises on Aldersgate Street, small creatures rampage in the trash, and frosty tendrils of winter reach into the London fall. Various occupants of Slough House arrive swearing, as one tends to do if one is seconded to MI-5’s dust heap or, more accurately, reclassified as the very dust. Louisa Guy swears according to the fashion of the day:

“A body’s been dumped in the street. Broad daylight.”

“Here?”

“Central London […] More specifically,” Louisa said, “outside a fuck-off restaurant near the Mall” (RT 143)

Fuck-off stands for ‘you’re too ordinary to be here.’ Roddy Ho’s swearing isn’t about something that happened on the street but instead is merely an interior overestimation of his sex appeal: “Bitch was ripe was how he read it. Bitch was ready” (RT 11). His big mistake, however, is saying the same thing to Shirley Dander, who rightly clocks him — the dangers of thinking aloud.

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A Shit Ton of Infixing and Interposing Lands on Slough House, Everyone Survives

Michael Adams1 Comment

The intelligence officers of Slough House, good at everyday profanity, are proficient infixers and interposers, too. An infixing, remember, is when one inserts profanity into the structure of a word, at a stress appropriate point (unfuckingbelievable); an interposing inserts the profanity between words in a fixed or idiomatic phrase (go to hell < go the fuck to hell). Infixings and interposings occur infrequently in speech, but when it comes to any variety of profanity, the slow horses are well ahead of the common herd.

Jackson Lamb infixes and interposes with abandon. As he points out to River Cartwright, whose grandfather had been a powerful spook in his day, “But no, you’ve got a grandfather. Congratufuckinglations. You’ve still got a job” (SH 37). The infixing drips with disdain for both grandfather and grandson, well-earned in the grandfather’s case — if you don’t already know that and why, then you really need to read the books.

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Sweary links #27

Nancy FriedmanLeave a comment

Well, this is embarrassing: It’s been five years since we last published one of these link roundups. Obviously, we’re overdue for an update. Equally obviously, we’re not going to cover all the newsworthy sweary things that transpired between June 2020 and June 2025. We’re obsessive but not deranged. 

Here, then, is the best of the latest. Got a tip for us? Leave a comment here, or tag us on Mastodon or Bluesky. (We are no longer on Twitter/X.)

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Swearing as a rite of passage

Stan Carey3 Comments

Think about your earliest swearing. Did you graduate from euphemisms? (As a child I used sugar, drat, and flip/feck for shit, damn, and fuck.) Or did you jump right into prodigious profanity? Did you practise in private, and did you try out your new vocabulary among friends – or in front of shocked family members?

Poster for the film Hope and Glory. It shows a schoolboy running towards the camera, grinning broadly. Over his right shoulder there are several airships in the sky, and below them some other children on the street. The boy's jacket swings open, his tie is loose, and he's wearing short pants and shoes, like a school uniform. The tagline above the film title reads: A celebration of family. A vision of love. A memoir of war. All through the eyes of a child.Or maybe, as in John Boorman’s Hope and Glory (1987), you were forced to swear. In this period film, which reimagines the director’s childhood in London during the Blitz, coming of age meant coming to terms with the senselessness of war and the elusive sense of swearwords.

As Boorman writes in his wonderful memoir, Adventures of a Suburban Boy, the film was “a way of looking at my personal mythology”. For a child in wartime, some of that mythology centred on ammunition, an object of constant fascination:

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