“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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Pornhub’s WOTY

Dave Wilton1 Comment
Map of the US with the top relative Pornhub search terms for various states

Readers of this blog are probably familiar with the various Word of the Year (WOTY) competitions run by dictionaries and linguistic organizations. But they may not know that the site Pornhub.com has its own WOTY project of sorts. Each year Pornhub publishes a statistical analysis of its users, and in addition to providing global demographic data about who uses the site and when, it publishes the top and trending search terms used on it.

The 2024 analysis can be found here. [Note that the analysis itself is not pornographic, but beware of clicking links within it as those may lead you to NSFW pages. Moreover, one may not want to visit this link on a work computer, as your IT department may notify your boss that you’ve visited Pornhub.]

Hentai, sexually explicit cartoons in the style of Japanese manga, was the site’s no.1 search term again this year, with MILF, an acronym for a mom I’d like to fuck, also holding position at no.2. Demonstrating Pornhub’s global reach is the no.3 term, Pinay, referring to a Filipina, climbing from no.5 last year. On Pornhubgay.com, the top three terms remained unchanged from last year: twink, a man of youthful and slim appearance, at no.1, anime at no.2, and Pinay’s masculine counterpart Pinoy at no.3.  

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The 10th Annual Tucker Awards for Excellence in Swearing

Ben Zimmer4 Comments

How in the absolute fuck can this be the tenth installment of the annual Tucker Awards recognizing excellence in swearing? Somehow, it’s true: feast your eyes on the nine previous installments from ’15, ’16, ’17, ’18, ’19, ’20, ’21, ’22, and ’23 if you don’t believe me. The year 2024 has once again provided us with a bumper crop of sweary excellence, and it’s another opportunity to keep alive the spirit of the patron saint of Strong Language: Malcolm Tucker, the ultra-obscene political spinmeister on the BBC show The Thick of It, portrayed by Peter Capaldi from 2005 to 2012. (Mark your calendars, Tucker fans: May 19, 2025 marks the 20th anniversary of the character’s introduction in the first episode of the series.)

Capaldi still gets asked if there will be a revival of The Thick of It, even though series creator Armando Iannucci has ruled it out — last January he told The Independent that he wasn’t keen on the idea of rebooting the cutting political satire because politics now is “beyond a joke.” Still, the recent UK elections sparked a reappreciation of Tucker’s sweariness, as seen in such headlines as “Malcolm Tucker shows how f*****g ridiculous politics has become” and “What would Malcolm Tucker make of this election campaign?” (both from The Herald in Capaldi and Tucker’s native Scotland). Post-election, some pined for a return to Tuckerism (“Labour needs a Malcolm Tucker – and fast,” “Does Sir Keir need a real life Malcolm Tucker?“). And Tucker’s barbs remain alive and well on TikTok, where clips from The Thick of It are subject to endless remixes and re-memeification.

@baledfx

i dont even know how many times ive rewatched this show #thethickofit #thickofit #malcolmtucker #british #britcom #ukcomedy #edit #fyp #foryou #fyp > #thethickofitedit #xyzabc

♬ original sound – jazz

But let’s get down to the best sweary language of 2024. Come the fuck in or fuck the fuck off, as the sainted Malcolm would put it.

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REVIEW: Jesse Sheidlower’s The F-Word, 4th edition

Dave Wilton3 Comments
Cover of The F-Word, 4th edition
Buy the book!

Sheidlower, Jesse. The F-Word, 4th edition. Oxford University Press, 2024. 449 pages. US$22.99.

Back when I was a teen, c. 1980, some friends and I were cruising the streets of Seaside Heights, New Jersey on an off-season night. With us was a friend-of-a-friend, someone I did not know. He got into a verbal altercation with some other teens we had met on the street, and afterward as we drove off, he leaned out of the car window and shouted, “How’d you like a Hawaiian muscle fuck?!”

Now, we had no idea what a Hawaiian muscle fuck was, and truth be told, I don’t think he did either. We dubbed him the “HMF Kid,” and the incident stuck with me long after I had forgotten his real name. Over the years I occasionally wondered what a Hawaiian muscle fuck was, but it wasn’t until I had a copy of Jesse Sheidlower’s The F-Word in my hands that I found out. There it was, in print, under the headword muscle fuck, noun:

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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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