language

Serving Kant

Dave Wilton5 Comments
Cover image of Miriana Conte's single, "Serving." She's sitting on a white floor, leaning towards the viewer, her long dark hair blowing to the side. She's wearing a black fishnet top over a leotard that's pink on top and tiger-print on the legs. Above her, the word SERVING is in sparkly pink, all caps.

It wouldn’t be the annual Eurovision Song Contest without some sort of controversy. Most years the controversy is political in nature. The 2025 contest was no different in this regard, but in addition to the usual political rhubarb, this year’s contest saw a dispute over a certain four-letter word in lyrics of one of the entries.

The song in question was Malta’s entry in the contest: “Serving,” originally titled “Kant,” performed by Maltese singer Miriana Conte and written by Conte, Benjamin “BNJI” Schmid, Sarah Evelyn Fuller, and Matthew “Muxu” Mercieca. The song was released in January 2025.

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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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What kind of “fuckery” is this?

Stan Carey5 Comments

If there’s one place you’ll find fuckery, it’s in a fuckery. In fact, you’d probably find all sorts of fuckery in a fuckery, including:

—treachery, ill treatment or behaviour
—nonsense, foolishness, bullshit
—something causing frustration
—sexual activity.

That’s some polysemous fuckery. And the fuckery you’ll find it in, if you’re still with me, is a brothel.

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Strong bad mature filthy language

Stan Carey12 Comments

Listening to a podcast this morning, I noticed the phrase mature language used in a content warning. It’s one of many phrases in the form X language, some of them similarly euphemistic, for what we might more plainly call swearing.

In several of these phrases, the modifier identifies the type of content: abusive language contains abuse, obscene language obscenity, profane language profanity, vulgar language vulgarity. But these categories are tricky to define and tend to overlap in usage; the phrases are often used interchangeably.1

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Trooper, trucker, sailor, fishwife: What we swear like

Stan Carey19 Comments

The expressions swear like a trooper and swear like a sailor are so common as to be cliché. But why do we swear ‘like a trooper’ or ‘like a sailor’? And what else do we swear like, idiomatically, in English and other languages?

Troopers and sailors

Swearing has long been identified with the military, source of so much slang, ribald chants, tribal insults, and other forms of strong language. Profanity would come into its own in war, aiding both bonding and catharsis: ‘an easement to the much besieged spirit’, as Ashley Montagu put it.

So routine was swearing in WWI that to omit it carried real force. In his 1930 book Songs and Slang of the British Soldier: 1914–1918, John Brophy writes, ‘If a sergeant said, “Get your ––––ing rifles!” it was understood as a matter of routine. But if he said “Get your rifles!” there was an immediate implication of urgency and danger.’

We can assume that fucking is the censored word. The spread of fuck through war is described in Ruth Wajnryb’s Expletive Deleted (2005):

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