Pornhub’s WOTY

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?

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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Visual Swears 2: Electric Fuckaloo

Back in 2015 I wrote about visual swears in film, where profanity appears on the screen rather than on the soundtrack. The films featured in that post were The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Blade II, Shoot ’Em Up, Runaway Train, and Sorry to Bother You. Since then I’ve gathered a fuckload more.

Visual swears can have all sorts of motivations for filmmakers: humour, attitude, character type or mood, place detail, meta-commentary, and so on. After all, they’re deliberately built into a film’s production design – unless it’s a documentary, in which case they’re still selected in the framing and editing.

The first film below happens to be a documentary, and a great one: Dark Days (2000), which explores the lives of people living in a disused New York subway tunnel. One of them labels a makeshift toilet SHIT SPOT, perhaps for both informational and comedic reasons:

Front view of a makeshift toilet, with open seat balanced on some poles over a bucket. The inside lid has text that says, in all capitals, 'Shit spot' and an arrow pointing down.

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Shit! Goddamn! Sing sweary songs and jam

It’s a couple of years since our last fuck shit stack of sweary songs, and almost five since we began this series at the Rotten Cocksuckers’ Ball. So it’s about fucking time we posted some more bawdy blues and mothercussin’ melodies.

Much of the audio below is NSFW, if that still means anything, but it straddles the range from super-profane to merely suggestive. Genre-wise it’s cheerfully all over the place, so if you don’t like one, try the next.

LaVern Baker and Jackie Wilson clearly enjoyed this party version of ‘Think Twice’:

I said you better think twice, Jackie
Before you call me a dirty ho
I’ve got news for you, little boy
Don’t fuck with me no mo’

Shit! Goddamn! Get off your ass and jam, Funkadelic style:

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What is a grammar ho?

This is a guest post by David Morris, a sub-editor and former English language teacher who holds a master’s degree in applied linguistics. David has written a few posts for Strong Language and writes about language at his blog Never Pure and Rarely Simple.

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I stumbled across a website called Shit My Students Write,* on which teachers – it’s not specified what level – anonymously submit examples of their students’ writing. Most are of the type that used to be called “schoolboy howlers”. Sometimes the student’s intention is clear: “Hitler was a facetious dictator.” But I couldn’t figure out what was intended by the student who wrote:

My grandmother, when she was alive, was quite the grammar ho.

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