That’s bitchin’!

A lot of surfer slang consists of in-crowd jargon or outmoded antiques: grommet (an eager young surfer), hodad (a non-surfer; a poser), log (a heavy surfboard), Noah (a shark). But other terms that bubbled up in the surf towns of Southern California, Hawaii, and Australia in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s – bro, dude, Cali (for California), wipeout – are now part of the everyday vocabulary of English-speaking landlubbers who may have no idea about the words’ briny origins. One of the most widespread of these expressions, and probably the most pertinent to our interests at Strong Language, is bitchin’, an adjective or interjection meaning “excellent,” “cool,” or “admirable.” 

It took a long time for bitch and its derivatives to evolve from veterinary noun (Old English: “female dog”) to taboo slur (for a woman c. 1400; for a man c. 1500) to slightly taboo verb (early 1900s: “talk spitefully”; early 1930s: “complain”) to a word so cheerily inoffensive that it’s used in brand names that are prominently displayed in mass-market retail outlets like Costco. Along the way, bitch begat dozens of slangy spin-offs, most of them U.S. in origin and mostly pejorative, that include bitch bath (perfume instead of soap and water), bitch box (loudspeaker), and bitch light (a twisted rag soaked in grease and used for illumination). 

Bitchin’ Sauce at Costco, Richmond, California. Photo: Nancy Friedman

Palimpsestual Profanity

Sounds dirty, doesn’t it, getting your palimpsest on? In fact, it’s the broadest sort of euphemism for swearing. It’s not total absence of profanity from a text or conversation. Profanity is there, legible in occasional traces despite the better-behaved language that effaces it. When your grandmother says she never swears, I call bullshit. When authors avoid profanity but acknowledge that their characters (including a narrator) swear just beyond our hearing, I call bullshit, too. What motivates this caution but politeness that simultaneously evades and acknowledges the way we speak now? Great literature eschews bad language — so goes the conventional wisdom — but the swearing is there anyway, because the literature is written and read by polite people who swear. Palimpsestual profanity shapes attitudes towards proper speech, that is, speech that’s proper in a fictional setting.

F-word trivia time!

The following is a guest post by James Callan.

I wrote a quiz about “fuck” that ran on LearnedLeague the other day, which attracted 2401 players. 

LearnedLeague, for those who are unfamiliar, is an invitation-only subscription-based trivia contest that runs four seasons per year. The regular quizzes are all the work of one person, who goes by Thorsten A. Integrity. 

But between seasons, members have the opportunity to submit what are called One-Day Specials — 12-question quizzes that stay up for a day or two, focused on a particular topic. Proposals for 1DSes, as they’re called, are accepted in August, and slots to write (or “smith”) them are awarded in September. Smithing is a volunteer activity. 

“The F-Word” was the seventh 1DS that I’ve smithed for the league. Earlier topics have included Andy Warhol, Cultural Appropriation, and One-Letter Answers. Though I euphemized the title, the quiz itself did not shy away from spelling out “fuck” and its permutations. 

Now that the quiz has run, I thought it would be fun to share with Strong Language readers.  

The sweary WotYs

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.)

The 9th Annual Tucker Awards for Excellence in Swearing

We’ve logged yet another fucking year here at Strong Language, so that can mean only one thing: It’s time for our annual awards recognizing excellence in swearing. It’s our ninth go-round — check out our posts from ’15, ’16, ’17, ’18, ’19, ’20, ’21, and ’22 for a trip down memory lane. The awards are also an opportunity to pay tribute to the patron saint of Strong Language: Malcolm Tucker, the deliriously obscene operative played by Peter Capaldi on the BBC political satire The Thick of It from 2005 to 2012. We’re not the only ones keeping Tucker’s spirit alive these days. For instance, there’s someone going by “Malcolm Tucker” on TikTok, posting choice soundbites like Tucker’s Law (an outtake from the 2007 “Spinners & Losers” special): “If some cunt can fuck something up, that cunt will pick the worst fucking time to fuck it up, ’cause that cunt’s a cunt.” (I can totally see Malcolm having this on a tea towel.)  

@malcolm_tucker

Never forget it, I live by this law. 🖤 #malcolmtucker #malcolm #tucker #petercapaldi #foryoupage #tuckerslaw #fuck #message #law #rule #onlyinmycalvins #scaleupyourswagger #fyp #whotok #12thdoctor

♬ Malcolm Tuckers Law – Malcolm Tucker

Meanwhile on Twitter (X, whatfuckingever), “John Bull” has been imagining Tucker’s reactions to the omnishambles of the Rishi Sunak era in British politics.

TUCKER: The mortgage crisis is going to make a lot of voters homeless.
RISHI: Yeah. Agreed. That's why I plan to put chessboards in parks
TUCKER: You fucking what?
RISHI: You know… um… Give them something to do.
TUCKER: How the FUCK did you survive school? https://t.co/Sazxz4vaoS

— John Bull (@garius) August 2, 2023

And as we’ll see, echoes of Tucker can also be detected on TV shows staffed by Thick of It alums. But let’s not beat around the proverbial bush: who swore it best in 2023?