Dick Assman, a Canadian gas station owner — yes, Assman the Gasman — has died at 82. He achieved fleeting celebrity in the 1990s when Dave Letterman featured him on the Late Show.
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Our new favorite Twitter account: Swear Trek.
Not the weirdest place McCoy woke up. pic.twitter.com/GynSv0b7e5
— Swear Trek (@swear_trek) August 20, 2016
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“There are publications that have refused to review this book, simply because they believe profanity is evidence of poor breeding and illiteracy.” A Q&A with Benjamin Bergen, author of the forthcoming What the F: What Swearing Reveals About Our Language, Our Brains, and Ourselves.
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It’s very important to teach our children how to avoid common spelling mistakes: pic.twitter.com/rTp0Je5apY
— Sophie Heawood (@heawood) August 21, 2016
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SiriusXM invented a restaurant called Dick’s Pizza just to make dick jokes. Tons and tons of dick jokes.
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Should judges quote obscenities verbatim in their decisions? Some say yes, others say no, and one says “It’s not so f***ing simple.”
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Charles River Ventures, a 46-year-old early-stage venture fund based in Silicon Valley, Boston, and New York, has launched the CRV Fellowship Program to support immigrant entrepreneurs. The company announced the move in a Medium post titled F*CK TRUMP.
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Everything Is Fucked: a syllabus for a class taught by Sanjay Srivastava. Week 1: Psychology Is Fucked. Week 2: Significance Testing Is Fucked. … Week 10: The Scientific Profession Is Fucked. (Hat tip: Betsy Levy Paluck.)
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Attn: @stronglang:
Application to register
PHUCKIThttps://t.co/XdWyk9hYSc#trademarks#greektome#nophucksgivenpic.twitter.com/hyHQQKdFjm— Ed Timberlake (@TimberlakeLaw) August 18, 2016
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Racist thug tells judge she’s “a bit of a cunt.” Judge tells racist thug: “You’re a bit of a cunt yourself.” Justice: done. (Hat tip: Lynne Murphy.)
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A man was arrested in South Cerney, England, for “drunkenly using foul language” while standing on a war memorial. #BeyondThePale, tweeted the Cotswolds Police.
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If Hillary Clinton wrote for Strong Language, it might go a little like this.
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Paul LePage, the Republican governor of Maine, left a voicemail message for Drew Gattine, a Democratic state representative, in which he called Gattine a “son-of-a-bitch socialist cocksucker,” among other endearments.
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A tattooist in St. Pölten, Lower Austria, was jailed for inking a penis and “fuck” on a woman’s back instead of the yin/yang symbol she’d requested.
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@stronglangpic.twitter.com/f8IWbgHFWS
— Sofiya Asher (@sofiyaasher) August 12, 2016
(More on “X as fuck” in this Strong Language post.)
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UK supermarket giant Tesco is defending an employee who allegedly swore at a 4-year-old (“don’t take the fucking piss”) in its Cambourne store. (More on “take the piss” here.)
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The Wall Street Journal now permits the printing of “most vulgarities” if they are in direct quotations: “Thus, an executive referring to a ‘shit storm’ or a politician (guess who) vowing to “‘bomb the shit’ out of Islamic State’s oil operations.”
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By God’s heart: Swearing in early modern English. (Hat tip: Sue Walder.)
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How Internet filters fuck shit up: “Since the internet first went mainstream in the late 90s, Scunthorpe has faced a major indignity from the algorithmic twists and turns of the connected internet.”
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https://t.co/Pf6amZiYHQ via @Fritinancy pic.twitter.com/Rp6Q1cR7KK
— Strong Language (@stronglang) August 9, 2016
Strong Language 
In the movie comic, note the description of “#” as “hashtag”, as opposed to “pound sign” or otherwise. The times they are a-changin’.
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In British English # was always hash, Our pound sign would be £. The lady who voiced phone announcements for the BT phone company said her favourite was “Press hash now”.
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The American English “pound” sign (#) represents the unit of weight (16 ounces), not money.
Another name for # is octothorpe. Here’s the story behind that name.
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@Nancy, below,
In the rest of the English speaking world, the 16 ounce pound is abbreviated to lb.
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It’s also “lb.” in the US. And it’s (sometimes) “#.”
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