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 quiz as it ran

Answers appear at the end of the post.

Q1: On February 24, 2022, a Ukrainian border guard responded to a demand from the guided missile cruiser Moskva with a phrase reported in English-language news media as “[blank] [blank], go fuck yourself.” Many news outlets wrote around the expletive, but what two words fill in those blanks?

Q2: What acronym, dating back to at least April 1941, started as Army slang acknowledging the ordinary disorder of military life? As the word spread to civilians, the “F” in the acronym was variously explained as standing for “fouled,” “fiddled,” “fixed,” or “fuddled” — but we know a minced oath when we see one. In 1943, a series of instructional cartoon shorts produced for the Army used it as the surname for their “goofiest soldier,” a walking lesson in what not to do.

 Q3: Martin Scorsese has directed a lot of fucking movies that use the word “fuck” a lot. And as of now, he has the distinction of directing both the Best Picture nominee and Best Picture winner that use “fuck” most often.
The nominee includes the word 569 times. One example: “You want me to sell you this fucking pen?”
The winner includes it 237 times, including “Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe fuck yourself.”
Name both movies. Hint: Neither of them are GoodFellas, which was nominated but fucking robbed.

Q4: One story — an amusing etymology yarn that enough people believe to spur a Snopes page debunking it — spread around the internet in late 1996, falsely claiming to have been featured on the NPR show Car Talk.
In the story, after a memorable victory, English archers taunted their foes by waving their middle fingers at them and flaunting that they could “pluck yew!” What military engagement a few hundred years earlier supposedly both spawned the middle finger and popularized the insult “fuck you”?

Q5: What four-word phrase completes the title of two books published in 2015 and 2016? In the first, Sarah Knight explored The Life-Changing Magic of …, and later Mark Manson dug in to The Subtle Art of … this phrase. The books were part of a provocative 2010s publishing trend of titles using the word “fuck,” though they also use asterisks in their cover art to make them friendlier for brick-and-mortar bookstores.

Q6: What word, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, first appears in the late 1800s as a synonym for “brothel,” but shortly thereafter became a synonym for “unjust or meddlesome treatment”? Or, in the words of etymologist Mark Peters, “unadulterated bullshit.”
Amy Winehouse considered using it as the title for her song “Me and Mr. Jones,” but instead just immortalized it in an early line.

Q7: What slang term did staffers working for Richard Nixon’s 1972 reelection campaign use to describe their political sabotage and dirty tricks, including stuffing ballot boxes and distributing fake campaign literature? The term was brought to wider public attention when Woodward and Bernstein published All the President’s Men, and is still used today to describe similar bullshit political tactics.

Q8: What is the new name, as of 2021, of the Austrian town formerly known as “Fucking”? Residents voted in 2020 to change it after years of dealing with tourism-related vandalism. The new name changes the old the same way that Norman Mailer agreed to euphemize “fuck” in his book The Naked and the Dead.

Q9: What three-word phrase was upheld as constitutionally protected speech in the 1971 case Cohen v California, when the United States Supreme Court ruled that using the word “fuck” did not constitute, on its own, disturbing the peace. Paul Robert Cohen had been arrested in 1968 for disorderly conduct because he wore a jacket that featured peace symbols, the phrase “Stop the War,” and the phrase in question.

Q10: What 1981 Dead Kennedys single, a furious one-minute song demanding that fascist and far-right music fans get out of their music scene, was packaged with an armband depicting a crossed-out swastika?

Q11: On January 5, 2024, the American Dialect Society selected “FAFO” as 2023’s “acronym/initialism of the year,” over nominees that included AITA (“am I the asshole”) and IYKYK (“if you know, you know”). The ADS defined FAFO as a “warning that foolish actions will result in unwanted consequences,” but what 5-word phrase does the abbreviation stand for?

Q12: “Fuck.”
With that line, using the word’s classic non-metaphorical definition of “engage in sexual intercourse,” Nicole Kidman delivered what turned out to be the last line in the last film in a celebrated director’s career. Name both the director and the 1999 movie that contains that final farewell “fuck.”

Bonus: 4 questions written that did not run

When smithing a One-Day Special, writers have the option to submit 15 questions to playtesters, knowing that they’ll need to cut 3 of them before it runs. It’s a useful way to gauge difficulty and how much people like particular topics. 

I ended up cutting 4 questions between playtesting and the quiz going live, because I added the FAFO question after the American Dialect Society WOTY voting, which came after the deadline for draft questions. 

Alt Q 1: What insulting but broadcast-friendly phrase was coined by reporter Kelli Stavast during an interview with the winner of the 2021 Sparks 300 NASCAR race? She had either misheard or was misquoting a vulgar chant used by the crowd at the Talladega Superspeedway to voice their displeasure at the president.

Alt Q 2: 30 Rock used “boff,” Two and a Half Men used “bang,” and Spider-Man: Homecoming just used “eff.” All these pop culture riffs — and many others — on the forced-choice party game FMK replace that initial “fuck” with a less vulgar euphemism. In most of these bowdlerized variations, though, the M and the K stay the same. What do both of those letters stand for?

Alt Q 3: “I’d like to know who the fuck did it!”
With that February 21, 1981 ad-lib, Charles Rocket doomed his career on Saturday Night Live. He was responding to a question from guest host Charlene Tilton as the culmination of a running gag throughout the episode. What television series was being referenced in that gag?

Alt Q 4: What adjective did Erica Jong coin in her 1973 novel Fear of Flying to describe the kind of fuck that is “a platonic ideal,” “absolutely pure,” “free of ulterior motives,” and ideally brief and anonymous? 

Answers to all questions follow below.

A1: Russian warship (alternate phrasings such as “Russian ship” or “Russian vessel” were accepted)
I know the literal translation to English is closer to “go sit on a dick,” but it’s still a big current events news story about “fuck” in English. 

A2: snafu
This was a hard one to pin — to come up with a question where there’s one unambiguously correct answer. The version that went to testers did not include anything about Private Snafu, and relied solely on dating. I also added the “ordinary disorder” phrasing. Nonetheless, “fubar” was actually guessed more often than “snafu” — 51% to 45% or so. 

A3: The Wolf of Wall Street and The Departed

A4: the Battle of Agincourt
An all-time favorite false etymology story that I felt compelled to work in. 
Interesting language-related discussion on the message boards: Some people were misled by “a few hundred” because “six” is too many to be “a few.” I disagree — in my dialect, “a few” would include anything from three to nine — but had I realized that would confuse people, I’d have written around it.

A5: not giving a fuck

A6: fuckery
In here because of the song, and because “fuckery” is maybe my favorite fuck-derivative. 

A7: ratfucking

A8: Fugging

A9: Fuck the Draft
Most popular answer was actually “fuck the police,” which made a lot of sense but didn’t occur to me ahead of time. Several testers guessed that would be the most common wrong answer, though. 

A10: “Nazi Punks Fuck Off” 

A11: fuck around and find out

A12: Stanley Kubrick, Eyes Wide Shut

Alt A 1: Let’s go Brandon
Dropped because no testers were enthusiastic about it. Nor was I — solid topic, not a particularly interesting framing, and “Russian warship” covered current events so there were no compelling reasons to keep it over better-liked questions.

Alt A 2: Marry, Kill
Speaking of not particularly interesting, I was fairly sure even before submitting test questions that this would get cut. I like the “Fuck Marry Kill” topic but could not come up with a compelling framing of the question. The major argument for keeping it, in retrospect, is that I suspect it would’ve played pretty easy — always nice to have a couple of gimmes in a quiz. (Though the quiz did have two already.) 

Alt A 3: Dallas
Another one I was leaning towards cutting anyway, and was validated by tester response. Nothing really wrong with it other than not being as interesting as what stayed in the quiz. In retrospect, I do wish I’d included a TV question, though. 

Alt A 4: zipless
This was the first question I thought of when I was brainstorming question topics, and the last question I cut — specifically to fit in FAFO. I’ve always thought “zipless fuck” was an amusing coinage, because it’s just popular enough to stick around yet also not really used in the wild anymore. And “zipless” is just a funny word. 

Unsurprisingly for such a productive bit of language, there are far more possible topics — memorable uses and bits of history — than I could have included. 

George Carlin? Lenny Bruce? Not here! 

People in a discussion thread were sad not to see The Wire’s famous all-”fuck” dialogue scene, for example. Or a scene from Good Omens, which I have not watched, with a “devastatingly effective” use of “oh, fuck” — probably would’ve been good! 

Maybe I’ll propose “The F-Word II” next year as a followup — or maybe I’ll go back to one of my non-fuck ideas. “Alfred Hitchcock in the 1950s” may not be as lexically colorful, but it would still be fun to fucking write. 

James Callan’s self-description: “Content designer and strategist. Handy on a quiz team. Moviegoer, cinephile.” You can follow him on BlueSky and Letterboxd.