“A-cute-cute in a stupid-ass way”

With the passing of Scott Walker, who found pop-music fame as a member of the Walker Brothers before setting out on an inimitable solo career, the singer’s best-known work has been making the rounds online. One particularly memorable song from Walker was his first solo single, “Jackie,” released in December 1967. “Jackie” was an English-language rendering of Jacque Brel’s “La chanson de Jacky,” translated from French by Mort Shuman (a Brill Building songwriter who would go on to co-create the musical revue Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris). Both the French and English lyrics were quite racy for the time. The English chorus, as unforgettably delivered by Walker, goes:

If I could be for only an hour
If I could be for an hour every day
If I could be for just one little hour
A-cute-cute in a stupid-ass way

New frontiers in the giving of fucks and shits

Back in December 2014 when the Strong Language blog was just starting out, Stephen Chrisomalis contributed a memorable post, “How many swears can we give?” In it, Stephen mused on a couple of memes — “Look At All The Fucks I Give” and “Not a Single Fuck Was Given That Day” — and traced the history of “(not) give a TABOO TERM” (damn, shit, fuck, etc.) as what linguists call a “negative polarity item.” The following year, John Kelly posted about a newly popular idiom, “zero fucks given.” (Zero fucks given or ZFG was also nominated in the Most Useful category in the American Dialect Society’s 2015 Word of the Year voting.) Since then, there have been many more creative variations on the theme. Here are two humorous entries in the “no fucks/shits to give” genre that have popped up recently.

The 4th Annual Tucker Awards for Excellence in Swearing

It is once again my solemn duty to present the annual Strong Language honors for excellence in swearing, named for our patron saint Malcolm Tucker, Peter Capaldi’s paragon of sweariness as seen on BBC’s The Thick of It, the cinematic offshoot In the Loop, and countless YouTube montages ever since.

This is the fourth time the Tucker Awards have been bestowed on worthy recipients — feel free to take a stroll back in time and peruse the winners of 2015, 2016, and 2017.  But as the calendar turns on 2018, let’s get down to fucking business.

A metric buttload of OED additions

The quarterly update of the Oxford English Dictionary is always an occasion for rejoicing among hardcore lexicography buffs. The latest update is an even bigger bumper crop than usual, with a whopping 1,400 new words, senses, and subentries online. If you skim through the public list, you’ll see that a very large number have to do with the words arse, ass, bum, and butt, including related phrases and compounds. You might even say there’s a metric buttload of such additions. (Buttload, by the way, was already added to the OED back in June 2009, citing examples going back to 1988 — none of the metric variety, unfortunately.)

When the news gets shitty

Back in October, news spread about an anonymous crowdsourced list titled “Shitty Media Men,” which compiled various rumors and allegations of sexual misdeeds by men in the media industry. “Shitty Media Men” became newsworthy again this week after Twitter started buzzing that Harper’s was planning to publish a piece by Katie Roiphe that would reveal the name of the list’s creator. That led to several writers declaring that they would pull stories from Harper’s in protest. In a piece for The Cut, Moira Donegan bravely stepped forward to identify herself as the creator of the list.

Here I won’t dwell on the shittiness of the media men’s alleged behavior, or the shittiness of Harper’s and Roiphe for whatever plans they might have had to out Donegan and expose her to potential abuse. (Roiphe claims she wasn’t going to name Donegan without permission, but a fact-checker from Harper’s contacted Donegan and told her she was going to be identified.) Rather, let’s look at how newspapers like the Washington Post and the New York Times are handling the shitty word at the center of this shitty story.