Tossed salad and scrambled eggs

Fans of Frasier, which ran for eleven seasons on NBC beginning in 1993, will recognize the title of this post from the show’s iconic closing theme. The song’s composer, Bruce Miller, explained that tossed salad and scrambled eggs represented Frasier Crane’s psychiatric patients in that they were “mixed up.” Had the show premiered three years later, Miller might have had to change the lyrics: 1996 was when HBO aired its Prisoners of the War on Drugs documentary and the anilingual sense of “toss my salad” entered the unincarcerated public consciousness through this man:

For those of you who don’t want to watch this video, he says—No, you know what? Just watch the damn video. I’ll wait.

Burn in 7734, you Arsenic Sulfur

Since Strong Language launched, I’ve been cursed. I am seeing swears everywhere. I am hearing swears everywhere. I am constantly thinking about swears and I am swearing about swears. I’m dreaming swears. I’m conjuring up swears where there aren’t even swearwords. While it’s no coprolalia, it is a fucking shitshow. But this is nothing new.

As kids, we capsize calculators: 58008 is flipped into “boobs” or 7734, “hell.” As if charting sweara incognita, we scour maps for Beaverlick, Kentucky or Fucking, Austria. Phonebooks are prank fodder: Mike Hunts, in all their Simpsonian glory, have long unlisted their numbers. Phone numbers are curse codes: It didn’t take long for people to discover that the Obamacare hotline, 1-800-318-2596, dials up some choice words, if we decipher the telephone keypad.