If you’ve been seeing or hearing enshittify or enshittification in the last week or so, you have one man to thank: Cory Doctorow, the journalist, sci-fi writer, and co-author of the new book Chokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Labor Markets and How We’ll Win Them Back.
Sweary links #26
Once upon a time, dear StrongLangers, we made a promise to keep you regularly updated with interesting sweary tidbits from the Wide World of Web. We kept that promise until we didn’t. It has been, we note with embarrassment, more than 30 months since we posted Sweary Links #25. Well, we’re going to atone for that lapse right now. Not with 30 months of links: are you fucking kidding? Baby steps. Here’s what caught our attention over the last month or so. To stay up to date, follow us on Twitter.
What de rass is bomboclaat?
When you go to Twitter to see if “sco pa tu manaa” is over and they just shifted it to “bomboclaat.”
After wishing all the people posting “sco pa tu manaa” would just go the fuck to sleep, I was really happy to see the “bomboclaat” meme circulating at first. We don’t see enough sweary Patois! Admittedly, I couldn’t see what was so “fuck, man” about some of the images, but… Continue reading
Pubic education
English-usage authority Bryan A. Garner shook Language Twitter by suggesting that only philistines pronounced pubes as a single syllable.
More than a few of us responded with tweets of bewilderment and skepticism, likely confusing everyone around us as we muttered “PYOO-beez. PYOOBZ. PYOO-beez??” at our screens. Continue reading
Before Twitter, there were Rees’s pieces
Before there was the World Wide Web, there were libraries and bookstores. In high school I loved crawling the shelves of the Banff Book and Art Den, discovering books that would shape my view and style. Kurt Vonnegut, for instance, and Spike Milligan.
Before there was Twitter, there were bathroom walls and similar public surfaces whereon could be etched – or markered or spray-painted – comments on life and sundry witticisms (often recycled).
At the junction of these two was Nigel Rees and his series of books of collected graffiti from around the world, published 1979–1982. I discovered them in the Book and Art Den. They informed my sense of humour (I still use some of the jokes from them) and they instructed me on British swearing patterns and cultural references (such as the “[name] rules, OK” graffiti common around the Sceptred Isle at that time).
Nigel Rees was – is – a BBC luminary, host of the Radio 4 quiz panel show Quote… Unquote. He has collected books of quotations and phrases and anecdotes and such like. Quite a few books, in fact; somewhere north of 50, I believe. I don’t have most of them. But I’ve read Graffiti Lives, O.K., Graffiti 2, Graffiti 3, and Graffiti 4 quite a few times (although only once in the past decade).
Strong Language 