My friend Ander Opmeer, who lives near Rotterdam, happened to see a bag for sale in the train station and, knowing I like strong language, bought it for me:
It says, in the colours of Rotterdam, SJOUW ME DE TERING. That’s a turn of phrase particular to Rotterdam; it translates idiomatically to something like “Fuck, this is heavy” or “Working my ass off.” But that’s not what it means literally.
To find out what it means literally, you have to translate it word by word, because if you just drop it into Google Translate you’ll get “Screw me,” which, again, is not literal. My Dutch is a bit uneven, and I at first thought it literally meant “Show me tuberculosis.” But no. I made two mistakes.
Sounds dirty, doesn’t it, getting your palimpsest on? In fact, it’s the broadest sort of euphemism for swearing. It’s not total absence of profanity from a text or conversation. Profanity is there, legible in occasional traces despite the better-behaved language that effaces it. When your grandmother says she never swears, I call bullshit. When authors avoid profanity but acknowledge that their characters (including a narrator) swear just beyond our hearing, I call bullshit, too. What motivates this caution but politeness that simultaneously evades and acknowledges the way we speak now? Great literature eschews bad language — so goes the conventional wisdom — but the swearing is there anyway, because the literature is written and read by polite people who swear. Palimpsestual profanity shapes attitudes towards proper speech, that is, speech that’s proper in a fictional setting. Continue reading →
The calendar year 2023 was a miserable one in countless ways — wars, abortion rights, record high temperatures, the decline and fall of Twitter/X — but it was the best of times for the mainstreaming of strong language. At the American Dialect Society’s 34th annual word of the year vote, held on the evening of January 5 in New York City, no fewer than six sweary lexical items — a historical record — were nominated for WotY honors. Two of them won in their respective categories, and one, enshittification,was named overall word of the year.
Here’s how it went down. (Note: I was not present at the vote but followed along as best as I could via various Bluesky accounts.)
I recently had the occasion to deploy the term, “The fuck outta here!” This got me thinking. The usual phrase in full is: “Get the fuck out of here.” But we have two common truncations: “The fuck outta here,” and “Fuck outta here.”
In meaning, the ejaculation “the fuck outta here” is roughly equivalent to “I don’t believe what you’re saying,” or maybe “bullshit.” What drew my interest was the truncation of “the.” So we start with “The fuck outta here,” which elides the word “get,” whereas “fuck outta here” elides both “get” and “the.” I think these are different expressions.
When you say, “Fuck off,” you’re using the word “fuck” as a verb. With “Fuck outta here,” it’s the verb, too. When you say, “Get the fuck outta here,” the nominative verb is “get.” Now we’re drilling down to the distinction. “The fuck outta here!” is leaning on the missing “get.” So what’s going on with these two phrases? “Fuck off” is akin to “Piss off.” In like guise, “Fuck outta here” is a rejection, a command, an imperative statement. But you add that “the” and things change in a subtle yet important way. “Fuck outta here” is closer to “Get out of here” or “Go away.” Add the definite article and the meaning shifts closer to “I don’t believe it.”
Phonetically, that “outta” is amusing. Depending on your idiolect, it might have a sort of Brooklyn accent, closer to “oudda.” Delivered naturally, it could sound like a single word: fuggouddaheah. But if your meaning is “this is nonsense,” then dafuggouddaheah gets you on the mark. Which may be your reaction to this monograph.
Among many other things, Madeline Kripke was a collector of dictionaries and other language books. At her death, in April 2020, an early victim of the Covid-19 pandemic, she left behind more than 20,000 books, boxes full of manuscripts — from an early Merriam-Webster archive to her own purchasing records, essential to determining the provenance of her many acquisitions — and ephemera, so much that she could barely move in her Greenwich Village apartment. But impressive as they are, the numbers are less important than her curation: she wasn’t a hoarder, and she didn’t collect accidentally or on a whim, but purposefully and with great knowledge of the history of people’s interest in language. She was a formidable scholar who chose to exercise her intelligence, not by teaching in a university, but by curating a peerless private collection. Much of that collection is devoted to strong language or language adjacent to it.
Strong Language 