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.
Deliverance from the F-word
At Strong Language we love creative swearing. But sometimes being creative means avoiding swearwords. When John Boorman and his team were filming Deliverance in rural southeast US, they faced difficulties not only in handling the unforgiving location but also in making certain scenes suitable for eventual TV broadcasting.
One scene in particular proved a challenge: Jon Voight and Ned Beatty’s brutal encounter with two sadistic locals in the woods. According to Boorman, the film’s producers suggested that he shoot the scene two different ways, so that there’d be a version suitable for TV. This meant, among other things, toning down the language in the working script.
Gadzooks! Taboo words? Minced oaths? Zounds!
I’m reposting this from my own blog, Sesquiotica. Lest you marvel at the absence of actual swearwords, know that my mother reads it.
Gadzooks! Zounds!
Be careful with those words. They’re ancient holy relics. They’re soaked with a divine spirit. They’re broken bits of oaths, pieces of sacred words of eternal commitment, now used as playthings. I’ll show you… but not quite yet.
We don’t utter oaths as exclamations and imprecations and expressions of emotional intensity much anymore. Most of us are more likely to call on sex and other bodily functions to express dismay at the arc of a crystal glass to a tile floor or a steel hammer to the wrong kind of nail. In general, we feel one of two ways about names for the divine: a few of us consider them so inviolable and sacred that we would never use them to express shock, anger, or other emotions of the edge; the remainder of us seldom consider them of enough account to be satisfactory for the purpose. But there were times when it was otherwise. Continue reading
Swearing in the time of coronavirus
We’re staying inside, we’re social-distancing (or, more accurately, physical-distancing), we’re washing our hands over and over, we’re inventing new corona-words, we’re choosing new email signoffs (adieu to “Cheers!”; bonjour to “Be well”).
And here in the virtual Strong Language enclave, we’re thinking about illness-inspired swearing.
Testicular fortitude
If you ever played the video game Duke Nukem, you might remember his signature catchphrase, “I’ve got balls of steel.” This use of balls features widely in the English lexicon, as in:
- ballsy
- big balls
- break my balls
- have (someone) by the balls
- ball-buster
So it’s understandable that when you encounter a phrase or idiom with “balls” in it, the cojones are a go-to cognate. But that can lead one astray. Take, for example, “balls to the wall,” meaning to be racing flat-out. This comes to us from aviation, where the throttles are topped with knobs and are pushed fully forward for maximum power.
