Mainstream AF

It’s been just about four years since I published my first post about commercial sightings of “AF,” the abbreviation for the intensifier as fuck. And my, how far we’ve traveled since 2015: from festival T-shirts and Etsy geegaws to subway ads, a Netflix movie, and a surreal bidet commercial. We went back and forth on pronunciation: one-syllable word or initialism? (The latter, it would seem.)

And now we find ourselves, and AF, in the middle of Main Street, USA.

To be precise, the personal-care/feminine-hygiene aisle of Target.

Down There Wipes in “Sensual Seduction.” They’re FRESH AF, says “Rachel S.”

Go ahead and register your scandalous trademark . . . but the Supreme Court will judge your choices

You’re in luck if you sell FUCK ME formalwear, own the NO SHIT diner, or produce HEY ASSHOLE pepper spray. You’ll soon be able to head over to the website of the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) and register those trademarks. Because the U.S. Supreme Court has just ruled in the Brunetti case that the statutory bars on registering “scandalous” and “immoral” trademarks are unconstitutional.

But you better move quickly . . . A passel of the Justices is not pleased with this outcome. (The moral panic during the oral argument was sort of a red flag.)

Sluts

Last week, in response to the passage of draconian anti-abortion laws in several U.S. states, a Los Angeles–based makeup company announced that for four days it would be donating 100 percent of its revenue to organizations that support reproductive rights. The company, which was founded in the aftermath of the 2016 presidential election “by a group of jaded romantics,” is no stranger to controversy. The provocation begins with the company name: Lipslut.

Pictured: Lipslut’s “F*ck Trump” shade. The company also sells “F*ck Kavanaugh” (named for the newest U.S. Supreme Court Justice, Brett “I Like Beer” Kavanaugh), “F*ck Hollywood,” “Notorious R.B.G.” (a tribute to Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg), and a dark purple shade called — deep breath — “Leftylibglobalistsantifacommiesocialisthollyweirdopigs,” which takes its name from an internet troll’s insult.

Lipslut joins an increasing number of mainstream brand names, titles, and idioms that deploy the S-word. As of this writing there are 54 registered or pending SLUT trademarks in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office database; while a few are put to risqué use (SLUTNATION.XXX), many are family friendly. Which means that slut—a wanton word throughout its history—may be shape-shifting yet again.

The mistaken old fucks at The New York Times

The New York Times has a replete searchable archive. Every issue is there. But every issue from before 1996 has been OCRed (has had optical character recognition performed on it) and in general has not been checked by human eyes. The result is that sometimes the words you see online are not the words that were in print. And word forms are sometimes misrecognized as other lexical items, such as fuck, rather than as unintelligible collections of characters. (The word fuck per se has appeared many times in The New York Times even before recent years, especially in excerpts from books.)

And so we get this headline from September 29, 1950:

Fucks and Wilt Will Speak

Fags and faggots

This is a guest post by H.S. Cross, the author of the novels Grievous (FSG, 2019) and Wilberforce (FSG, 2015).

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Americans are familiar with the word fag as a gay slur, but across the pond, this is not necessarily the case. When I first encountered the word in English boarding school novels, I was shocked, but I soon learned that there was more to fag than ugly insults hurled on Christopher Street. The word has a long history, stretching back to the early 1300s, but it was not until the 1920s that it began to be used in the context of sexuality. For seven centuries, fag and faggot were not strong language but instead commonplace in schools, government, work, agriculture, and sports, chiefly in Britain.

I write fiction set in an English boarding school between the World Wars, so I have to deal with the word fag all the time in one of its non-derogatory usages. A reviewer once praised me (I think?) for my “unflinching use of the word fag,” as if there were a way around the word in the English school context. There isn’t.