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
What a fucking week! In the U.S., Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy announced his retirement — but only after siding with the court majority in upholding President Trump’s travel ban and bestowing a judicial blessing on anti-abortion facilities. The Environment Protection Agency’s chief ethics officer recommended an investigation of his own boss. Immigrant children as young as 3 were being ordered to appear in court alone. A gunman with a festering grudge shot up the newsroom of a newspaper in Annapolis, Maryland, killing five employees. And in the UK … well, we’ll get there in a minute.
It was, in short, a week guaranteed to elicit a lot of strong language, and on that score it did not disappoint. Here’s a brief round-up.
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Blue Velvet is a film with an enduring power to unsettle viewers. Its unique brand of ‘darkness in colour’ (to borrow Pauline Kael’s phrase) features also at the level of language, with the cornball goofing of its young sweethearts set against the malevolent and compulsive profanity of Frank Booth, played by Dennis Hopper.
For his book Lynch on Lynch, Chris Rodley asked David Lynch if all of Frank’s fucks were in the script or if any were improvised. Lynch replied:
I had many, many, many of them written in the script, but Dennis always added more, because you get on a roll, and you can’t help yourself. And if an actor is locked into the groove so solidly, even if they say extra lines, or not exactly the way they’re written, they’re truthful. And for me Dennis was one of those guys. He always says that I could never say the word on set and that I would go to the script and say, ‘Dennis, when you say this word.’ [Laughs.] That’s not true exactly.
The filmmakers initially passed on Hopper because of his reputation, but the actor persisted and Lynch, thankfully, reconsidered. Without presuming to psychoanalyze Booth – ‘there’s enough material there for an entire conference,’ as the psychiatrist said of Basil Fawlty – we can see in his profanilect* motifs of incest, defecation, and violence, among other things. He swears inventively but also routinely, and constantly.
Enough fucking about. Let’s look at some examples. (Spoiler and trigger warnings ahoy.)
On Friday, after President Trump abruptly canceled a June 12 meeting in Singapore with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, reporters scrambled to file updates. One of them was Daniel Dale of the Toronto Star, who attempted to get a quote from Jeffrey Lewis (@ArmsControlWonk), an expert on nuclear nonproliferation. The response wasn’t quite what Dale had hoped for, but it was newsworthy in its own way.
Goat rodeo seems like an amusing but innocuous way to describe the chaotic situation that Lewis was alluding to. On the surface, it appears more family friendly than its time-honored synonyms clusterfuck, fuckup, snafu (Situation Normal, All Fucked Up), fubar (Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition), and shitshow. Dig a little deeper, though, and you discover the sweary origins of the term. Continue reading
Soon we may have all sorts of COCK-formative trademarks engorging the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) database because the bar on registering scandalous trademarks is dying a slow death. But the current COCK-related trademark controversy is more complicated and, frankly, less fun than the pending application for COCK SUCKER for candy in the shape of a rooster.
Faleena Hopkins has written several self-published romance novels, among them the Cocker Brothers of Atlanta series, also called the Cocky series. These brothers, though they have cockiness and, apparently, horniness in common, have chosen diverse paths in life. Titles in the series thus include Cocky Marine, Cocky Cowboy, Cocky Genius and Cocky Senator.
After publishing a number of books in the series, Hopkins went on to obtain two federal trademark registrations for COCKY. She owns one for COCKY in no particular font for “a series of books in the field of romance” and “a series of downloadable e-books in the field of romance,” issued April 17, 2018. And another stylized mark for the same goods, issued May 1, 2018:
Armed with her registration, Hopkins appears to have used the Amazon Brand Registry to have Amazon take down several novels with “Cocky” in the title. (The ABR requires a trademark registration.) She has also sent out several cease and desist letters to individual authors with “Cocky” titles.
This has pissed the publishing community off royally. For the full shitstorm, check out #cockygate on Twitter. Just brace yourself for the vitriol. The Romance Writers of America trade association is consulting with legal counsel to figure out how to stop Hopkins, and a Moveon.org petition urging the USPTO to cancel Hopkins’ trademark registrations has almost 27,000 signatures as of this writing. Continue reading
