If anycunt says it, will everycunt accept it?

This is a guest post by Gary Thoms and E. Jamieson. Gary Thoms is from Glasgow, and is an Assistant Professor at New York University. E Jamieson is a Scot from outside the central belt, and is a postdoc at the University of Glasgow. Both work on Scots syntax.

Viewers of Saturday Kitchen, a Saturday morning magazine show broadcast on the BBC in the UK, were treated to a sudden and unexpected airing of the c-word this Saturday past. “Dan from Edinburgh” called in to ask the celebrity chef hosts a question about Christmas dinner.

“You ken what it’s like this time of year, every cunt’s banging on about parsnips and all that, so what’s a barry side for Christmas?”

Fucking holiday gifts

Looking for that certain sweary something that will elicit [chortles] [cackles] [gasps] during Secret Santa time? Strong Language has just what the season demands.

A fuck shit stack of sweary songs

My last collection of sweary songs began with some vintage a cappella filth about cocksuckers. For balance, I’ll start this one with The Fourskins’ winning ditty ‘Her Vagina’ (most audio that follows is VNSFW):

Want ruder? Harry Roy and His Orchestra sang about ‘My Girl’s Pussy’ almost a century ago. Warning: this one has serious earworm potential:

(Comic artist R. Crumb and his Cheap Suit Serenaders introduced me to the song.)

A lyric for our times: ‘Bloody Mother Fucking Asshole’ by Martha Wainwright:

The fucking midterm elections

You know what I’m talking about, fellow U.S.ians? Let’s get this motherfucker over with already, even though we know that campaigning for the fucking 2020 general election will begin on November 7, and the festering rancor will probably continue into the 23^rd century, if the melting icecaps don’t inundate us first.

I mean, take a look at the contents of my mailbox.

Oakland, California, October 29, 2018. Not shown: election-related emails, texts, and robocolls.

Tired of it all? Me too! But instead of turning my frown upside down, I’m turning weary into sweary. Here are a few fucking points of light in the gloom.

How I Met Your Mother: The bitch chronicles, part 4 — Plain bitch

Earlier bitch chronicles have celebrated highly evolved bitches, but How I Met Your Mother (HIMYM) acknowledges bitch’s baser uses, too. For instance, you can deploy weaponized bitch against people you hate or despise. You can use it glibly to abuse anyone outside your own group, exactly the opposite of using bitch to build solidarity within the group. But you cannot use basic bitch against a woman friend, neither to her face nor indirectly in a way that gets back to her. HIMYM demonstrates over and over just how rhetorically and stylistically impressive a bitch can be, but some bitches confront a stone face and stop time.