OMFG! Sweary abbreviations FTFW

That’s Oh my fucking god and for the fucking win, for the uninitiated. Sweary acronyms and initialisms are a BFD (big fucking deal) on the internet. It’s hard to imagine everyday online discourse – especially on social media – without frequent encounters with, or use of, WTF (what the fuck), FFS (for fuck’s sake) and their semi-encoded ilk.

Concision is an obvious advantage: STFU and GTFO take far fewer keystrokes than the full phrases shut the fuck up and get the fuck out, saving the (ab)user time, effort, and – perhaps most importantly – the appearance of giving a shit. Sweary abbreviations also play a role in signalling group identity, expressing personal style, and so on, FYFI (for your fucking information). And they are extremely meme-friendly:

Sweary links #7

The weekend commences. Let the wild swearing begin!

“Initials to that effect“: The famously prissy New York Times not only avoids printing swear words, it won’t even print “WTF.”

“What not to swear“: A 2010 report from New Zealand’s Broadcasting Standards Authority on the acceptability of words on the air. (tl;dr: Here’s a handy chart.)

Sweary links #4

The latest bulletins from Swearsville:

The New Yorker profiles Jony Ive, Apple’s vice president of design

And look what it finds in his office:

Overlapping framed images leaned against the wall: a Banksy print of the Queen with the face of a chimpanzee, and a poster, well known in design circles, that begins, “Believe in your fucking self. Stay up all fucking night,” and ends, many admonitions later, “Think about all the fucking possibilities.”

Image via Business Insider (link via commenter Linda).