“Reno As Fuck”

The comparison “X as fuck,” as Jesse Sheidlower tells us in  The F Word (soon to be updated!), has appeared in print since at least 1978. [UPDATE: 1970! See Jesse’s comment, below.] By 2010 or so, the abbreviation “AF”—as in “elegant as fuck”—had begun cropping up in public settings, especially Twitter. When I first wrote about it in 2015, AF was still pretty much under the radar commercially, relegated to Etsy jewelers and festival T-shirts, but over the next few years it began going mainstream. In my most recent post on the subject, from July 2019, I noted that a product called Down There Wipes was being sold at Target with the prominently displayed slogan “FRESH AF.”

AF was one thing. Surely, though (I said to myself), the spelled-out “As Fuck” would never appear on supermarket shelves.

Well, I was wrong as fuck.

“Rena As Fuck” in the wild (Berkeley Bowl Marketplace, Berkeley, California, March 2023)

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.”

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.

Conspicuous fucking consumption (with scandalous trademarks)

Christmas has come early this year for business owners who want to sell their products using any goddamned language they like. Yes, the floodgates of retail profanity have opened in 2017.

The further adventures of “AF”

In the two years since I first wrote about seeing “AF” — the abbreviation for the intensifier “as fuck” — in various interesting places, I’ve kept track of its spread from the fringes to the mainstream, or at least a major tributary of the mainstream, of popular culture. In April of this year, when I noted its use in New York subway advertisements by the food-delivery service FoodKick, I speculated that this was the first time AF had appeared in a commercial context. Well, I was wrong. It wasn’t the first. And it certainly hasn’t been the last.

“I’m feeling myself because my boobs are swoll AF”