Sweary links #24

We’re pleased AF to welcome Very Bad Words, a new podcast from radio producer Matt Fidler about “our complex relationship with swearing and forbidden language,” to the sweary community. A new episode, “WTF, FCC?”, explores what’s permitted and what’s verboten on the airwaves. You can follow Very Bad Words on Twitter, too.

Update: You can read Ben Zimmer’s appreciation of the Very Bad Words podcast on Slate.

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No sweatsuit or athleisure wear for the professional mixed martial artist and boxer Conor McGregor, no siree. At a press conference hyping his August 26 bout with Floyd Mayweather, McGregor wore a custom suit whose pinstripes were composed of the repeated phrase “FUCK YOU.” According to Esquire, the suit was made for McGregor by David August, an American brand of “timeless made-to-measure clothing for the modern man.” The company’s CEO, David Heil, told Esquire: “I felt weaving this specific phrase into the cloth was the perfect way to bring together the bespoke details of a custom suit and Conor’s personality.”

If bespoke suiting doesn’t befit your budget, you could opt instead for a McGregor-inspired T-shirt or throw pillow, both from Redbubble.

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Visual swears in film

We’ve looked at swearing in films before, in the obvious sense where it occurs on the audio track. But sometimes films offer visual swears, a few examples of which are presented below. Visual swears may be remarked on or alluded to in the dialogue, or they may not; they may be props, used for colour and characterisation, or they may serve comedic aims, or some combination of the above.

Here’s one that contributes to both contextual humour and characterisation: Rooney Mara’s delightful FUCK YOU YOU FUCKING FUCK T-shirt in David Fincher’s remake of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011) (click images to enlarge):

Nearly sweary ads

Once upon a time, advertising copywriters could seize your attention with words like FREE and SALE and GUARANTEED OR YOUR MONEY BACK. Now they vie to see who can nudge closest to actual expletives without going full Tucker. Over the last couple of years we’ve seen “abso-booking-lutely” and “Look at the booking view!” from Booking.com, in which “booking” substitutes for “fucking”; “Ship my pants!” from supposedly family-friendly Kmart, in which “ship” sounds very much like “shit”; “half-fast Internet” from Verizon (“half-assed”—get it?); “Go fun yourself” from Toyota Europe; “Go fork yourself” from Bravo TV; and “I take a sheet in the pool” from Sheets Energy Strips (I think you can figure out the last three).

And the trend keeps trending. Here are some recent examples:

So many mother _uckers

In my work as a name developer I’ve yet to encounter a client who’s amused by riffs on swear words. But not all companies are taboo-averse, as I learned when I began looking into the uses of motherfucker in brand names.

OK, not literal motherfucker. (Not yet, anyway.) But close soundalikes? All over the motherfucking place. It turns out that a bunch of people in charge of brand naming have independently concluded that rhyming bowdlerizations of the mother of all taboo words are novel and distinctive and high-fucking-larious. Sometimes they’re right.