Once upon a time, dear StrongLangers, we made a promise to keep you regularly updated with interesting sweary tidbits from the Wide World of Web. We kept that promise until we didn’t. It has been, we note with embarrassment, more than 30 months since we posted Sweary Links #25. Well, we’re going to atone for that lapse right now. Not with 30 months of links: are you fucking kidding? Baby steps. Here’s what caught our attention over the last month or so. To stay up to date, follow us on Twitter.
penis
The fresh prints of ‘bell-end’
When dance-lord Michael Flatley said he would perform at Donald Trump’s inauguration ball in January, someone cheekily redirected colossalbellend.com to Flatley’s website. (It now points to Trump’s Twitter page.) Reporting on the story, the Guardian noted: ‘Bellend is a British insult.’
Helpful, but short on detail. Just what kind of insult is bell-end? What does it mean, and how is it used? Where did it come from, and when, and why? And what’s bell end brie?
Let Strong Language ring your bell.
Sweary links #23
Strong Language contributor Jonathon Green (@misterslang), the author of Green’s Dictionary of Slang, has a new project of special interest to SL readers: Slang Family Trees. “The aim,” writes Jonathon, “is to look at some of slang’s primary themes and show the way the lexis assesses given topics on a semantic basis.” The trees are constructed with mind-mapping software and appear as .pdf files. To get started, see vagina, penis, and drunk.
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To drive awareness on International Women’s Day about how women are paid on average 25 percent less than men, J. Walter Thompson London created an outdoor campaign that uses censorship to show how offensive the world can seem with 25 percent missing. (Via Little Black Book)
Find your purse?*
Taking a turn in “cock” alley
It’s the Year of the Cock. No, no, not that Year of the Cock, when TIME named Donald Trump its 2016 Person of the Year. Today marks Lunar New Year, and for many of its Chinese celebrants, 2017 is the Year of the Rooster – or, if we’re not so prudish, Cock. But what’s all this cockeyed rooster/cock cockamamie about, anyway?
Shakespeare’s dildo, and other secret Early Modern pleasures
Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale is best known for what’s probably the most famous stage direction in the history of English drama: “Exit, pursued by a bear” (3.3.57). But the Bard slips in another memorable line that’s sure to get a rise out of lovers of language – and pleasure. At one point, a servant describes Autolycus, a rascally, villainous pedlar who shows up at a local feast:
He hath songs for man or woman, of all sizes; no milliner can so fit his customers with gloves. He has the prettiest love songs for maids, so without bawdry, which is strange with such delicate burdens of dildos and fadings, ‘Jump her and thump her’; and where some stretch-mouthed rascal would, as it were, mean mischief and break a foul gap into the matter, he makes the maid to answer, ‘Whoop, do me no harm, good man’; puts him off, slights him, with ‘Whoop, do me no harm, good man!’ (4.4.190-98)
Burden of…dildos?! That’s right: Shakespeare used the word dildo.
Strong Language 