Some sweary trademarks still off limits

This post set out to be a fun romp through the naughty marks in the U.S. federal trademark register. Don’t worry, that post is still forthcoming . . . but in the meantime I’ve learned about a distressing trend that’s stopping lots of sweary marks from attaining federal registration.

Despite having been instructed by the Supreme Court that it can no longer refuse trademark applications on the ground that the contents are “scandalous,” the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) won’t commit wholeheartedly. It’s relying on a shaky rationale to justify rejecting a variety of recently-filed FUCK- and SHIT-formative marks, like GOOD SHIT, APESHIT and YOU FUCKING GOT THIS.

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.

Swears in the news

What a fucking week! In the U.S., Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy announced his retirement — but only after siding with the court majority in upholding President Trump’s travel ban and bestowing a judicial blessing on anti-abortion facilities. The Environment Protection Agency’s chief ethics officer recommended an investigation of his own boss. Immigrant children as young as 3 were being ordered to appear in court alone. A gunman with a festering grudge shot up the newsroom of a newspaper in Annapolis, Maryland, killing five employees. And in the UK … well, we’ll get there in a minute.

It was, in short, a week guaranteed to elicit a lot of strong language, and on that score it did not disappoint. Here’s a brief round-up.

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Sweary maps 2: Swear harder

You may remember Jack Grieve’s swear maps of the USA. Now he has a nifty new web app called Word Mapper that lets anyone with an internet connection make use of the raw data behind those maps.

Being a mature grown-up, I put on my @stronglang hat and went searching for swears and euphemisms. What emerged were some intriguing – and visually very appealing – patterns of rude word use in contemporary discourse:

About 60 maps follow, so fair warning: It’s an image-heavy post.

What the digamma?

On Facebook, Jay Dillon posted an intriguing verse that appeared in Prize Translations, Poems, and Parodies, Reprinted from The Journal of Education (1881).

Jay muses that the line “What the digamma?” might actually be a disguised form of “What the fuck?” since the archaic Greek letter digamma (Ϝ) strongly resembles the Latin letter F (even though it was originally pronounced as /w/). So was the author of this verse cleverly using Homeric Greek to express a proto-WTF?