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tl;dr: I’ve translated the intro to Beowulf and the fight scene between Beowulf and Grendel into modern rural Western Canadian English, complete with lots of rude language. Why? Because I wanted to. Here it is.

Slightly longer introduction: 

Some time ago, I was thinking about the famous opening of Beowulf (“Hwæt!”), and how it gets translated. And I considered that people are always advised to translate into their native idiom. Well, in my native idiom – the dirtbag vernacular of the Bow Valley in Alberta – it could be “Fucken A!” (also sometimes written “Fuckin’ eh!” but that’s an argument for another time). 

So, for fun, starting with that and in that style, I translated the first 19 lines of Beowulf. I left it at that for some time, with the intention of translating more eventually. Well, I’ve now translated the fight scene between Beowulf and Grendel – or, in my translation, Wolf-boy and Grinder (see the end for notes on my translations of names). And, because it’s a gleefully crude translation, revelling in the potential of English strong language, I’m presenting it here on Strong Language.

Translations of Beowulf tend to be almost strainingly literary, sometimes to the point of prissiness. Well, fuck that. This is a violent, earthy story, told not in studied rhymes or in blank iambs but in the rough-and-tumble alliterative verse that was popular among the Anglo-Saxons of more than a millennium ago. And it’s clear that what the poet chose to say was importantly conditioned by the sound and impact of the verse. So I’ve taken that as a prime directive: translate as accurately as reasonably possible (with the help of a decent Old English dictionary and my own education in the language), adapt as necessary to modern English grammar and idiom, prioritize the mood, tone, and general thrust over the exact literal meaning, use wordplays as available, and above all, don’t fuck up the sound. (If you want a reasonably accurate – though starchy – literal rendition, interlinear with the original, Representative Poetry Online has one.)

Because we’re all fucking nerds here, I’m including the original text as well. But I can’t do it side-by-side – it would barely fit, and not at all on a phone screen – and I don’t want to do it as a strict interlinear, because that’s a nuisance and is too scholarly for this. Instead, I’m putting a block of the original in right-align (because our template doesn’t make block indent easy), followed by a block of the translation, and so on. If I have time soon, I’ll post recordings of these.

Let’s start with the opening!

Hwæt. We Gardena in geardagum,
þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon,
hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon.

Fucken A! We fighting Danes
have epic tales of kings and clans,
how righteous dudes did righteous deeds.

Oft Scyld Scefing sceaþena þreatum,
monegum mægþum, meodosetla ofteah,
egsode eorlas. Syððan ærest wearð
feasceaft funden, he þæs frofre gebad,
weox under wolcnum, weorðmyndum þah,
oðþæt him æghwylc þara ymbsittendra
ofer hronrade hyran scolde,
gomban gyldan. þæt wæs god cyning.

Shove’s son, Shield, shot shit, kicked ass,
busted benches in wicked bar brawls,
duked the earls. His early years
were poor as dirt, but he paid his dues,
made it big, beat the bank,
till he was the baddest man in town,
and even across the pond they paid
him tribute. That was one true king!

ðæm eafera wæs æfter cenned,
geong in geardum, þone god sende
folce to frofre; fyrenðearfe ongeat
þe hie ær drugon aldorlease
lange hwile. Him þæs liffrea,
wuldres wealdend, woroldare forgeaf;
Beowulf wæs breme blæd wide sprang,
Scyldes eafera Scedelandum in.

Then, of course, he had a kid,
hell of a guy, gift from God,
a helping hand in times of trouble
cuz they’d been wandering in the woods
for fucking ever. He fixed them up,
the wonder-boy, and won their bows.
Wolf-boy was famous: they knew his worth,
this son of Shield, across the North.

OK, let’s cut to the chase. I haven’t translated all of Beowulf yet, because that would take a lot of time (it’s 3182 lines) and I’ll only do it if someone actually wants to publish it. But the most famous part of the story is the fight between Grendel and Beowulf in the mead-hall, lines 702 to 863. Here it is – LFG!

Com on wanre niht 
scriðan sceadugenga. Sceotend swæfon, 
þa þæt hornreced healdan scoldon, 
ealle buton anum. þæt wæs yldum cuþ 
þæt hie ne moste, þa metod nolde, 
se scynscaþa under sceadu bregdan; 

At zero-dark-thirty
the slimebag slid up. Soldiers slept
instead of guarding the gabled pub—
well, except one. The whole world knew
the demon couldn’t drag him down
into the grave if God said no.

ac he wæccende wraþum on andan 
bad bolgenmod beadwa geþinges. 
ða com of more under misthleoþum 
Grendel gongan, godes yrre bær; 
mynte se manscaða manna cynnes 
sumne besyrwan in sele þam hean. 

But he was awake, and wicked angry,
pissed but patient to settle the score.
Then from the swamps under sweaty dark
Grinder goes, wearing God’s anger;
the bastard planned to break in and bag
some human bodies in the big house.

Wod under wolcnum to þæs þe he winreced, 
goldsele gumena, gearwost wisse, 
fættum fahne. Ne wæs þæt forma sið 
þæt he Hroþgares ham gesohte; 
næfre he on aldordagum ær ne siþðan 
heardran hæle, healðegnas fand. 

He slouched under the sky until he saw
the golden door gleaming in the dark,
full of fat. It wasn’t the first time
he’d raided Roger’s residence,
but never on any other night of his life
did he hit such a horde of healthy heroes.

Com þa to recede rinc siðian, 
dreamum bedæled. Duru sona onarn, 
fyrbendum fæst, syþðan he hire folmum æthran; 
onbræd þa bealohydig, ða he gebolgen wæs, 
recedes muþan. Raþe æfter þon 

Buddy broke into the building then,
in a shit mood. He shoved the door
wide with his fist, fuck the iron bolts,
swung it back like a sonofabitch
and marched into the mouth of the mighty house.

on fagne flor feond treddode, 
eode yrremod; him of eagum stod 
ligge gelicost leoht unfæger. 
Geseah he in recede rinca manige, 
swefan sibbegedriht samod ætgædere, 
magorinca heap. þa his mod ahlog; 

He traipsed on the tiles—that shit’s not cheap—
loaded with loathing, and if looks could kill,
his eyes would blast the buggers with lightning.
He saw in the dark dozens of dudes,
brothers in arms, boys and buds,
fast asleep. Then the fucker chuckled

mynte þæt he gedælde, ærþon dæg cwome, 
atol aglæca, anra gehwylces 
lif wið lice, þa him alumpen wæs 
wistfylle wen. Ne wæs þæt wyrd þa gen 
þæt he ma moste manna cynnes 
ðicgean ofer þa niht. þryðswyð beheold 
mæg Higelaces, hu se manscaða 
under færgripum gefaran wolde. 

because he reckoned, before the rooster rose,
he’d rip each one—the rotten wretch—
life from limb. He was looking forward
to murder, that monster. But God almighty
knew he’d never break another body
after that soiree. Staring silently,
Booty-brain’s kinsman clocked the creep,
to see how he’d do in a dirty dust-up.

Ne þæt se aglæca yldan þohte, 
ac he gefeng hraðe forman siðe 
slæpendne rinc, slat unwearnum, 
bat banlocan, blod edrum dranc, 
synsnædum swealh; sona hæfde 
unlyfigendes eal gefeormod, 
fet ond folma. Forð near ætstop, 
nam þa mid handa higeþihtigne 
rinc on ræste, ræhte ongean 
feond mid folme; he onfeng hraþe 
inwitþancum ond wið earm gesæt. 

The hellraiser hardly held back a moment,
but started by snatching a sleeping fighter
right away and ripped him wildly,
bit his bones and drank his blood,
gobbled him greedily—goddamn fast,
he crunched the corpse completely, clean
from feet to fingers. Following that,
he reached his hand and hit a hearty
resting soldier, so he started
to grab him—but guess who grabbed him first
all of a sudden and sat right up.

Sona þæt onfunde fyrena hyrde 
þæt he ne mette middangeardes, 
eorþan sceata, on elran men 
mundgripe maran. He on mode wearð 
forht on ferhðe; no þy ær fram meahte. 
Hyge wæs him hinfus, wolde on heolster fleon, 
secan deofla gedræg; ne wæs his drohtoð þær 
swylce he on ealderdagum ær gemette. 

Holy shit, that hell-hound thought,
I’ve never met, in this mad, mad world,
a goddamn grip on any guy
as fierce as this. Fuck, he was freaked,
and had to haul ass—like that would happen.
He badly wanted to bail, go back
to his demon hole; he had no hope
of getting what he got in his glory days.

Gemunde þa se goda, mæg Higelaces, 
æfenspræce, uplang astod 
ond him fæste wiðfeng; fingras burston. 
Eoten wæs utweard; eorl furþur stop. 
Mynte se mæra, þær he meahte swa, 
widre gewindan ond on weg þanon 
fleon on fenhopu; wiste his fingra geweald 
on grames grapum. þæt wæs geocor sið 
þæt se hearmscaþa to Heorute ateah. 

Then Booty-brain’s boy brought back to mind
his banquet boast and bounced to his feet
and held him hard to break his hand.
The giant jumped away; our hero held close.
The evil shithead sure was eager
to fuck right off and run far away
back to the bog, but boy, his fingers
were’t going anywhere. God, what an idiot
he was to stage such a raid on Stag Hall.

Dryhtsele dynede; Denum eallum wearð, 
ceasterbuendum, cenra gehwylcum, 
eorlum ealuscerwen. Yrre wæron begen, 
reþe renweardas. Reced hlynsode. 
þa wæs wundor micel þæt se winsele 
wiðhæfde heaþodeorum, þæt he on hrusan ne feol, 
fæger foldbold; ac he þæs fæste wæs 
innan ond utan irenbendum 
searoþoncum besmiþod. þær fram sylle abeag 
medubenc monig, mine gefræge, 
golde geregnad, þær þa graman wunnon. 

And now there was howling from hungover Danes,
dudes from the castle and kids from the clan,
lords no longer drunk. And look,
the watchmen were wild! What a racket!
You could hardly believe they built this house
strong enough to withstand the struggle,
so fucken fiece, but it held fast,
bound with iron bands both sides,
brilliantly made. But man, those benches
were smashing to splinters and flying like feathers 
—even the gold ones, swear to God—

þæs ne wendon ær witan Scyldinga 
þæt hit a mid gemete manna ænig, 
betlic ond banfag, tobrecan meahte, 
listum tolucan, nymþe liges fæþm 
swulge on swaþule. Sweg up astag 
niwe geneahhe; Norðdenum stod 
atelic egesa, anra gehwylcum 
þara þe of wealle wop gehyrdon, 
gryreleoð galan godes ondsacan, 
sigeleasne sang, sar wanigean 
helle hæfton. Heold hine fæste 
se þe manna wæs mægene strengest 
on þæm dæge þysses lifes. 

that battle was grim. But Shield’s guys built
the house so well no human would
ever blow its bone-covered beauty,
not even with trying, unless they torched it
in a ball of smoke. Now, boy, that sound
was deafening: the northern Danes
were shitting themselves, every last one,
when they heard the wailing through the walls,
the horrible howling of God’s biggest hater,
the loser’s lament, the sorry song
of hell’s worst hostage. Holding tight
was the man who was mightier than any other
walking the world on that one day.

Nolde eorla hleo ænige þinga 
þone cwealmcuman cwicne forlætan, 
ne his lifdagas leoda ænigum 
nytte tealde. þær genehost brægd 
eorl Beowulfes ealde lafe, 
wolde freadrihtnes feorh ealgian, 
mæres þeodnes, ðær hie meahton swa. 

And the earls’ guardians were not gonna
let this burglar be among the breathing,
or let him end up anywhere other
than the shit heap. Now, unsheathing
well-used blades, Wolf-boy’s buds
went to defend their worthy dude,
their king of cool, if they ever could.

Hie þæt ne wiston, þa hie gewin drugon, 
heardhicgende hildemecgas, 
ond on healfa gehwone heawan þohton, 
sawle secan, þone synscaðan 
ænig ofer eorþan irenna cyst, 
guðbilla nan, gretan nolde, 
ac he sigewæpnum forsworen hæfde, 
ecga gehwylcre. Scolde his aldorgedal 
on ðæm dæge þysses lifes 
earmlic wurðan, ond se ellorgast 
on feonda geweald feor siðian. 

They had no idea, as they headed to fight,
these fearless heroes and hearty henchmen,
circling the scum to slice him to ribbons
and send his soul seeping down to hell,
that even the best iron blade on earth
couldn’t do fuck-all to fight this foe,
since he had spells that kept him safe
from any edge. And yet the end
of all the hours he’d lived on earth
had to be horrible, and his hateful soul
was bound to the fire kept burning for fiends.

ða þæt onfunde se þe fela æror 
modes myrðe manna cynne, 
fyrene gefremede he wæs fag wið god, 
þæt him se lichoma læstan nolde, 
ac hine se modega mæg Hygelaces 
hæfde be honda; wæs gehwæþer oðrum 
lifigende lað. Licsar gebad 
atol æglæca; him on eaxle wearð 
syndolh sweotol, seonowe onsprungon, 
burston banlocan. Beowulfe wearð 
guðhreð gyfeþe; scolde Grendel þonan 
feorhseoc fleon under fenhleoðu, 
secean wynleas wic; wiste þe geornor 
þæt his aldres wæs ende gegongen, 
dogera dægrim. Denum eallum wearð 
æfter þam wælræse willa gelumpen. 

Fast enough this fuckhead found—
whose heart was twisted with hate for humans,
who committed crimes while cursing God—
that his muscles might not make it,
because Booty-brain’s brawny kinsman
had him in hand—and how they hated
each other’s guts. And now, goddamn,
he was gonna die. Ah, shit, his shoulder
was wrecked, alright. His sinews ripped,
his bone-locks blew. Wolf-boy beat
him gloriously. Grinder was gone
like a bat out of hell to his boggy hole,
his shitty shack; he sure enough knew
his ass was grass, his grave was dug,
his days were done. The Danes had all,
after that bloodbath, won the bonus.

Hæfde þa gefælsod se þe ær feorran com, 
snotor ond swyðferhð, sele Hroðgares, 
genered wið niðe; nihtweorce gefeh, 
ellenmærþum. Hæfde Eastdenum 
Geatmecga leod gilp gelæsted, 
swylce oncyþðe ealle gebette, 
inwidsorge, þe hie ær drugon 
ond for þreanydum þolian scoldon, 
torn unlytel. þæt wæs tacen sweotol, 
syþðan hildedeor hond alegde, 
earm ond eaxle þær wæs eal geador 
Grendles grape under geapne hrof. 

The welcome guest, gutsy and wise,
had purged the pest from Roger’s place
and left it like new. His wicked night’s work
was fit for fame. The East Danes found
the Goth made good on his glorious boast,
fixed the fuckery, healed the hurt,
the goddamn grief that had given them
for fucking ever fear and frustration,
pain a-plenty. And for proof,
their healthy hero gave them a hand
—and arm and shoulder, the whole shot,
Grinder’s grip, under the gabled roof.

ða wæs on morgen mine gefræge 
ymb þa gifhealle guðrinc monig; 
ferdon folctogan feorran ond nean 
geond widwegas wundor sceawian, 
laþes lastas. No his lifgedal 
sarlic þuhte secga ænegum 
þara þe tirleases trode sceawode, 
hu he werigmod on weg þanon, 
niða ofercumen, on nicera mere 
fæge ond geflymed feorhlastas bær. 

Many a morning, as I remember,
guys would gather in that good house,
folk-heroes welcomed from far and wide,
hitting the highways to see the hell-hound’s
farewell to arm. No one gave a fuck
for the sore loser—literally—at his end
as he shuffled, eating shit,
heavy-hearted, heading home,
badly beaten, bleeding out,
dragging red all down the road.

ðær wæs on blode brim weallende, 
atol yða geswing eal gemenged 
haton heolfre, heorodreore weol. 
Deaðfæge deog, siððan dreama leas 
in fenfreoðo feorh alegde, 
hæþene sawle; þær him hel onfeng. 

They followed and found a frothy pool,
a sickening surf sloshing around,
gross with gore, a bath of blood,
above the body of the joyless bastard
who breathed his last in that lousy bog,
whose heathen soul was hauled to hell.

þanon eft gewiton ealdgesiðas, 
swylce geong manig of gomenwaþe 
fram mere modge mearum ridan, 
beornas on blancum. ðær wæs Beowulfes 
mærðo mæned; monig oft gecwæð 
þætte suð ne norð be sæm tweonum 
ofer eormengrund oþer nænig 
under swegles begong selra nære 
rondhæbbendra, rices wyrðra. 
Ne hie huru winedrihten wiht ne logon, 
glædne Hroðgar, ac þæt wæs god cyning. 

The comrades in arms then came along
with all the young dudes, a delightful day,
riding white horses all the way home
back from the bog. Their buddy Wolf-boy
they said was the best; they made this boast,
that from sea to sea and south to north
no one on earth had ever earned
such worthy glory, as God was their witness,
and frankly this fighter just fucking ruled.
Of course, that’s no shade shed on their chief,
the kindly Roger—he was a righteous king.

Beowulf = Wolf-boy. Wulf means ‘wolf’; the beo is less certain, could be ‘bee’, could be something else. Whatever. I like Wolf-boy.

Grendel = Grinder. There are various ideas about the origin of Grendel, and one of them is that it comes from ‘grinder’, which I like and think fits well here.

Heorot = Stag Hall. Literally heorot means ‘hart, stag’; I just added Hall to specify that it’s a place, as we would now. Sounds good too.

Hroþgar = Roger. The name Hroþgar literally means ‘glory-spear’ but it’s also the source of the name Roger, which I think is a good name and has some other meanings too.

Hygelac = Booty-brain. This one might piss some people off, but hyge means ‘mind, mood, thought, desire’ and lac means ‘gift, offering, sacrifice, booty’. This could have been Thought-gift but come on. We’re in fucking Exshaw, Alberta, Canada, here now.

Sceafa = Shove. You see this name in Scefing, which means ‘descendant of Sceafa’. Sceafa (which was said sort of like “shave-a”) probably meant ‘sheaf’, but I liked the sound of Shove and anyway, he’s not really important here.

Scyld = Shield. This is a literal translation, and the words are even pronounced almost identically (except the y in Scyld is like “ü”).

The following article appeared in the online news site the Baltimore Banner on 23 March 2026:

Putting aside the fact that this headline is a wonderful example of the infinite expressiveness of language—expressing a thought that no one would ever have imagined prior to reading it—its use of cornhole is remarkable, for that word is an apparent violator of Gresham’s Law as applied to language—that “bad” meanings will drive out “good” ones. For cornhole is both a noun referring to a wholesome beanbag game, played by children and serious adult competitors alike, and a verb meaning to engage in anal intercourse.

Cornhole is not a case where the sexual sense of the word is restricted to a niche discourse community, so that those who participate in the beanbag game are unaware of its carnal meaning. The sexual sense is much older than the ludic sense and is well known to the wider public. In my own case, I was familiar with the sexual sense long before I learned of the game, which was when I first moved to Texas in 2016, and one of my students proudly admitted, to my confusion and surprise, that they enjoyed cornhole.

The game has recently made an appearance on the HBO series DTF St. Louis, where the protagonists get to know one another over a game of cornhole in the first episode; the episode is even titled “Cornhole.” But despite the sexual theme and plot of the series, in the show the game is simply a game. No one makes a crack about the sexual meaning of cornhole and there are no obvious double entendres involving it. While the writers must have been aware of the double meaning, there is no indication that is the case from watching the show. Cornhole is just about the most innocent aspect of the series.

As the setting for DTF St. Louis indicates, the game of cornhole is especially popular in middle America, apparently less so on the coasts. For those unfamiliar, it is played with a raised and tilted board that has a hole cut in it, and players attempt to toss beanbags into the hole. There is an American Cornhole Association, founded in 2005, that claims to be the “governing body for the sport of cornhole,” but its website seems to exist mainly to sell cornhole-related products. The rival American Cornhole League was founded in 2015; its website, while it also sells merchandise as a side hustle, focuses on organizing and promoting tournaments. And there is even a World Cornhole Organization that has held a Cornhole World Cup competition since 2023.

The game is first described in an 1883 patent under the name Parlor Quoits, the name cornhole being much more recent. That later name is only reliably attested to in the twenty-first century, although it may be a few decades older. I found the following classified ad in the Cleveland, Ohio Plain Dealer from 4 March 1979:

ANYONE KNOWING WHEREABOUTS of Mary Oriti of Parma, cabinet cornhole expert, please call Chuck at [phone number].

Putting aside the mystery of what happened to Mary, I can’t tell whether or not cabinet cornhole is a reference to the game. I’m reasonably confident that it doesn’t refer to the sex act, although it’s not beyond the realm of possibility that Chuck and Mary were into non-vanilla sex.

The earliest clear reference to the game of cornhole is in another Ohio classified ad, this one from 13 July 2001 in the Cincinnati Post:

CORNHOLE—Beanbag style yard game fun/safe for all $50 [phone number].

The Oxford English Dictionary has a first usage citation from 2002, so it’s a good assumption that the name of the game was becoming well established during the opening years of this century.

The sexual sense, on the other hand, dates to over a century ago. The gay slang verb to cornhole is recorded in academic literature in Edward Kempf’s 1920 Psychopathology:

He said the “boys call me chicken and kid me about cornholing me (sodomy) and they call me shitpot.” He was very suspicious of everyone and reluctant to tell me about his case. He was having auditory hallucinations and other vivid sensory disturbances. When asked, using his phrase, if he had been “cornholed,” he said not unless they had “chloroformed” him. He believed that this might have occurred. He admitted having had such sexual relations with his brother when a boy.

And J. E. Lighter’s Historical Dictionary of American Slang cites Henry N. Cary’s Sexual Vocabulary, a typescript from c. 1920, as glossing the noun cornhole as the “anus.” So it’s pretty clear that the sexual sense was in oral circulation in the opening years of the last century.

While the term started out as gay slang at the start of the twentieth century, by century’s end it had become generally familiar to heterosexuals, making its way into mainstream entertainment in the 1990s. The MTV animated series Beavis and Butt-Head featured an alter-ego of Beavis named Cornholio; that is Beavis with his t-shirt pulled over his head and saying things like “I am Cornholio, I need TP for my bunghole.” Cornholio made his debut in season 4, episode 29, “Generation in Crisis,” which aired 14 July 1994.

And the sitcom Arrested Development (S1E3, “Bringing Up Buster,” 16 November 2003) contained a conversation between Lucille Bluth, played by the inimitable Jessica Walter, and her son Michael about her other son, Buster, with a line that will forever live rent free in my head:

LUCILLE: Everyone’s laughing and riding and cornholing except Buster.

Jason Bateman, who plays Michael, is also one of the stars of DTF St. Louis.

The cornholing double entendre in the Arrested Development scene doesn’t involve the beanbag game. It is playing off another trope in the show, the “Cornballer,” a defective deep fryer for balls of corn meal that burned the hands of anyone who tried to use it. Still the word’s use on the show demonstrates that the sexual sense was well established enough to be a joke on network television at the same time the game of cornhole was rising in popularity.

As to the etymology of the anal intercourse sense, that, like the origin of most slang terms, is more guesswork than fact. There is a literal sense of cornhole, meaning a hole in which a corn seed is planted, that dates to the seventeenth century. It seems likely that the sense of an anus came from this, and the verb from this anatomical sense. The origin of the name of the game is less mysterious, although it too is not known with absolute certainty—the bags were originally filled with dry corn kernels and the hole, obviously, refers to the target hole in the board.

And while the game of cornhole is played in earnest, I would not be entirely surprised if the name was coined as a kind of inside joke, with full knowledge of the carnal sense, a case of Middle America “owning the libs” on the coasts and enjoying the shocked looks on their faces when they hear the name of the game for the first time.

Sources:

Classified Ad. Cincinnati Post (Ohio), 13 July 2001, 12C/10. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Classified ad. Plain Dealer (Cleveland, Ohio), 4 March 1979, Section 7, 1/1. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

“Cornholio.” Beavis and Butt-Head Wiki. Accessed 25 March 2026. Fandom.com.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, accessed 24 March 2026, s.v. cornhole, n., cornhole, v.

Kempf, Edward J. Psychopathology. St. Louis: C. V. Mosby, 1920, 676. HathiTrust Digital Library.

Lighter, J. E. Historical Dictionary of American Slang, vol. 1 of 2. New York: Random House, 1994, s.v. cornhole, n.

Oxford English Dictionary Online, September 2021, s.v. cornhole, n., cornhole, v.; June 2021, s.v. beanbag, n.

Remember when vulgarity in American politics still seemed almost surprising? When it was considered noteworthy that Donald Trump swears a lot? When he forced The New York Times to be less tight-ass about censoring swears? When he made headlines around the world by calling certain countries “shitholes”? Well, those days are fucking gone forever.

Or nearly. Because there’s always some new shit. Trump saying swearwords? Yawn. Trump saying swearwords on his social media account? Meh. Trump saying swearwords on his social media account on Easter Sunday in the course of threatening war crimes? Hmmm. And doing so with… suspiciously scrupulous spelling and punctuation (if not capitalization)? Oh, come the fuck on.

And yet here we are. On Easter Sunday, April 5, 2026, Donald Trump’s Truth Social account posted the following:

Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP

There are a few things worth noting here. The first is, of course, that the president of the United States of America is crudely, rudely, publicly threatening war crimes – and, yes, on Easter Sunday. This is, shall we say, a little out of keeping with the presidential standards, as Barbara A. Perry pointed out in The Atlantic. It’s not that previous presidents never swore; it’s that they generally didn’t do so in public. There was a tone that was expected of America’s leaders in time of danger and strife, and even George W. Bush knew it; after 9/11 he said,

I’ve directed the full resources of our intelligence and law enforcement communities to find those responsible and to bring them to justice. We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them.

Just imagine what Donald Trump would say in similar circumstances.

I was going to say we don’t have to imagine, but, ah, about that. Does that Truth Social post (they call them “truths” but I think “sharts” would be a better word) really sound like Donald Trump? Not everyone thinks so. Andy Borowitz, for example, pointed out that, among other things, Trump has a history of misspelling “strait” as “straight.”

Beyond that, though, what’s with this almost twee folksiness in writing “Fuckin’” with the apostrophe? If you’re in earnest, even if you say “fuckin,” you write “fucking.” Picture yourself texting someone who has locked you out: “Open the fucking door, you asshole.” Not “Open the fuckin’ door, you crazy bastard.” It’s just too… finger-lickin’ good. Jocular, even.

It reminds me of Will Ferguson’s 2002 novel Happiness, about a rambling self-help book that ends up almost destroying the world by making people too well adjusted and insouciant. Among other things, it encourages people to abandon their jobs; as Ferguson’s protagonist, an editor named Edwin de Valu, explains to a co-worker,

“At one point, he tells us that it’s okay to take a break from our past, to hang up a sign and say to the world, ‘Gone fishin’.’”

“Gone fishin’?”

“That’s right: Gone fishin’. Can you imagine anything so trite?”

It really is rather… studied. 

It’s not as though no one says “fuckin’”; when speaking in casual earnest, that’s the normal pronunciation, as exemplified by an interaction between de Valu and the (cynical, as it turns out) author of the self-help book near the end of Happiness:

“I don’t edit UFO books,” said Edwin, testily. “I edit self-help.”

“Same fuckin’ thing.”

“Open the Fuckin’ Strait” is something a standard-issue vulgarian might say, but in writing you would expect either “Fucking” or “Fuckin” (no apostrophe) or maybe “Fucken.” To spell it with the apostrophe is a thing novelists do.

Speaking of which. Here’s another quote from Happiness:

“The crazy bastard’s going to kill us!” yelled Mr. Mead as he scurried, head down, into the front passenger seat.

“Crazy bastard” is an established collocation, of course. In the Corpus of Contemporary American English, you can find 137 results for “crazy bastard” in the singular, and 19 results for “crazy bastards” in the plural. And the results are nearly all from novels, short stories, TV series, and movies, often science fiction, fantasy, or action. It comes in a few tones:

• Grudging approbation, like “You’re a crazy bastard, you know that?” from an episode of Roswell, or like “HFPA, you crazy bastards, you” from the blog The Edge of the Frame
• Panicked interaction with a familiar person or persons, like “Argh! hold your fire, you crazy bastard!” from Firestorm
• Stressful response to an action of a specific third party, like “He just flipped out. The crazy bastard. He didn’t even care about the money. He just wanted to kill her” from an episode of Homicide: Life on the Street
• Annoyance at irrational actors outside of one’s control, like “Some crazy bastards pissed off Zeus and he’s on the warpath!” from Turbo Kid

The closest to the usage in Trump’s post is from a comment on an article by Michael Rowe on the “Ground Zero mosque” in the Huffington Post (the comments are no longer visible on the huffpost site, but COCA has preserved it):

Islam didn’t kill those people; some crazy bastards in a plane did.

One thing that shows throughout is a sense of lack of control on the part of the speaker – the person(s) described is either familiar to the speaker, and someone whom the speaker cannot command (at least not always), or not familiar but also not within the speaker’s control, and the speaker feels this clearly.

Another thing it shows is, again, a style more characteristic of a professional writer. Not inevitably, to be sure. But “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell” – well, it’s just my impression, but that reads like the voice of someone who is making wild threats in the knowledge they have lost control of the situation, or, more to the point, the voice of a writer presenting the voice of someone making wild threats (if the writer isn’t all that good, it may not intend loss of control, but it still has the air of it).

And then there are those capital letters. Well, of course, they’re all over the place, and that’s Trump’s style, to be sure – as well as the style of anyone trying to imitate him – as well as the styles of countless other people. Capital letters tend to confuse the hell out of a lot of people. Or the Hell, for those who specifically always think of Hell as a real place (like Heaven). That doesn’t tell us that the writer, whoever it is, is an evangelical Christian, but it’s not inconsistent with it. Frankly, it’s almost more noteworthy that “crazy bastards” isn’t capitalized. A forensic linguist might find these useful clues as to the real authorship of this post – if they had the time and energy and fucks to give.

One more thing. Readers of this site may know of my penchant for looking at translations in news sources in various languages of vulgar pronouncements (by Anthony Scaramucci or Donald Trump or Dana Bash or Emmanuel Macron or Pope Francis). This has become nearly impossible lately – newspapers around the world paywall most of their articles (and I can’t afford to subscribe to two dozen newspapers just to check articles very sporadically), and if you’re not a subscriber even the free articles are often nearly impossible to read because of all the pop-up ads and videos, which overtax both my patience and my computer’s processor. But, for the curious, here are examples I’ve managed to get of renditions in French, German, Italian, and Spanish:

• « Ouvrez le Putain de Détroit, espèce de tarés, ou vous vivrez en Enfer – VOUS ALLEZ VOIR ! », a écrit le président américain sur sa plateforme Truth social, ajoutant : « Gloire à Allah. » —LeMonde.fr
• “Öffnet die verdammte Meerenge, ihr verrückten Mistkerle”, schrieb Trump. —Zeit.de
• “Martedì in Iran sarà la Giornata della centrale elettrica e la giornata del ponte, tutto in uno. Non ci sarà niente di simile!!! Aprite il maledetto Stretto, pazzi bastardi, o vivrete all’inferno – Vedrete! Sia lode ad Allah”. Lo scrive su Truth il presidente americano, Donald Trump. —Today.it
• En una publicación llena de palabras altisonantes, Trump dijo: “Abran el maldito estrecho, bastardos locos, o vivirán en el infierno. ¡Ya lo verán! Alabado sea Alá”. —ElUniversal.com.mx

Here’s a quick run-down of those translations:

the Fuckin’ Strait:

• French: le Putain de Détroit
• German: die verdammte Meerenge
• Italian: il maledetto Stretto
• Spanish: el maldito estrecho

The French translation is the obvious winner here: literally “the Whore of Strait” (idiomatically “the Fucking Strait”) – all the others just mean “the damned strait.”

you crazy bastards:

• French: espèce de tarés
• German: verrückten Mistkerle
• Italian: pazzi bastardi
• Spanish: bastardos locos

Again, while the other three literally mean “crazy bastards” (with the same implications as in English), the French uses “tarés,” which more literally means “defective ones” and more figuratively “madmen,” and doesn’t avail itself of a term of abuse relating to parentage; the phrase “espèce de” (“species of”) is found in various derogatory phrases, such as “espèce de con,” which literally means “species of cunt” but figuratively means “fucken jerk” or “you idiot.”

And how, by the way, is it being represented in English news sources? The Testy Copy Editors group on Facebook posted a collection of screenshots from The New York Times, The Guardian, the New York Post, NPR, The Wall Street Journal, and CNN via The Daily Beast, showing between them a clear hierarchy of vulgarity, with fuck above bastards above hell:

Thanks to Nancy Friedman and Ben Zimmer for some of the links.

I never fully adopted freaking as an intensifier, euphemistic for fucking, partly because I swear fairly freely, and maybe also because fecking was available in my Irish English dialect. But I like having freaking available, and with its hundredth birthday round the corner, it’s a good time to showcase it.1

Freaking substitutes for its ruder cousin in all sorts of lexical and syntactic contexts, modifying adjectives (that was freaking amazing), verbs (let’s freaking go), and nouns (how is it still freaking January?), among other word classes; it’s also used as an infix (un-freaking-real) and in set phrases like freakin’ A – euphemistic, obviously, for fucking A.

The earliest known use of this freaking – the first citation in Green’s Dictionary of Slang, Jesse Sheidlower’s The F-Word, and the OED – is in the 1928 novel Georgie May, where author Maxwell Bodenheim uses two freakings and a freakin’, including:

“Gawd, ah hate the hull, freaking pack uh you,” she cried, between her sobbing.

The next example those dictionaries list is in Nelson Algren’s The Man with the Golden Arm (1949):

“You point that freakin’ finger at me ’n you’re one dead pointer.”

That 21-year gap doesn’t mean no one was using it in the meantime. I found the line “You freaking fool!” in the 1937 screwball comedy Nothing Sacred, available on YouTube and the Internet Archive at around the 47m 40s mark:

Films and TV, with their heightened emotions and industrious regulators, are a natural home for this expressive but family-friendly expletive. A chart from COCA shows its use concentrated in those media, occurring at over four times the rate in fiction generally and over six times the rate in speech:2

As Wiktionary notes, “Freaking (or fricking) is often used in motion pictures as a substitute for fucking so that characters can be shown to swear without the motion picture incurring censorship or a higher certificate than it otherwise might.”

Less discerningly, the Encyclopædia Britannica says freaking is “used to make an angry statement more forceful”. That’s not wrong, but it’s misleadingly narrow: freaking can amplify all sorts of emotions, even joy – ask Ned Flanders.

WikiHow knows this. An article by Wits End Parenting and Elaine Heredia says you can use freaking “to emphasize how great something or someone is” and that it “can be a positive or negative word based on context”. It adds that the word “isn’t a sin to say”, in case you were wondering.

Freaking is on the rise but has been levelling off, according to data in COCA and Google’s Ngram Viewer. Rows under the dates below show frequency (i.e., number of uses), number of million words in the sample, and (hence, by division) per-million figures for direct comparison:

That levelling off is despite global use. Geographically, freaking is most popular not in the US but in Singapore, per the GloWbE corpus (freakin has the same top two, reversed). Malaysia comes in third, followed by Canada, Australia, and the Philippines:

Jack Grieve’s eye-catching swear maps of the USA, meanwhile, allow us to zoom in on what States are especially partial to freaking and freakin. Californians’ relative coolness towards them came as a surprise:

Browsing the word’s collocates (freaking/freakin’ ___) in COCA shows the company it keeps. High-ranking +1s include the adjectives awesome, amazing, hilarious, crazy, cool, hot, stupid, hard, and huge; nouns like idiot, mind, thing, break, genius, clue, and deal; and occasional verbs, like love, hate, kidding, and kill.

Some of these invite us to extrapolate the full phrases, or chunks: big freaking deal; give me a freakin’ break; not have a freaking clue; out of my/your/etc. freaking mind; Are you freakin’ kidding?

Other language corpora, such as the 14-billion-word iWeb, show a similar pattern of collocations:

Easily topping the +1s are the preposition out and the pronoun me: a sign of how well freaking [me] out caught on as an idiom, with multiple senses, after being coined in the 1960s. That’s a different usage, of course: not the intensifier freaking but the verb freak (or rather the verb phrase freak out) in the present progressive tense.

Zappa fits right in here: freaking offers outsider energy for any self-defined freak (or geek) who cares to use it.3 The word’s gently countercultural flavour is also apparent in dictionary citations, where Tom Wolfe’s name recurs.

What makes freaking effective as a minced oath, and attractive to mild and novice swearers, is that it offers proximity to (and thus evocation of) strong swearing while remaining relatively benign. We see this niche exploited expertly by a child in the vampire comic 30 Days of Night: Return to Barrow:

A little later the boy defaults to freakin’, this time automatically obeying his father’s no-swearing rule, and making the word more casual by dropping the g:

Freaking is not always a straightforward substitute for fucking, however. The particular way that it lands caused slight consternation for slang expert Michael Adams when his son started using it at the age of seven:

. . . he’s not just saying That’s freakin’ cool or No freakin’ way. No, he’s saying things like What the freak?! which is a long way from Oh, my gosh on the euphemism scale. There’s the underlying profanity. There’s the phonetics. There’s the fact — apparently — that What the hell? and What the freak? — while parallel — signify differently.4

Films redubbed for TV broadcast have mixed fortunes with it, as my post “Freak those monkey-fightin’ melon farmers!” shows. “I don’t need full freakin’ forensics” in Die Hard 2 (1990) is passable, if implausible in a police station, while “Freak you!” in Casino (1995) is comically underpowered.

In his 2016 book In Praise of Profanity (which I reviewed here and recommend), Michael Adams discusses how the vowels, consonants, and pragmatics of various “partial euphemisms” for fuck – feck, frak, frick, frig, and their freaky fraternity – do their work:

. . . although people usually think euphemisms work because they substitute for profanity, in fact many euphemisms are themselves partially profane, because they more or less cover up profanities—usually less—that are still inscribed in the situations of their use, and our minds’ eyes see through them to the profanities . . . . what makes profanity and the relevant euphemisms pragmatically powerful and interesting is that the euphemisms are often both euphemisms and profanity, a fact not unknown in linguistic circles but too often overlooked when we calculate the logic of language attitudes.

We’re advocates of strong language here at Strong Language, but we know it’s not suitable for all occasions: sometimes a softball is called for. And among the many euphemisms for fucking, freaking has, in a century or so of use, established itself as a truly effective and useful option. It may be mild, but it’s got freakin’ game.

*

1 The OED also lists an obsolete, mid-17thC sense of freaking (adj.): “Of a person: inclined to change his or her mind, mood, or behaviour suddenly and unaccountably; given to freakish ideas; capricious, fickle, whimsical.” One of its fans was Samuel freakin’ Pepys: “He told me what a mad freaking fellow Sir Ellis Layton hath been” (Diary, 25 January, 1665).

2 I was unable to separate the verb freaking from the intensifier using part-of-speech tags in COCA, GloWbE, and iWeb, so these uses are combined in the graphs. To fortify the data somewhat I checked 300 examples in each corpus and found that, in COCA, 76% were the intensifier and 24% were the verb (freaking out, or plain freaking with the same sense); in GloWbE it was 74% and 26%, and in iWeb 68% and 32%. So you can consider the graphs broadly indicative but with that significant caveat.

3 We still don’t know where freak came from: origin unknown, the dictionaries say, though the OED offers speculation. Skeat says freak in the sense “whim” is of Germanic origin, being frec “bold, rash” in Old English.

4 Adams has also analyzed the use of freaking in the TV series 13 Reasons Why, tracing a character’s graduation from euphemistic to full-bore profanity.

Note: This post was originally published in a slightly different form on Fritinancy, my Substack newsletter.

*

“DON’T GIVE A F#@&” shouts the headline on a two-page ad in a recent Sunday New York Times. Instead of giving a f#@&, we’re instructed to “give an e.l.f.” — to substitute a three-initial brand name for a four-letter taboo word.

E.l.f. is a cosmetics brand — the initials stand for eyes, lips, face, and the name is pronounced as an acronym, elf — that calls itself “a different kind of beauty company.” (Where is the entrepreneur bold enough to launch “the same kind of beauty company”?) Founded in 2004 and based in Oakland, California (my hometown!), e.l.f sells its potions online, in U.S. retail chains such as Target, and in brick-and-mortar shops in 17 other countries. The company has partnered with singer-songwriter Alicia Keys on a sub-brand, Keys Soulcare, and recently made headlines for its $1 billion (!) acquisition of Rhode, Hailey Rhode Bieber’s line of “edited, efficacious, and intentional” skincare and makeup products.

How “different” is e.l.f.? Here’s the facing page of that ad:

Translation: Unlike our heartless competitors, e.l.f. cares (“gives a fuck/gives an e.l.f.”) about women in sports, fair trade certification, empowering legendary females (another e.l.f.!), et cetera. It gives so many e.l.f.s about “double-certified cruelty free” that it gives that virtue a double mention.

The campaign took its message to the streets of Manhattan last week, and Breaking and Entering Media was on the scene of the “activation,” to use the jargon-y term:

View this post on Instagram

The corporate website devotes a page — “Impact” — to more details:

GIVE A F#@&. GIVE AN e.l.f..

We give soooo many e.l.f.s — always have, always will.
From changing the board game to amplifying voices —
and donating 2% of annual profits to causes YOU care
about. It’s all in our 4th annual impact report.

*

This isn’t the first time e.l.f. has flirted with naughty words. The corporate blog is called “The e.l.f. Word,” which winks at “the F-word.” The “page loading” graphic on the corporate website reads “Let’s Elfing Gooo.” (For more on “let’s fucking go,” see my January 2020 Strong Language post.)

And in 2024, the company launched “So Many Dicks,” a campaign that wasn’t exactly about penises. Its argument was the fact that men named Dick (or Richard, Rick, or Rich) outnumbered women of any name on the corporate boards of publicly traded companies. (Two-thirds of e.l.f’s board members are women.) “We want to normalize diversity — and if it takes some e.l.f.ing in-your-face advertising to do it, we’re happy to put it on some of the biggest screens you can imagine,” the company’s chief marketing officer, Kory Marchisotto, said at the time.

E.l.f. clearly likes to turn its brand name into various parts of speech, which is cheeky and a little risky. (Trademark lawyers will tell you it leads to genericide.) But I want to focus on something else about the current ad campaign, namely: Is it even possible, linguistically, to “give an e.l.f.”? Or a fuck? If it is, how many e.l.f.s (or fucks) can you give? And by the way: How long have we been giving (or not giving) fucks?

*

I’ll take the last question first.

In the fourth edition of his indispensable The F-Word, Jesse Sheidlower traces the original DGAF abbreviation (“don’t give a fuck” = don’t care) to a 1995 Usenet posting. But DILLIGAF — “do I look like I give a fuck?” — is considerably older: Jesse found it in Current Slang, volume 5, number 1, from 1970: “‘D.I.L.L.I.G.A.F.’ or DILLIGAF, n. An irresponsible person. . . . adj. Irresponsible.” The meaning has shifted over the decades to something closer to “indifference” or even “scorn”; The F-Word’s most recent citation, from 2020, concerns a New York City police officer who wore a face mask depicting the Punisher’s skull logo along with DILLIGAF.

As for the other questions, they’re catnip for the contributors (or co-fuckers, as we like to say) here at Strong Language. Linguistic anthropologist Stephen Chrisomalis, for example, tackled the issue of countable fucks back in 2014, under the heading “How many swears can we give?” Stephen’s jumping-off point was a then-popular meme, “Look at all the fucks I give”:

‘Give a damn’, ‘give a shit’, ‘give a fuck’, and other such items are all examples of negative polarity items (NPIs), which are unmarked when they occur in negative contexts. If you’re familiar with the phrase give a fuck, then you don’t need to be told that this is a rephrasing of I don’t give a fuck, because it rarely occurs as a positive polarity item (e.g. I give a fuck about you sounds odd).

(Emphasis added.)

Which would make “Don’t give a F#@&” and “Give an e.l.f.” sound slightly wrong to our ears. In advertising, though, that strangeness can be an asset: It creates just enough friction to be memorable.

Besides, as John Kelly observed less than a year after Stephen published his post, although “I give a fuck” is “not a way we would normally express care,” the expression is increasingly being used for humorous effect. Case in point: “I give zero fucks.” John wrote:

In 2015, giving zero fucks isn’t about not caring per se. Giving zero fucks is about an I’m-over-it ignoring of haters, trolls, and bullies, to draw on some popular vernacular; it’s about leaning in, #beingyourself, having swagger, no more ass-kissing or bullshit-taking. But this is a two-sided fuck, if you will. A zero-fucks approach can have a liberating assertiveness and self-confidence, but it also runs the risk of being heedless, uncompromising, irresponsible, or unfeeling, as Emma Gray smartly warned in her exhortation for us to give more fucks. This is an age-old tension for the individual in society, of course, but one that seems like it’s being more intensely staged in the modern psyche, on Twitter feeds, and American politics.

And in 2019, Ben Zimmer updated the discussion with “New Frontiers in the Giving of Fucks and Shits.” The post includes a spirited music video, “I’ve No More Fucks to Give,” which is the very best sort of earworm.

Probably not, though, for e.l.f., which is very much in the fucks-giving spirit this season. Ho ho ho!

As dawn rises on Aldersgate Street, small creatures rampage in the trash, and frosty tendrils of winter reach into the London fall. Various occupants of Slough House arrive swearing, as one tends to do if one is seconded to MI-5’s dust heap or, more accurately, reclassified as the very dust. Louisa Guy swears according to the fashion of the day:

“A body’s been dumped in the street. Broad daylight.”

“Here?”

“Central London […] More specifically,” Louisa said, “outside a fuck-off restaurant near the Mall” (RT 143)

Fuck-off stands for ‘you’re too ordinary to be here.’ Roddy Ho’s swearing isn’t about something that happened on the street but instead is merely an interior overestimation of his sex appeal: “Bitch was ripe was how he read it. Bitch was ready” (RT 11). His big mistake, however, is saying the same thing to Shirley Dander, who rightly clocks him — the dangers of thinking aloud.

Then there’s Jackson Lamb, who’s also got it out for Ho. When Lamb asks, “‘Yeah, where are the files? Go find out, will you?’” Marcus Longridge wonders, “‘Can’t Ho do that?’” to which Lamb returns, “‘You’ve changed your tune. Weren’t you calling him a useless twit this morning?’ [Lamb] looked at Ho. ‘His words. Not mine.’ Ho nodded gratefully.” “Twat, I told him. You’re a useless twat” (RT 160). It’s not enough to swear; one must swear precisely. Stick with Jackson Lamb and you’ll learn the rules, not London rules or Joe Country rules, but the rules of effectively offending people and pissing them off. He’s only trying to help.

Profanity is Lamb’s natural language, and he has the native speaker’s ability to milk as much meaning from the f-word as possible. Before dawn rose over Aldersgate, Lamb answered his phone while sleeping: “When at last he emerged, tarred and feathered by sleep, the phone escaped his grasp like a sliver of soap, forcing him to lean over the side of the bed and fumble about on the floor. Mission accomplished, he answered with a single word: “Fuck?” — ‘(What the) fuck (do you want?)’ or a synonym for ‘Yes/Hello’] — “Twenty seconds later he said, ‘Fuck’” — the fuck of frustration — “and disconnected” (SS 50). In Lamb’s lexicon, fuck replaces all sorts of other words: “You heard him — find the connection. What ties the old man to France? That’ll be our third reference point. Any questions? Good. Off you fuck” (SS 108). Most of us use go much more frequently than we do fuck, but Lamb is defined by the unlikely.

When he’s awake, Lamb deploys fuck in numerous, flexible, grammatically productive ways. He can say to Catherine Standish, who is more prim than profane, “You’re all fuck-ups […]. The manner of your fuck-uppery’s irrelevant” (JC 244). “I told Taverner not to fuck with my joes. She probably won’t. But having them tailed by her L-plate muppets isn’t full-on fuckery. More like heavy petting” (SH 127). Leave it to Lamb to sneak the sex back into fuck by analogy. Quotation after quotation proves that there’s nothing much wrong with his fuckery, but fuck-uppery describes others, basically, all others — fuck-uppery is his bête noire but also, late in his career, his trade.

His manners are generally coarse, but Lamb often swears with nuance. He can cut off River Cartwright’s interruption and introduce some sweary semantics at the same time: “You’re a fuck up, Cartwright. We both know that. You wouldn’t be a slow horse otherwise. But —” “I was screwed over. There’s a difference.” “Only fuck ups get screwed over,” Lamb explained (DL 137). Getting screwed over is one thing, but having fuck all for a brain is arguably worse: “These aren’t Islamic fuckwits waging war on San’s poodle,” as Lamb estimates their adversaries for the team. “They’re homegrown fuckwits who think they’re taking it back to the enemy” (SH 121).

Some might think of fuck up and fuckwit as synonyms, just nasty fuck-words you use to put someone down, but significantly, fuck ups do things badly no matter how smart they are, but a fuckwit is also likely to be a fuckup, there being a problem with wits and all. In other words, even if it sounds like an undifferentiated torrent of profanity, there’s a logic to its use, at least, there is when Lamb is the profaner — it’s a matter of character, the character in which Herron writes him.

The Slough House novels look at the fundamentals of profanity. It’s surprising how much the alphabet contributes to creative cussing. Because of the bureaucratic setting afforded in the Secret Service, alphabetism is all but inevitable. Even River Phoenix’s nemesis, “Spider” Webb can participate in abbreviated profanity. River was brought down by a small conspiracy and, after the fall, sent to Slough House. “‘And the tape not working,’” he insists to Webb. “‘Don’t forget the tape not working. What are the odds on that?’” But the real question is, what are the odds that Webb can come up with a profane alphabetism that’s also profane as an acronym? “‘EFU, River. Happens all the time.’” My guess is that Webb spelled EFU out, since its pronunciation raises no hackles. “‘Enlighten me.’ ‘Equipment fuck-up. You think they dish out state-of-the-art gear for assessment ops?’” (SH 54). That’s profanity in art dealt with artfully.

It was inevitable that Shirley Dander — that “loose fucking cannon” — be required to do a course of anger management training. What wasn’t inevitable was that anger management would allow Herron to experiment further with alphabetism and profanity. “[I]n the end the assault charges had been side-stepped on condition Shirley sign up for AFM. Anger Fucking Management. Twice a week, in Shoreditch” (SS 20). First, AFM is the angry name for the program, but it soon shifts semantically, to mean the meetings that constitute the program: “Marcus felt like saying more, but there was no sense poking a stick at Shirley when you didn’t need to. Any given day, the odds on her going postal were marginally in her favour, and if she’d calmed down lately, that wasn’t — Marcus figured — on account of anything in particular getting better, but just things not getting appreciably worse. Everyone drew a line somewhere. And maybe the AFMs were helping (SS 113). And, before you know it, AFM is attributive:

“Shirley suppressed a sigh. Suppressing sighs was actually quite high on the list of personal goals drawn up at her AFM sessions (SS 118). Once Herron has a sweary idea, he then puts it through its paces, checking to see how it builds character and narrative.

            While reading the earlier novels, I wondered whether the alphabetisms and acronyms would pass once Herron had played with them a bit: they could be the stylistic engines of some but not all of the Slough House books. Chronologically, however, the profane alphabetisms were always there, from before Slough House and up to the present, in the partly retrospective The Secret Hours: “But Otis was dismissing automotive failure with a breezy hand. ‘This is not a problem. This is exactly what happens most of the time. Just needs a little TCL.’ A snort from Miles. ‘You need to get your TLAs in the RFO.’ ‘Three Letter Acronyms,’ Alison explained, when Otis raised an eyebrow. […] ‘And, ah, — Right Flipping Order?’” (SH 211). You know swearing is integrally important to the novels when Herron indulges in sweary metalinguistics.

Roddy Ho’s mind is too often occupied with Roddy Ho than to worry overmuch about spelling, which is why he’s susceptible even to sweary old saws. When a slow horse suggests “‘Let’s find out more about Black Arrow,’” the adversary du jour, Ho complains, “‘You mean, you want me to.’” “‘There’s no I in ‘team,’” Louisa reminded him. “But there’s a U in ‘cunt,’” Shirley reminded him” (RT 149). Good one, Shirl, and likely one of the many lessons you learned in AFM. Although it plays into the broader, structural motif of sweary alphabetics, especially in the “middle” novels, borrowing this formulation from popular culture is one of Herron’s less inventive moments.

Sometimes, I suppose, Herron is too clever for his own good, writing sweary passages we can’t help but appreciate but which feel more like set pieces than natural dialogue, even for that irrepressible profaner, Jackson Lamb, who is always the one to go too far. “‘Charity ball,’ wondered Lamb. ‘Is that like a pity fu —’ ‘We’re in a church.’ ‘Fair dos’ (RT 134). Indeed, Lamb tends to eructate in church, the ultimate intersection of sacred and profane. He can ask Molly Doran

“So why am I here? Just to watch you pondering the mysteries of whatever-the-bugger-it-is?”

“Ineffable.”

“I thought that meant can’t be fucked.”

“There are probably theologians who would agree.” (LDL 210)

Who is Jackson Lamb, really? A cardinal in the Church of National Security? A grammarian, or perhaps more apply, one of those linguistic descriptivists who enjoy the anomalies of speech: “‘Sneaked, by the way,’ Standish said. ‘… What now?’ ‘It’s sneaked. Snuck’s not proper English.’ ‘Do I look like I give a feaked?’” said Lamb (SH 224). That’s priceless language play.

Too much of this joking would be unbearable and would interfere with the more productive uses of profanity to fill in details of character or to thread certain thematic and linguistic motifs through the “whole work” (whether a novel or the series of novels). Herron’s profanity project depends on authorial judgment and restraint, as well as authorial daring and invention. What does Nikolai Katinsky mean when he leaps from his chair at Lamb and says “‘Fcrah!’” (DL 92). It might be an atavistic growl, but I’ve often thought that instead it’s a sort of cheer for profanity: fuck-rah. Let’s hear three “Fcrahs!” for Slough House swearing and Mick Herron’s artful use of artful profanity.

This is the last of three posts about Slough House fuck-uppery; the others may be found here and here. Key to novels cited: DL = Dead Lions (2018); JC = Joe Country (2019); LDL = Last Dead Letter (2020); RT = Real Tigers (2016); SH = Slow Horses (2016), and SS = Spook Street (2017)

The intelligence officers of Slough House, good at everyday profanity, are proficient infixers and interposers, too. An infixing, remember, is when one inserts profanity into the structure of a word, at a stress appropriate point (unfuckingbelievable); an interposing inserts the profanity between words in a fixed or idiomatic phrase (go to hell < go the fuck to hell). Infixings and interposings occur infrequently in speech, but when it comes to any variety of profanity, the slow horses are well ahead of the common herd.

Jackson Lamb infixes and interposes with abandon. As he points out to River Cartwright, whose grandfather had been a powerful spook in his day, “But no, you’ve got a grandfather. Congratufuckinglations. You’ve still got a job” (SH 37). The infixing drips with disdain for both grandfather and grandson, well-earned in the grandfather’s case — if you don’t already know that and why, then you really need to read the books.

These micro-adventures in profanity aren’t always exciting, as proved in Lamb’s occasional “Ha-de-fucking-ha.” (BA 195). But sometimes they are especially apt, as when he confronts the person who is likely his only friend, the Service’s librarian Molly Doran: “You’re supposed to be an archivist, not Barbara bloody Cartland” (LDL 216), which means that she’s cut closer to the bone than Lamb would like. At his best, though, Lamb is a subtle interposer: “I think you should hurry the fuck up” (LDL 217), which is really a sort of verbal power play — the demand to accelerate is made with a linguistic structure that attenuates the message. Only someone in charge can play such sweary games.

Even the least sweary of the slow horses, Catherine Standish, interposes intelligently, with implications. Frustrated at work, she does not drink, though she’s a recovering alcoholic, “Nor did she browse the Blue Book — let alone Sylvia bloody Plath” (DL 75) — that is, she’s stressed but she’s certainly and ironically, not suicidal. Sometimes, Diana Taverner, even when First Desk, that is, head of the intelligence service, is a syllable short of Lamb: “Ha bloody ha” (SW 180). Her predecessor, Claude Whelan, at his most courageous, manages a fine, though dated, pop-cultural interposing: “Dropping the phone into his lap, he grabbed the wheel with one hand, reached for the brake with the other, and the car lurched, throwing him forward again, and then he was leaving the ground — Christ alive, he was in Chitty fucking Bang Bang” (BA 280).

When Sid Baker asks River Cartwright, “Will you pay afuckingttention?” (SH 155), she’s not infixingly “wrong,” exactly, but it’s unusual to place an insert after a solely vowel syllable — is Herron, as author, challenging linguistic conventions, what a linguist might call “acceptability constraints,” or is Sid less adept at infixing than her senior, more practiced colleagues? Whichever, it’s unusual to observe an author working out the parameters of infixing and interposing as a means of characterization. I’ve not done the necessary counting, but I doubt that many works of fiction experiment with varieties of infixing and interposing as much as Herron’s do. Out of the experiment comes comedy, readerly pleasure, and a demonstration of Herron’s verbal finesse.

Of all the characters besides Jackson Lamb, Shirley Dander is especially given to infixing and interposing. One never knows what will come out of Dander’s mouth, but, as her partner, Marcus Longridge observes (as do we all), “Shirley’s a loose fucking cannon” (RT 145). Some of her interposings are weak, their matrices not really fixed phrases or idioms: “What the hellfuck is going on?” (LR 67) is perfectly good, everyday swearing, and the fuck here does act as an “emotional stress amplifier” (James McMillan’s phrase in his classic article on infixing and interposing in English), but “What is going on?” is barely interposable. “Grow fucking up” (RT 156) isn’t much more exciting, and she, like Lamb and Taverner, occasionally succumbs to inanity with a “Ha-de-fucking-ha” (RT 229), the prelude to which, “First thing she’d do would be send Lamb a postcard. Wish you were here?” only proves her childishness.

But when she’s on, she’s fire: “She could either man the fuck up or head the hell home” (LR 76) and the splendid “It’ll be an omnifuckingshambles” (LR 109). Shirley is insecure and angry about it. In her mind, she puts her fellow slow horses in their interposed places: “Catherine bloody Standish. Not to mention Lech bloody Wicinski and Louisa bloody Guy” (BA 151). She leaves Lamb out of it, wisely if for no other reason than he can beat her at all linguistic games, though her flame is sometimes especially bright: in “‘Jesus screaming fuck!’” (BA 155), Shirley interposes the base, Jesus fuck, by inserting screaming. Jesse Sheidlower’s robust treatment of Jesus fuck in The F-Word (4/e, 2024) includes a quotation from John le Carré’s The Night Manager (1993), certifying that Jesus fuck and interposings pertaining thereunto are spook speak.

Diana Taverner, boss of bosses in the British intelligence services, is a skilled interposer, though I notice that she doesn’t do infixings. Usually, when she resorts to an interposing, it’s in the interest of asserting her authority. When something she knows is above her interlocutor’s pay grade, she can dismiss them easily, “On account of mind your own fucking business” (DL 128). She summarizes a crisis as “Your boss is in a heap at the bottom of the stairs, this Candlestub bullshit will be history by bedtime, and I’m First fucking Desk. You have two seconds to decide where your loyalties lie, and by loyalties, I mean career prospects” (BA 260), and unsurprisingly, she gets her way. But more than effective, she’s also an elegant interposer: “How in the name of John le fucking Carré can Service product go walkabout?” (SH 148), she asks. She could have put it differently, as “How in the name of John fucking le Carré can Service product go walkabout?” neatly dividing fore- and surname, but she’s more stylish than that, and reassuringly competent, even if it is only a sort of linguistic competence.

As with all swearing, however, Jackson Lamb exceeds expectations. Superficially, his interposings and infixings look like anyone else’s: “Oh, goodie fucking gumdrops” (JC 40), he intrudes at one point. “Catherine said, ‘Happy now?’ ‘You know me. Like Pollyeffinganna on Christmas morning,’” Lamb responds. [LR 145). When Molly Doran announces, “‘I’ve a story to tell,’” Lamb’s frustration is infixed: ‘Oh, great. Jackabloodynory. Will it take long? Only I have plans’” (LDL 210). “Well, supercalifragilisticfuckmealadocious. And people say funerals are glum affairs” (JC 70). But these aren’t quite ordinary infixings or interposings, after all. In fact, they’re on the edge of acceptability, because topically, they swear about kid things: Jackanory, the BBC reading show for children; Mary Poppins; gum drops; Pollyanna and Christmas. It’s like a children’s bloody bookshelf, with snacks, and a little creepy. How far will Lamb go to offend? (Answer, given all the Slough House novels and stories, too far.)

Any connoisseur of infixing, however, will appreciate Lamb’s nuanced proficiency, as when he inserts a euphemism into Pollyanna, rather than –fucking– it. And Jackanory is the perfect base for an infixing critical of Molly’s storytelling, because besides referring to the television show, it derives from a schoolyard rhyme — rhyming slang, in fact — in which Jackanory equals story and story means ‘tall tale’ or even ‘lie.’ If you know the book, you know that Lamb knows what’s coming, that Jackabloodynory is the sort of deflection you’d expect of a spy. Or anyone. At first, one may not even register that, in supercalifragilisticfuckmealidocious, he clips –expi– from the matrix and replaces it with –fuck me-. It’s not a textbook infixing, in other words, but an on-the-fly invention of a master infixer.

Between semantics — the themes — and word structure, infixing and interposing in the Slough House novels express matters of superiority and power. When Shirley bloody Dander aggressively contrasts herself with her co-workers, she’s asserting power in thought that she can’t quite manifest in action. Diana Taverner, her career always at risk from in- and outfighting, interposes to emphasize her power, a sort of verbal foot-stamping. But Lamb gets away with a level of perversity beyond anything any of the others could imagine except as it comes from him, and therein lies considerable power, the power that doesn’t give a fuck. He tests the limits, and in doing so he establishes new limits — for himself. Further, though, he conjures infixings and interposings much as he conjures lit cigarettes from nowhere. That is, he continually performs the impossible without showing any effort, the very quality that Baldassare Castiglione named sprezzatura, the aesthetic power of a gentleman, of an artist, in this case an artist in colorful and technically daring profanity.

This is the second of three posts about slow horses and profanity — the others are here and here. Key to novels cited: BA= Bad Actors (2022); DL = Dead Lions (2018); JC = Joe Country (2019); LDL = Last Dead Letter (2020); LR = London Rules (2018); RT = Real Tigers (2016); and SH = Slow Horses (2016); and SW = Standing by the Wall

A couple of years ago, people I know were talking about the Apple TV series Slow Horses, the television version of Mick Herron’s Slough House novels. I love espionage novels, and I like espionage television series, too, but I can’t afford another streaming service — I have children on the cusp of university! — so I hadn’t seen any episodes of the series until I was flying in a plane. I watched three episodes (generously provided by the airline) and afterwards concluded that while the episodes were sweary, they were sweary in a reflexive, unaesthetic way, whereas the novels were full of clever and innovative swearing, and for that reason alone the books were more worth reading than the television show was worth watching.

Some authors and their audiences prefer their books clean of profanity, or they hide the profanity behind a fig-leaf of literary technique. We can have it both ways: we all know that the profanity is there, but we don’t have to own it, and we don’t have to behold it in all its glory. Other authors and readers, however, let it all hang out — they celebrate profanity and insinuate that, at least in telling some stories, profanity is essential language. Mick Herron’s series of spy novels, focused on the spies assigned to Slough House — spies who make big mistakes but can’t easily be fired, so are warehoused there until they’re killed or quit — revel in bad language, which is necessary to its comedy and to the development of character and narrative cohesion: in Herron’s case, at least, profanity is a term of art.

Unsurprisingly, then, profanity suffuses the Slough House novels, and all characters swear, some rarely enough to surprise us, most at about the same rate as readers, which serves the novels’ social realism, and one of them so profusely that the character is unimaginable without it. (If you guessed Jackson Lamb, you deserve a gold fucking star, but I have no more fucking stars to give, so, please, appreciate yourself.)

In the first category, the rare swear, you’ll find Catherine Standish — a most self-controlled recovering alcoholic, whose sudden “Fuck!” over breakfast surprises her co-workers and readers alike (SH 287: “The first time any of them had ever heard her say that”) — and Roddy Ho, the Slough House team’s self-absorbed, delusional computer systems nerd, whose strong language mostly participates in his sexual fantasies. The normal swearers include River Cartwright, Louisa Guy, Shirley Dander, Min Harper, and Marcus Longridge among the “slow horses,” the residents of Slough House, as well as all the politicians and intelligence higher-ups, especially Diana Taverner, who rises to the intelligence service’s so-called First Desk. The novels’ super-swearer is Jackson Lamb, the super-spy assigned, for his operational sins, to supervise Slough House and its miscellaneous denizens.

The range of profanity in the Slough House novels is impressive by any standard, from arsehole to bastard, bitch, bloody, and bugger, from an occasional cunt to a more frequent dick (dickhead, dick-waving), fuck and fucking and fuck up (expletive, adjective, verb, and noun), shit (plus chickenshit, dipshit, and ecoshit), and sod — just your average, everyday swearing, but a lot of it, sometimes half a dozen fucks a page, or a page-long pile-on of various swear words. One or another sentence is thick with profanity: “What the fuck are you doing here, you stupid fucking cunt?” (SH 190). What more is there to say? (There’s a key to abbreviations for the novels at the end of this post).

The weird intimacy of Slough House, where no one trusts anyone else, but everyone depends on everyone else, promotes profanity, which both expresses and releases the tension of the job. When Shirley Dander interrupts the romantically clueless and generally unappealing Roddy Ho interviewing possible dates online for a Star Wars convention, the ensuing conversation quickly descends to tit-for-tat profanity:

“What are you doing here?”

“Collecting my iron.” She held it up in evidence. “But fuck me, this is brilliant. The others are literally going to shit themselves. I mean, literally. There is going to be shit, everywhere.”

“You tell them and I’ll fuck you up.”

“Totally worth it. Who were those women? They were women, right?”

“Friends.”

“You haven’t got any friends.”

“Neither have you.”

“Dickhead.”

“Beast.”

“Asshat.”

“Spreader.”

“… Spreader? What does that even mean?”

Roddy said, “You know, like, spreader. Like you spread the virus.”

“Nobody says that.”

“Some people do.” (BA 156)

No, no one does, but by the end of the conversation, that poor excuse for profanity is all Roddy’s got.

Profanity is an essential aspect of Jackson Lamb’s character. “It had been a while since Lamb had endured a conversation this long without resorting to profanity” (SH 15), the narrator tells us the first chance he gets in the first novel of the series. The swearing is only one among Lamb’s vices, all of which he delivers with excess: smoking, drinking, gluttony, the consequent farting and swearing, are all part and parcel of the man. But given the man, given the story, given the exigencies of espionage, it is of utmost narrative importance that, not just the first novel, but the whole series of novels be framed by the subject of profanity, with so many instances of it to come as the story realizes itself across the pages of the several novels.

Later, when Lamb evades the Security Service’s Security Office (the Dogs, in Herron’s spy jargon), Catherine Standish provides a motivation for his profanity — neither necessarily the correct nor the exclusive motivation — to the Head Dog, Emma Flyte: “‘He said he’d spent the early hours winding up the dyke who’s currently boss of the kennel. And that if she turned up here, I was to waste as much of her time as possible.’ Emma stared. Catherine said, ‘I may have skipped the odd f-word. He thinks swearing’s big and clever’” (SS 145). Emma had already noted his fucking proclivities at their first meeting: “No, really,’ Emma Flyte murmured to his back. “You had me at ‘fuck’” (SS 60). Hers is not an unusual reaction.

Yet, when it comes to Lamb’s use of profanity generally, not just his fucks but the way he uses them and other bad words cleverly, he receives a different kind of grudging approval, as when Ingrid Tearney, First Desk before Diana Taverner’s inexorable rise from Second to First, remarks to Lamb, “You have a gift for the pithy phrase” (RT 139). The phrases aren’t pithy just because of the profanity, but chances are, if Lamb said something pithily, there’s profanity in it. There’s usually a twist in Lamb’s turn of phrase, on the order of ironic self-awareness, so he can criticize someone who just swore with the dictum, “Casual profanity’s the sign of a small fucking mind” (Secret 289). In Lamb’s case, it’s the sign of a big fucking mind capable, not just of casual profanity, but pithy profanity. Or here’s an idea: maybe Lamb’s swearing isn’t casual.

Lamb developed his profane tendencies early in his career. In the following passage, Miles is Lamb’s undercover name, and his colleague Otis explains its genesis to Alison, another colleague:

“A man with Schenker’s history, he’ll have his ear to the ground,” said Otis. “A few scraps here and there. That’s all that’s needed.”

“Chumming the water,” Miles said. “It’s not an exact science. But it doesn’t have to be.”

“So now he’s a shark, not a tiger.”

“Christ on a fucking bicycle. He’s got teeth. What else do you need to know?”

Otis laid his arm on Alison’s across Alison’s shoulder. She shrugged it off. He didn’t mind.

“Miles can be abrasive,” he explained, as if this were news. “A bit of, what’s the best word? A foul-mouthed pig. He was trying this identity on for a joke once, and the wind stayed, so he stayed like that.” (Secret 294)

For Lamb, then, profanity was originally performative. Who’s to say it isn’t performative — a sort of cover — throughout the series? How would we know, one way or the other?

Lamb may use profanity as part of his everyday cover, but Herron’s use of profanity is, in the first instance, characterological: the amount and type of profanity from the mouth of a character and the freedom to play with it (like a monkey throwing its shit, Lamb might say) indicates position in the social pecking order of Slough House. We know the characters by their swearing. Of course, it also contributes to the novels’ comedy, as the disordered language of organizational and personal mayhem. Further, it’s a narrative tool, as sudden, unexpected maneuvers in profanity disrupt narrative continuity, yet the expectation of profanity, overall and character by character, supports narrative continuity. In other words, the Slough House novels demonstrate how profanity can be, not verbal decoration, but essential to the tensity of the fiction in which it appears.

This is the introductory post of a series about profanity in the Slough House novels. The sequel posts can be found here and here. Next up, Herron’s uses, routine and innovative, of infixing and interposing. Key to the novels cited here: BA = Bad Actors (2022); RT = Real Tigers (2016); SH = Slow Horses (2010); SS = Spook Street (2017); Secret = The Secret Hours (2023).

Well, this is embarrassing: It’s been five years since we last published one of these link roundups. Obviously, we’re overdue for an update. Equally obviously, we’re not going to cover all the newsworthy sweary things that transpired between June 2020 and June 2025. We’re obsessive but not deranged. 

Here, then, is the best of the latest. Got a tip for us? Leave a comment here, or tag us on Mastodon or Bluesky. (We are no longer on Twitter/X.)

Who gives a s#!t about cursing robots? Researchers at Oregon State University, that’s who. “Our findings show that swearing robots would typically have little downside and some upside, especially in open-minded spaces such as university campuses.” (IEEE Spectrum. Hat tip: Ben Zimmer and Grant Barrett.)

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Did ancient Romans like swearing? “Suetonius might not actually say ‘fucked up the ass’, but that is almost definitely the sentiment he was trying to convey.” (James Coverley, Potentially Interesting Roman History)

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Helen Zaltzman devoted two recent episodes of her excellent podcast, The Allusionist, to swear words. For “Ffff” — all about fuck — she interviewed Jesse Sheidlower, editor of four volumes of The F-Word. (Read our interview with Jesse, published in November 2024.) For “Serving C-Word” she talked with linguists Nicole Holliday and Kelly Elizabeth Wright about “what it means to turn such a strong swear into praise.” (For additional service, see Dave Wilton’s post “Serving Kant.”)

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“Australians’ proud reputation as a pack of cunning linguists has taken a hit from a study finding they come only third in the swearing stakes online,” after Americans and Brits. (The Guardian) 

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You can’t say Brits aren’t giving it their best shot: “57% of Britons say they swear at least most days, and young Britons are now more likely to have a positive than negative view of swearing.” Motherfucker is seen as at least fairly offensive by 70% of Britons; 62% say the same of fatherfucker. (YouGov UK)

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And let’s not forget the Scots: On the occasion of the 20th anniversary of The Thick of It, The Guardian interviewed creator Armando Iannucci and star Peter Capaldi, among others involved in the BBC series. “I think because I’m from Glasgow the swearing came very naturally,” Capaldi said. “Sometimes a ‘fucking’ in the middle of a sentence can propel it forward with a new energy. But often I would swear because I couldn’t remember my lines. It would take a fucking minute or two for me to fucking remember the line that I fucking forgot. So I would be searching desperately for the line … and then it would fucking arrive!” Capaldi played director of communications Malcolm Tucker, in whose honor our annual Tucker Awards for Excellence in Swearing are named. (The Guardian)

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Two Australian researchers studied “vulgarity in online discourse around the English-speaking world” and found that “speakers in the United States use vulgarity most” and “speakers from different regions show preferences for specific vulgar items.” (Lingua)

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“It’s no secret that since the red MAGA hats regained power in Washington, Democrats have been cursing a blue streak. Reporters have noticed, as have late-night TV hosts. Democrats are announcing congressional campaigns to ‘unf— the country,’ and because their party needs to ‘grow a f—ing spine.’ On social media, Ways and Means Democrats responded to the White House’s reaction to tariff news with this: ‘To f— around is human, to find out is divine.’” (Roll Call)

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Bye-bye, Minnesota Nice: “Minnesota Democratic politicians are usually relatively mild in their cussing, but one thing seems clear: They’re cursing more freely, and often with gusto.” (Minnesota Reformer) 

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Good fucking luck with that: An Army unit at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, “has barred its soldiers from cussing and threatened those that repeatedly break the new rule with involuntary separation from the service.” (Stars and Stripes)

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Maybe the Army should take a cue from Formula One racing. “Research suggests that banning drivers from swearing during races could have wider effects. It may disrupt how they regulate their emotions in Formula One’s extreme environment.” (The Conversation) 

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Some internal news: Our co-fucker Stan Carey has updated his “swearing like a trooper” post from 2022 to include citations from anthropologist Ashley Montagu’s The Anatomy of Swearing.

Think about your earliest swearing. Did you graduate from euphemisms? (As a child I used sugar, drat, and flip/feck for shit, damn, and fuck.) Or did you jump right into prodigious profanity? Did you practise in private, and did you try out your new vocabulary among friends – or in front of shocked family members?

Or maybe, as in John Boorman’s Hope and Glory (1987), you were forced to swear. In this period film, which reimagines the director’s childhood in London during the Blitz, coming of age meant coming to terms with the senselessness of war and the elusive sense of swearwords.

As Boorman writes in his wonderful memoir, Adventures of a Suburban Boy, the film was “a way of looking at my personal mythology”. For a child in wartime, some of that mythology centred on ammunition, an object of constant fascination:

We kids rampaged through the ruins, the semis [semi-detached houses] opened up like dolls’ houses, the precious privacy shamefully exposed. We took pride in our collection of shrapnel. Most of it came from our own anti-aircraft shells, which also did more damage to roofs than the Luftwaffe. I often picked up fragments that were still hot and smelt of gunpowder. . . . The most prized acquisition of all was live ammunition. We would lock bullets in a vice and detonate them by hammering nails into their heads.

This is recreated in Hope and Glory in a scene where Billy – Boorman’s surrogate – encounters a gang of boys while out scouring the ruins for treasure. They want to see what he’s made of and conduct some routine intimidation, before realising their common enemy. The mood warms enough for the leader, Roger, to invite Billy into the gang. But first he must pass an unusual test (transcript from 2:10 below):

Roger: Do you wanna join our gang?
Billy: Don’t mind.
R: Do you know any swear words?
B: Yes.
R: Say them.
B: [hesitates]
R: Go on. Say them. You can’t join if you can’t swear.
B: Uh, I only know one.
All: [laughter]
R: Well say that one then.
B: [hesitates]
R: [shoves Billy] Go on.
B: Fuck.
All: [gasp]
R: That word is special. That word is only used for something really important. Now repeat after me: Bugger off.
B: Bugger off.
R: Sod.
B: Sod.
R: Bloody.
B: Bloody.
R: Now put them all together: Bugger off, you bloody sod.
B: Bugger off, you bloody sod.
R: [smiles] Okay, you’re in.
All: [cheering]
R: Let’s smash things up.
All: [loud cheering]

There’s much to enjoy in this scene. The specific innocence of children of that age and time. The camaraderie waiting behind their show of toughness. Their unselfconscious naïveté about swearing; their awe at fuck.* This viewer’s immense relief that none of them is hurt by the reckless play with explosives.

And I love how swearing plays a central role in Billy’s initiation. A string of (very British) swears is the key, the set of magic words that establishes rapport with a group of his peers, dissolving the boundary between outsider and insider and nudging him just slightly towards adulthood.

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* For a Boorman film that went in another direction, see my post on avoiding swear words in the making of Deliverance.

It wouldn’t be the annual Eurovision Song Contest without some sort of controversy. Most years the controversy is political in nature. The 2025 contest was no different in this regard, but in addition to the usual political rhubarb, this year’s contest saw a dispute over a certain four-letter word in lyrics of one of the entries.

The song in question was Malta’s entry in the contest: “Serving,” originally titled “Kant,” performed by Maltese singer Miriana Conte and written by Conte, Benjamin “BNJI” Schmid, Sarah Evelyn Fuller, and Matthew “Muxu” Mercieca. The song was released in January 2025.

The original lyrics to the song’s chorus are:

Why should we lеt other people dеcide
When we could be havin’ the time of our lives?
Let down your walls, come and dance to my vibe
I do it all the time, yeah, I do it all the time

Serving kant
(La-la-la-la-la-la-la)
Do-re-mi-fa-s-s-serving kant
(La-la-la-la-la-la-la)
Do-re-mi-fa-s-s-servin’

(You can see a video of Conte performing the original lyrics here.)

Kant, the only Maltese word in the otherwise English-language song, means singing in Maltese, and the word is descended from the Latin cantus, meaning song. The aural similarity to the the English word cunt is obvious, and the phrase serving cunt is ball culture slang meaning to be simultaneously bold, confident, and feminine, a quality that Conte exudes in her performances. (Ball culture is an African-American and LatinX LGBTQ+ subculture with antecedents that date back to nineteenth-century drag balls.)

The song is an anthem of feminine power, and the pun is quite clearly intentional. Conte has been quoted as saying, “Controversial song? Maybe. Bold outfit? Possibly. But we did it. This win is for MALTA. Let’s serve KANT in Basel.”

In addition to the pun, the “do-re-mi” in the chorus references The Sound of Music, as 2025 is the sixtieth anniversary of the film version of the musical. I leave it to the reader’s imagination as to how Julie Andrews might have performed the song.

After complaints from the BBC Radio, which by UK regulations could not broadcast the word cunt before 9 pm, the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) required the lyrics be changed. Conte reluctantly complied, changing the title of the song and replacing the lyric kant with aahh.

“Serving” and Malta came in seventeenth in the Eurovision song finals on 17 May. But one can’t help wonder if Malta might have done better in the contest had another Maltese synonym for singing/song been used, perhaps serving għanja.