Swearing as a rite of passage

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Stan Carey1 Comment

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:

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Serving Kant

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Dave Wilton4 Comments

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.

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“Smut”

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Nancy Friedman5 Comments

“Some people have a way with words,” the comedian Steve Martin used to say, “and other people . . . uh, not have way.” Tom Lehrer very much have way. The American musician, mathematician, and songwriter, who turns 97 today, is the creator of nearly 100 satirical songs, almost all of them written in the 1950s and 1960s, whose popularity, as a Wikipedia entry puts it, “has far outlasted their topical subjects and references.” The canon includes “Fight Fiercely, Harvard” — one of Lehrer’s earliest compositions, written when he was an undergraduate at that institution — and “We Will All Go Together When We Go,” a hymn to nuclear Armageddon. (“There will be no more misery/When the world is our rotizerie.”)

The anthem nearest to our hearts here at Strong Language Central, though, is of course “Smut,” which like Lehrer himself is celebrating a significant anniversary this year. Although the lyrics reflected a set of social and legal circumstances specific to mid-1960s America, their sentiment has proved to be timeless. In honor of its 60th anniversary and Tom Lehrer’s long, remarkable life, here’s our salute to “Smut.”

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“Eat shit” and “Oh fuck”: Sweary First and Last Words in Michael Erard’s “Bye Bye I Love You”

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John Kelly3 Comments

We will not go gentle into that good night here at Strong Language. We will rage. Oh, we will rage, all right, uttering our shit’s, fuck’s, and damn’s until the bitter-ass end.

And that’s true for a lot of us, according to Michael Erard in his latest book, Bye Bye I Love You: The Story of Our and First Last Words, out now from the MIT Press. Apparently some of us even come into speech, let alone leave it behind, kicking and screaming—and swearing!

The story of first and last words that Erard, a linguist and author, tells in Bye Bye I Love You is intelligent, humane, cross-disciplinary, beautifully written, and comprehensive, offering a historical and cultural account of our first and final utterances as much as a linguistic one.

Germane to my fellow vulgarians here, I was fascinated to learn that cursing does have a place amid the mama’s and famous last words we associate with our initial and ultimate speech acts. (And as Erard well explains, these verbal bookends are indeed far more complex than those associations.)

Bye Bye I Love You by Michael Erard (2025, MIT Press)
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Pornhub’s WOTY

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Dave Wilton1 Comment

Readers of this blog are probably familiar with the various Word of the Year (WOTY) competitions run by dictionaries and linguistic organizations. But they may not know that the site Pornhub.com has its own WOTY project of sorts. Each year Pornhub publishes a statistical analysis of its users, and in addition to providing global demographic data about who uses the site and when, it publishes the top and trending search terms used on it.

The 2024 analysis can be found here. [Note that the analysis itself is not pornographic, but beware of clicking links within it as those may lead you to NSFW pages. Moreover, one may not want to visit this link on a work computer, as your IT department may notify your boss that you’ve visited Pornhub.]

Hentai, sexually explicit cartoons in the style of Japanese manga, was the site’s no.1 search term again this year, with MILF, an acronym for a mom I’d like to fuck, also holding position at no.2. Demonstrating Pornhub’s global reach is the no.3 term, Pinay, referring to a Filipina, climbing from no.5 last year. On Pornhubgay.com, the top three terms remained unchanged from last year: twink, a man of youthful and slim appearance, at no.1, anime at no.2, and Pinay’s masculine counterpart Pinoy at no.3.  

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