Today’s new entry:
motherfather noun (a partial euphemism for) mother-fucker.
One of many, many euphemisms for motherfucker, this one was popularized as a characteristic exclamation of comedian Redd Foxx on the TV series The Royal Family, which had a short run in 1991 (short because Foxx died of a heart attack after only seven episodes had been shot; the attempt to keep the show going without Foxx was unsuccessful). I’m not aware of any use before Foxx’s, but the term has developed a life of its own, and is now used without any reference to him.
This is a sample definition of one of the many (over 120) new entries from the third edition of The F-Word. In the time leading up to publication, I will be featuring one such entry a day. In the book itself, these definitions will be supplemented with a number of quotations showing the use of the word or phrase (which is the whole point of a historical dictionary of this sort). In other words, this is only a teaser!
In the 2009 movie “G-Force,” the cute guinea pigs reference “Die Hard”: “Yippie-ki-yay, coffeemaker.”
There are a really extreme number of one-off euphemisms of this sort, esp. on network television. For the most part, I did not include them in the book, as they rarely get any currency beyond the one time they’re used….