World Wide Words & Boston Phoenix reviews
Posted in Uncategorized on Sep 15th, 2009
The first two full reviews:
Jonathon Green’s review in World Wide Words
Justine Elias’s review in the Boston Phoenix
The Complete History of the Word. Yes, That One.
Posted in Uncategorized on Sep 15th, 2009
The first two full reviews:
Jonathon Green’s review in World Wide Words
Justine Elias’s review in the Boston Phoenix
Posted in Uncategorized on Sep 10th, 2009
Yes, today is the official publication day!
That doesn’t mean all that much, to be honest—for most books at a sub-Harry Potter level, the publication date is mostly arbitrary, used as a basis for publicity. As we know, The F-Word has been available for some time.
But we are now officially published. Thus, the FWOTD feature is [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Sep 9th, 2009
Today’s new entry:
artfuck noun
1. an artistic person, especially one who is elitist or pretentious.
2. something (especially a piece or style of music) that is pretentiously artistic. Often as adjective.
A twofer today, as these new senses are closely related. The earliest example I could find for sense 1 was from the 1980s, from Bret Easton Ellis. [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Sep 8th, 2009
Today’s new entry:
DILLIGAF interjection “do I look like I give a fuck?”
One that I had never heard of before, DILLIGAF dates from the early 1970s, though I did uncover a late-60s precursor in DILLIGAD (“…a damn”). It remains fairly widespread, and while it is not frequently found in fiction, it appears to be good T-shirt [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Sep 7th, 2009
Today’s new entry:
¶ fuck this shit (used to dismiss a situation); “to hell with this.”
Dating back to the late 1960s, I did have an example of this in the previous editions, but realized that it was common enough at a set phrase that it should be included in its own [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Sep 6th, 2009
Today’s new entry:
XXXX noun British. = fuck noun definition 2.a. [After an advertising campaign for Castlemaine XXXX beer, having the tagline “Australians couldn’t give a XXXX for any other lager.”]
An exclusively British term (despite the Australian heritage of the beer), this is used euphemistically in constructions of the sort “don’t give a XXXX”. Dating from [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Sep 5th, 2009
Today’s new entry:
fuckability noun ability to be copulated with; (specifically) sexual attractiveness.
While fuckable has been around—in two senses!—since the 1880s, its partner fuckability, while predictable, seems to be a relatively new term. My first example is from the late 1960s, but in reference to a sex toy; the usual meaning, referring to a person’s sexual [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Sep 4th, 2009
Today’s new entry:
¶ to fuck, very much, a great deal; “to hell.”
This is, in effect, an intensified version of “to hell”; in the book’s examples, things are “blown to fuck,” someone “wishes to fuck,” someone gets “annoyed to fuck,” and so forth.
The earliest example is from a 1919 book about Australian soldier slang of World [...]
Posted in Media Coverage on Sep 3rd, 2009
Some recent coverage in professional blogs:
Huff Post (“Would you like to read an oral biography of the F word? We practically leaped off our sofa with a ‘Would I!’”
(On the other hand, there’s “edited by one Jesse Sheidlower.” Hmph. I am the Jesse Sheidlower, but since this guy can’t spell “foreword” or even “Lewis Black”….)
Entertainment [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Sep 3rd, 2009
Today’s new entry:
ass-fuck verb…2. to victimize cruelly.
The intensified equivalent of the main figurative senses of fuck v., this sense was somewhat less common, at least in print, than I had originally expected. The earliest example I have is from 1980, and I quote Howard Stern amongst others.
The noun equivalent, which was in earlier editions, was [...]