Feed on
Posts
Comments

Monthly Archive for September, 2009

The first two full reviews:
Jonathon Green’s review in World Wide Words
Justine Elias’s review in the Boston Phoenix

Read Full Post »

We are published!

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 [...]

Read Full Post »

FWOTD: artfuck

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. [...]

Read Full Post »

FWOTD: DILLIGAF

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 [...]

Read Full Post »

FWOTD: fuck this shit

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 [...]

Read Full Post »

FWOTD: XXXX

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 [...]

Read Full Post »

FWOTD: fuckability

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 [...]

Read Full Post »

FWOTD: to fuck

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 [...]

Read Full Post »

Latest blog coverage

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 [...]

Read Full Post »

FWOTD: ass-fuck v.

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 [...]

Read Full Post »

Older Posts »