1) The 10th Annual Tucker Awards for Excellence in Swearing:
Let’s face it: 2024 was a shitshow on many levels. But if we compare the past year to the comparably shitty 2016 and 2020, the landscape of swearing was different in 2024. Whereas “fuck 2016” and “fuck 2020” were common refrains in those years, this time around we have far fewer fucks to give. […] So in the spirit of escapism from *gestures wildly at everything*, it’s fitting that for our overall Tucker Award winner we recognize a remarkable cinematic portrayal of swearing that dramatizes events from a century ago. The film Wicked Little Letters, which hit theaters and Netflix in 2024, tells the true story of two women who lived as neighbors in the 1920s in the southern England town of Littlehampton: the devout Edith Swan (Olivia Colman) and the rabble-rousing Irishwoman Rose Gooding (Jessie Buckley). When Edith starts receiving incredibly obscene and insulting letters, she blames Rose for sending them, leading to accusations of libel that land Rose in jail. Others in the town start receiving similarly abusive letters, but is Rose the true culprit? I’ll refrain from spoilers here — just watch the movie in all its profane glory. The red-band trailer has some of the choicest swears.
The winner for Best Fucking Swearing in Film was Anora, which I’m dying to see (pull quote: “Me go fuck myself!? Me fuck myself!? You go fuck yourself and your fucking mother, motherfucker!”). See link for much more sweary goodness, including Best Fucking Book about Swearing (The F-Word, natch) and Best Fucking Data Analysis (“Which Countries Swear the Most?”); here’s last year’s post.
2) Public Domain Day: Works from 1929 are open to all, as are sound recordings from 1924! The Sound and the Fury, A Farewell to Arms, A Room of One’s Own, Red Harvest and The Maltese Falcon… and that’s just the first few. They need to reform the copyright law, but this makes me happy for now.
3) A Wee Coak Sparrah – Duncan MacRae: From 1959 onwards, MacRae’s recitation of “The Wee Coak Sparrah” was a core ingredient of Scotland’s televised New Year celebrations. (A cock-sparrow is “A male sparrow; A quarrelsome, cocky person.”) Thanks, Trevor!
The map of sweariest countries is intriguing. I can’t correlate sweariness with anything on that map, except that English-majority countries use the swearingest English, itself not obvious.
By and large, it just shows that L1 English speakers have the most facility in English obscenity. There is obviously an EFL opportunity waiting to be seized there.
I never got to grips with really offensive Kusaal. Some things you either learn at your mother’s knee, or never. Without the occasional “Don’t say that, dear, it’s not nice” or “Did you pick that up from one of your hooligan friends?”, how can one ever acquire true control of these registers?
Do they not have dive bars in that part of Ghana?
Only pito bars, where you sit about outside all day solving all the problems of the world with your friends. I tell you, fieldwork can be gruelling. It’s not for the weak.
The doble hijueputa strikes me as the opposite, and yet so close, of Gilgamesh.
@de
Would pito bar be something like this?
https://youtu.be/ZUbvT6YKPzk
Not altogether. There are, for example, comparatively few Koreans in the Bawku district.
The examples in Tucker are tiresome, denatured and unimaginative (the frisson of taboo related to the word “fuck” and related terms having disappeared decades ago, for example): inspiring at most, perhaps, a weak smile among the middle class, who might remember that 60 years ago their mothers may have been upset hearing some of this.
Maybe for you, Ook. The linked website with more graphs of Taylor Swift’s graphic output, even it modestly covers the vowels of the Bad Words with asterisks.
That bit in Wicked Little Letters where Rose looks at „Die Slut“ written on a door and says „it‘s German“ is an obvious lift from „The Simpsons“.
At least from the trailer the swearing in that movie seems like a 13 year old’s idea of being dirty, no Tucker like levels of virtuosity on display. On the other hand, that talented cast might carry a weak script.
Whether or not Ook’s diagnosis is too sweeping, I find the nominally-obscene “pull quote” from _Anora_ banal, cliched, and otherwise unimpressive. It’s been a long way down since 1988, when Hollywood gave us the striking and innovative phrase https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fuck_me_gently_with_a_chainsaw.