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We adults are careful about swearing around our kids. We don’t want bad language to confuse or corrupt or otherwise harm them. As Steven Pinker says in passing while talking about profanity in The Stuff of Thought (2007), “if some people would rather not explain to their young children what a blow job is, there should be television channels that don’t force them to,” and there are. We have every right to be protective of our children even if we don’t have a reason.

The post Protecting our children from profanity appeared first on OUPblog.

Euphemisms, per their definition, are used to soften offensive language. Topics such as death, sex, and bodily functions are often discussed delicately, giving way to statements like, "he passed away," "we're hooking up," or "it's that time of the month."

The post A collection of Victorian profanities [infographic] appeared first on OUPblog.

We’ve been casually calling the post-Millennial Generation the On Demand Generation (and the announcement of Fisher-Price’s new hand-held, personal DVR for kids that debuted at CES this week makes us think we might just have gotten the... Read the rest of this post

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By Mark Peters

I love bullshit.

Perhaps I should clarify. It’s not pure, unadulterated bullshit I enjoy (or even the hard-to-find alternative, adulterated bullshit). I agree with the great George Carlin, who said, “It’s all bullshit, and it’s bad for ya.” Hard to argue with that.

What I love is the enormous lexicon of words for bullshit and nonsense. Studies show they are all wonderful words. Piffle! Tommyrot! Poppycock! Truthiness! Balderdash! Rot! Crapola! Hogwash! Intellectual black holes! Using a vivid, meaty word like gobbledygook almost makes it worth dealing with gobbledygook itself. A few years ago in this very blog, I looked at some of these words.

Three years later, I’m older, wiser, and no less enamored of BS and all BS-like terms. This time, instead of looking at the origin stories of terms you already know, I’m going to share some terms I bet you don’t know: bullshit obscurities, some of which I’d never have found without the help of newly published sources, like Green’s Dictionary of Slang, the magnificent work of Mr. Slang, Jonathon Green. I implore you: give these words a home in your doomsday prophesies and cupcake recipes. They should be useful. You can never, ever have enough words for bullshit.

flummadiddle
Here’s a spin on flummery that would make Ned Flanders proud. Like flummery, flummadiddle (also spelled flummerdiddle and flummydiddle) has been used to mean either horsefeathers or something that would taste just as awful, as in this 1872 OED example: “Flummadiddle consists of stale bread, pork-fat, molasses, cinnamon, allspice, [etc.]; by the aid of these materials a kind of mush is made, which is baked in the oven and brought to the table hot and brown.” Mmm, mush. No wonder this diddly-fied version of flummery works so well when describing mushy thoughts and words, as in this 1854 use: “What does she want of any more flummerdiddle notions?” Bonus BS: this word is related to fadoodle and fairydiddle.

arkymalarky
One of my top five favorite BS words has always been malarkey, so I had at least two wordgasms when I found this variation in Green’s. Green spots two uses from the 1930’s and 40’s, both by Carl Sandberg, so this term might be an invention of his. Surely it deserves broader use, partly because it has the reduplication that makes jibber-jabber, mumbo-jumbo, and pishery-pashery such fitting words for fiddle-faddle. Yet another BS-y reduplicative term has a Shakespearian résumé: skimble-skamble appeared in Henry IV: “Such a deale of skimble scamble stuffe, As puts me from my faith.”

ackamarackus
Green notes that arkymalarky may be related to ackamarackus, which the OED defines as “Something regarded as pretentious nonsense; something intended to deceive; humbug.” Apparently, giving someone the old ackamarackus is like giving them the old okey-doke: a maneuver perfected by politicians and other flim-flammers.

donkey dust
This Massachusetts term—recorded in t

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By Dennis Baron

Apple’s latest iPhone app will clean up your text messages and force you to brush up your French, or Spanish, or Japanese, all at the same time.

This week the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office approved patent 7,814,163, an Apple invention that can censor obscene or offensive words in text messages whie doubling as a foreign-language tutor with the power to require, for example, “that a certain number of Spanish words per day be included in e-mails for a child learning Spanish.”

Parents are sure to love this multitasker, which puts an end to teen-age sexting while also checking homework. In the spirit of the Supreme Court’s 1978 ban on George Carlin’s “Seven Dirty Words You Can’t Say on TV,” Apple’s app will shrink their children’s stock of English expletives—or at least render them unprintable—while setting the kids on the path toward bilingualism, or at least a passing grade in French. This new invention from Apple is two things in one: Mary Poppins and the Rosetta Stone, or, for those parents of a certain age, it’s a floor wax and a dessert topping.

Of course, when Apple closes one door, it opens another. Apple may cut off access to bad words in English, but it then redirects that lexical energy in the profitable direction of foreign-language learning. Teens may find their texting vocabulary circumscribed, but if children’s grades go down, Apple’s iPhone censor lets parents activate a tool that “can require a user . . . to send messages in a foreign language, to include certain vocabulary words, or to use proper spelling, grammar and/or punctuation based on the user’s defined skill level. This could aide [sic] the user in more quickly improving his or her fluency of a language.”

As if Steve Jobs wasn’t already intruding enough into people’s wallets and their private lives, the iPhone device will not only watch your language, it will require you to correct your mistakes and rat you out if you screw up. The app doesn’t just make you do your homework, it even tells you when to do it. According to the Apple patent,

The control application may require a user during specified time periods to send messages in a designated foreign language, to include certain designated vocabulary words, or to use proper designated spelling, designated grammar and designated punctuation and like designated language forms based on the user’s defined skill level and/or designated language skill rating. If the text-based communication fails to include the required language or format, the control application may alert the user and/or the administrator/parent of the absence of such text.

The control application may require the user to rewrite the text-based communication in the required language, to include the required vocabulary words and/or to correct spelling and punctuation errors. The control application may require the user to locate the error. If the user cannot correct the error, the control application may provide hints as to the location of the error by first indicating the paragraph, then, the line and, finally, the exact location.

As figure 10 from Apple’s patent application shows (see below), writers of objectionable texts

Lauren, Publicity Assistant

Jesse Sheidlower is Editor at Large of the Oxford English Dictionary and author of The F-Word. Recognized as one of the foremost authorities on obscenity in English, he has written about language for a great many publications, including a recent article on Slate. Here, Jesse discusses the criteria for including certain words or obscenities in dictionaries.  Watch the video after the jump.

WARNING: This video contains explicit language.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I don’t correct folk on their grammar – I make enough mistakes of my own, and I am not exactly quoting any individual – but one of a number I have heard or talked with,  rather than a specific person; but – and you had to see this but hanging out a mile away – the point was, we were talking about one word in particular. I tend not to use it and won’t use it here. However I think I can let you know just what word it is by replacing it in the following paragraph with the the words “fire truck”:

Fire truck! The fire trucking fire truck at the fire trucking movies said the fire trucking show was fire trucking sold out, so we fire trucking have to fire trucking find something to fire trucking do for a fire trucking couple of fire trucking hours.  Fire truck! Let’s fire trucking go to the fire trucking Mcfire truckingD’s for a fire trucking burger while we fire trucking eat. I’m fire trucking starved. Fire truck!

That paragraph wasn’t said in anger. Just  conversation, one friend to their peers. If you haven’t figured it out, “fire truck” actually contains the word in question and I am not talking about “fire” or “truck” but it does end in “ck” and start with “f”

The paragraph translates into more standard English as:

The woman at the movies said the show was sold out, so we have to find something to do for a couple of hours. Let’s go to the McD’s for a burger while we eat. I’m starved.

I guess I can agree that they are only words, but I wonder that they don’t mean anything? What I am meaning is, what is the point of saying them if they don’t mean anything? If the point was to shock – say an offensive word too often and it stops having shock value. If the point was to mark yourself as an individual –  too many people use that word, you are one of the crowd.

So, perhaps it is to mark yourself as one of the crowd and someone who just wants to fit in. It is extra work to type as you can tell by the extra length to the paragraph and you could equate it to the illumination the monks added to the hand calligraphed books of bygone ages – except that it is the same design mouth punched into the sentences. It is more like dotting all the “i”s with hearts or sticking stars on the paper – they all look the same.

Getting back to it though… if, as was said, it doesn’t mean anything. If the swearing is so unimportant, then why can’t they “not swear” at certain times? I am meaning in respect to people for whom it might have meaning to?

If it is so unimportant that I should not complain about it – why is is so very important that it has to be done?

What you do say does mean something. It might not mean what you think. “Fire truck” no longer shocks, it no longer makes you look cool or trendy, it no longer really adds any emphasis. nearly any word used now doesn’t because nearly any word used becomes so quickly overused and abused.

In some places you “need” the Internet to keep up with what the current word is. You might as well fire trucking make up your own and even that won’t work long because it is fire trucking how you end up using it that marks it fire trucking out. Why not just use words and English to say what you want? Shakespeare did use foul language in his works, but he also created it and was creative about it. Tell someone they are a ray of dung shine and be dung with it!

I don’t correct folk on their grammar – I make enough mistakes of my own, and I am not exactly quoting any individual – but one of a number I have heard or talked with,  rather than a specific person; but – and you had to see this but hanging out a mile away – the point was, we were talking about one word in particular. I tend not to use it and won’t use it here. However I think I can let you know just what word it is by replacing it in the following paragraph with the the words “fire truck”:

Fire truck! The fire trucking fire truck at the fire trucking movies said the fire trucking show was fire trucking sold out, so we fire trucking have to fire trucking find something to fire trucking do for a fire trucking couple of fire trucking hours.  Fire truck! Let’s fire trucking go to the fire trucking Mcfire truckingD’s for a fire trucking burger while we fire trucking eat. I’m fire trucking starved. Fire truck!

That paragraph wasn’t said in anger. Just  conversation, one friend to their peers. If you haven’t figured it out, “fire truck” actually contains the word in question and I am not talking about “fire” or “truck” but it does end in “ck” and start with “f”

The paragraph translates into more standard English as:

The woman at the movies said the show was sold out, so we have to find something to do for a couple of hours. Let’s go to the McD’s for a burger while we eat. I’m starved.

I guess I can agree that they are only words, but I wonder that they don’t mean anything? What I am meaning is, what is the point of saying them if they don’t mean anything? If the point was to shock – say an offensive word too often and it stops having shock value. If the point was to mark yourself as an individual –  too many people use that word, you are one of the crowd.

So, perhaps it is to mark yourself as one of the crowd and someone who just wants to fit in. It is extra work to type as you can tell by the extra length to the paragraph and you could equate it to the illumination the monks added to the hand calligraphed books of bygone ages – except that it is the same design mouth punched into the sentences. It is more like dotting all the “i”s with hearts or sticking stars on the paper – they all look the same.

Getting back to it though… if, as was said, it doesn’t mean anything. If the swearing is so unimportant, then why can’t they “not swear” at certain times? I am meaning in respect to people for whom it might have meaning to?

If it is so unimportant that I should not complain about it – why is is so very important that it has to be done?

What you do say does mean something. It might not mean what you think. “Fire truck” no longer shocks, it no longer makes you look cool or trendy, it no longer really adds any emphasis. nearly any word used now doesn’t because nearly any word used becomes so quickly overused and abused.

In some places you “need” the Internet to keep up with what the current word is. You might as well fire trucking make up your own and even that won’t work long because it is fire trucking how you end up using it that marks it fire trucking out. Why not just use words and English to say what you want? Shakespeare did use foul language in his works, but he also created it and was creative about it. Tell someone they are a ray of dung shine and be dung with it!

Or at least her characters aren't allowed to. The BBC reports that the second printing of Dame Jacqueline Wilson's latest novel, My Sister Jodie, will be reprinted after the publisher, Random House, received three complaints and a message from ASDA supermarket mega-chain (which happens to be owned by WalMart,) that they will not sell editions of the book with the offending word. This is an issue