Fun, end of day read: the saga of Hendrix, a blue-and-gold macaw with a real gift for strong language.
“One day he will call you baby and the next day he’s calling you a...hmm. MFer I guess is the politest way to type it out.”

Fun, end of day read: the saga of Hendrix, a blue-and-gold macaw with a real gift for strong language.
“One day he will call you baby and the next day he’s calling you a...hmm. MFer I guess is the politest way to type it out.”
Need more profanity in your Friday? @Fritinancy has compiled a bunch of swearing-related links on the Strong Language blog:
https://stronglang.wordpress.com/2025/06/12/sweary-links-27/
Cursing robots, Romans, racers, and more. @Fritinancy has a new batch of sweary links on the Strong Language blog:
https://stronglang.wordpress.com/2025/06/12/sweary-links-27/
"You can’t join if you can’t swear." New post at @stronglang on swearing as a childhood rite of passage in wartime London:
https://stronglang.wordpress.com/2025/05/29/swearing-as-a-rite-of-passage/
Swearing as a rite of passage. A new post by @stancarey:
https://stronglang.wordpress.com/2025/05/29/swearing-as-a-rite-of-passage/
**Vulgarity in online discourse around the English-speaking world**
“_Australians might well be disheartened when they discover that they are not the top users of profanity among English-speaking countries. Their deep national attachment to the vernacular dates back to the original mix of slang, dialect and underworld jargon that gave rise to Australian English — fueled by anti-authoritarian sentiment, the colloquial part of the language expanded to become the feature that best distinguished the established citizen (or old chum) from the stranger (or new chum).”
Schweinberger, M. and Burridge, K. (2025) 'Vulgarity in online discourse around the English-speaking world,' Lingua, 321, p. 103946. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2025.103946.
#OpenAccess #OA #Article #DOI #Linguistics #Swearing #Vulgarity #StrongLanguage #English #Language #Academia #Academics @linguistics
Serving Kant: @Wordorigins on Miriana Conte's "clearly intentional" – and risquée – pun at #Eurovision, in a new post on the Strong Language blog:
https://stronglang.wordpress.com/2025/05/23/serving-kant/
**Linguistics expert explains why the c-word 'still has the ability to shock'**
_“The sounds are blunt, there are only four sounds in it, it's a very short sharp word. It's normally delivered with quite a lot of emphasis that it's being used as a profanity and for that reason, that still has the ability to shock.”_
#English #StrongLanguage #Words #Language #Linguistics @linguistics
"How did smut get so dirty? Simple: It was never clean." But did you know that its filth was originally botanical?
New on the Strong Language blog, @Fritinancy pays tribute to smut and the Tom Lehrer song of that title, now 60 years old: https://stronglang.wordpress.com/2025/04/09/smut/
Nancy Friedman has an enlightening and safe-for-work discussion of "smut" over on the Strong Language blog
On the 60th anniversary of Tom Lehrer’s song "Smut", @Fritinancy offers a salute to Lehrer and to "a four-letter word that wasn't quite one of *those* four-letter words".
On the Strong Language blog:
https://stronglang.wordpress.com/2025/04/09/smut/
Why we swear like a trooper, trucker, sailor, fishwife.
Updated my @stronglang post with notes from Ashley Montagu's 1967 book The Anatomy of Swearing:
https://stronglang.wordpress.com/2022/12/11/trooper-trucker-sailor-fishwife-what-we-swear-like-when-we-swear-like-a-something/
"There is something intuitively palliative about end-of-life profanity."
John Kelly on sweary first and last words in @MichaelErard's new book, "Bye Bye I Love You"
https://stronglang.wordpress.com/2025/02/21/swearing-first-words-last-words-michael-erard-bye-bye-i-love-you/
"What is interesting is which non-anglophone countries tend to use English terms and which use their native tongues."
@Wordorigins on Pornhub's top search terms of 2024. New on the Strong Language blog:
https://stronglang.wordpress.com/2025/02/01/pornhubs-woty/
"Is porn a universal language, a lingua franca that unites rather than divides?" @Wordorigins reports on Pornhub's top search terms of 2024, in a new post on the Strong Language blog:
For more on the r-word's fraught history and usage, see @IvaCheung's 2015 post for Strong Language:
https://stronglang.wordpress.com/2015/01/05/retarded-progress/
A 2024 review with a difference: @bgzimmer presents our 10th Annual Tucker Awards for Excellence in Swearing!
https://stronglang.wordpress.com/2024/12/31/the-10th-annual-tucker-awards-for-excellence-in-swearing/
Happy fucking new year! 2024 was a shitshow. See it off with our 10th Annual Tucker Awards for Excellence in Swearing, by @bgzimmer
"The F-Word" by @jessesheidlower was published this month in its 4th edition. On the Strong Language blog we have:
1. an excerpt, courtesy of @Fritinancy: https://stronglang.wordpress.com/2024/11/05/to-fuck-with-an-excerpt-from-the-f-word-fourth-edition/
2. an interview with Sheidlower by @Fritinancy: https://stronglang.wordpress.com/2024/11/05/jesse-sheidlower-answers-our-questions-about-the-f-word/
3. a review of the book, by @Wordorigins: https://stronglang.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/review-jesse-sheidlowers-the-f-word-4th-edition/
Get your fuck on!