Archive for Maledicta
For a long time, I’ve been intermittently collecting fortune-cookie fortunes that I find entertaining with phrases like in bed or between the sheets added. The other day, Kam came up with a new-to-us variation: adding between the sheets after lines of dialogue in Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes. I didn’t write down any examples […]
What a disaster.
When I was a kid, I occasionally listened to my father’s LP of Oscar Brand’s Bawdy Songs and Backroom Ballads. One of the songs on the album was “Sam Hall,” which included this line: You’re a bunch of muckers all, damn your eyes. At some point, I asked my father what muckers meant, and he […]
According to Wiktionary, lalochezia is “The use of vulgar or foul language to relieve stress or pain.” Other definitions that I’m seeing online focus on the idea of getting emotional relief from swearing, but I think in the context where I first encountered the word, it was related to experiments that suggest that swearing can […]
The brouhaha over a Michigan state Representative being banned from speaking on the House floor after saying the word “vagina” has led to, among other outcomes, a spate of articles...
Today's xkcd comic strip shows a graph of frequency of usage, for a variety of adjectives, of the intensifiers “fucking” and “as shit.” It's a cute graph, and some of...
Kendra tells me that a piece of graffiti found on a wall in Pompeii translates to “Everybody writes on walls except me.” Which led me to search for other ancient...
I turned on the radio during Talk of the Nation's Science Friday yesterday, in the middle of a segment about natural gas in water. At one point (starting at 13:52...
Cursebird provides "a real-time feed of people swearing on Twitter." It even shows a seven-day overview bar graph of the relative frequency of various common swear words....
Recently happened across the Wikipedia article on Spanish profanity. The little I've read of it so far seems to be useful and interesting. See also the articles on Portuguese profanity,...