Writes John McWhorter, in "The Trump Administration’s Coarseness Is a Sign That English Has Grown Up" (NYT).
Did he just call the New York Times immature?
January 8, 2026
"For those unfamiliar with the acronym, the first letter stands for a certain curse word, followed by 'around and find out.'"
"It amounts to something like 'Don’t mess with me or you’ll regret it.' The implication, in this context, is that Nicolás Maduro unwisely did the former and now must do the latter.... Superficially, it may seem jarring that people entrusted to run our nation, suit-wearing people who take themselves very seriously, would throw around a term like this. But I actually think it’s a positive development. The normalization of that word — the one Hegseth abbreviated as 'eff' — is a sign of maturity in American English...."
Writes John McWhorter, in "The Trump Administration’s Coarseness Is a Sign That English Has Grown Up" (NYT).
Writes John McWhorter, in "The Trump Administration’s Coarseness Is a Sign That English Has Grown Up" (NYT).
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57 comments:
Hmm...it must be related to that new Buc-ees billboard I saw: Buc around! Find out!
I was told in my formative years that coarse language is a sign of immaturity.
Well, to be fair, according to that prissy, snooty old fool, Everybody is immature.
Using the word "Fuck" is neither "Mature" nor "Childish". Its a curse word. The sort of thing that comes out when you're angry or hit your thumb with a hammer.
Using it in a most professional settings is still verboten. Does anyone want the POTUS in a state of union to start talking about "the Fucking budget" or "We're gonna tell China, don't fuck with us"?
Normalizing it, hasn't made anything better. But maybe if it gets used more, people wont laugh in the theater everytime some little kid or old grannie says "Fuck".
But RCOCEAN..."It's a big fucking deal!!"
I'd rather be talked to dirty than lied to politely. And I'm not just talking about sex.
I always thought it meant Fool Around with Fun Ointments, and that's why that cartoon with Maduro and P.Ditty made sense to me.
"Let's fool around and find out" is my go to pickup line.
The first letter could just as well stand for 'Fornicate' so McWhorter is simply assuming that somebody using the phrase "FAFO" is thinking of the curse word, and even then he's not describing someone actually saying "Fuck". He even points out Hegseth didn't. How about discussing ]people who are actually using that word (or variations) in official discourse, or would that not align with his narrative that it's the Trump Administration that's coarse?
Mayor Frey's "ICE, get the fuck out of Minneapolis" was way more gratuitous because the "fuck" didn't modify the clause, it was meant purely for hipster badass emphasis.
When I first moved to Ireland I was taken aback by how commonly used the word is, and not just in pubs. I'd be meeting with the partners at a prestigious law firm and they would throw the word around without raising an eyebrow. It took me years after moving back to the USA to stop speaking like that myself all the time. I haven't fully succeeded...
No. Nope. NuUnh. That isn’t what it means. It means do something stupid and face the consequences. It doesn’t particularly mean mess with me and face the consequences.
Stick your hand in the fire you are going to get burned. Stay out after curfew get put on restriction. This is how we grew up.
It seems we have generations that didn’t learn this. But yes, it might be stupid to piss off the leader of the free world.
It isn’t a matter of courseness, it’s a recognition that actions have consequences.
"I was told in my formative years that coarse language is a sign of immaturity."
Apparently, most or all societies have curse words, and they are used in similar situations, with similar effect on listeners. That is, cursing is human physiology, like punching or spitting.
It does seem that obscenity is often used out of laziness. It is easier to call someone a motherfucking piece of shit, than to find the appropriate words to describe exactly what you find objectionable about him.
It depends on the pitch and volume . A soft-spoken "fuck" in solidarity is vastly different from one that is shouted in rage. What are you trying to express? Frustration, excitement or are you trying to inflict hurt? My yoga teacher uses the word sometimes, makes me chuckle.
Jupiter: "obscenity is often used out of laziness."
Yes, but there is a small sliver of truly ingenious obscenity users. The DI in Full Metal Jacket. Christopher Hitchens (he and his fellow Oxbridge journos would amuse themselves for hours adding curse words to classic literature titles - I am too lazy to drag out his book and find the passage, but it was along the lines of Far From The Fucking Crowd or Wuthering Fucks). Whoever wrote The Aristocrats. CC, JSM
Good lord, as if conservatives are more responsible for the coarsening of language.
Old/slow: "When I first moved to Ireland I was taken aback by how commonly used the word is, and not just in pubs."
About 20 years ago, Bono got in a spot of bother when he reflexively exclaimed "Fucking brilliant!" at the Golden Globes. CC, JSM
Tim Walz, for example. What exactly do I find objectionable about Tim Walz? His political views and actions, obviously, and his association with Kamala Harris. But I think when I really started to hate the guy, was when I saw video of him kind of skipping onto a stage at some rally, while waving his hands in the air. If he had not been trying to trade on his military experience it might not have been quite so infuriating. But the closest I can come is "poofter", which really doesn't do justice to his abject insufficiency. But neither does "motherfucking piece of shit".
Sigh.
California is the antithesis of fafo. People shoplift with impunity. Break into cars. Poop on the sidewalk. And it appears…defraud the taxpayers. California protects people from the “find out” portion of the equation.
I don’t care if it’s course - I just like attitude.
Lately, cable-news people seem to get off on slipping minor obscenities (mostly 'shit') into pre-watershed live shows. Both sides do it - almost a daily occurrence on Morning Joe, but also frequent on The Five. CC, JSM
Jupiter: for Walz, how about "prancing poncy stolen valor paedo?" CC, JSM
It occurs to me, that it was a lot easier when there were things you could call a guy that meant he had to challenge you to a duel.
Speaking of Fuck. Someone gave me a DVD of fucking David Cross doing one of his Goddamn Comedy concert. I'd heard him on a podcast and he seemed fucking funny and not some ol shitty 2nd rater. So, he's not an asshole, so I gave the Fucking DVD a fucking watch.
And then I got through 10 fucking minutes, and put it in the shitter. I hate it when unfunny cunts and twerppy little shits curse their fucking comedy acts with curse words every Goddamn 3rd word.
Its gets Goddamn Repetitive and fucking boring. Y'know what i fucking mean?
Reading my above comment, i see that I didn't use enough Motherfuckers, assholes, cunts, and shits. Apologies to Mr. Cross.
"prancing poncy stolen valor paedo?"
Well, the "prancing" gets at a piece of it. But nowadays, that kind of language sounds like you are accusing him of homosexuality. Back in the duelling days, that accusation had its uses, but at this point it smacks of a small-minded insistence on vanishing distinctions. Hell, I've played in bands with homosexuals. We got drunk and snorted coke together. Who the Hell am I to call someone a faggot?
Prancing is neutral. Paedo is not homosexuality or heterosexuality. Ponce is a generic anti-gay slur, true. But I thought that's where you were headed with Poofter.
Maybe get one of your gay bandmates to call Walz anti-gay slurs? CC, JSM
I wonder if British sailors crack up when they sail to Puerto Rico and see "Ponce" on their charts? CC, JSM
My summer job in my last two years in high school was with a construction crew. Those guys said "fuck" about every other sentence and I of course picked up its use, although with a bit less frequency. But, all day long. Going home and sitting down to dinner an hour off the job, with my mom at the table, was treacherous. I was careful and managed to never screw up but there were close calls. It would have been ugly with Ma; the old man would have laughed his ass off, I'm sure.
I, like most people, I believe, used the word now and then over my lifetime. It is a very useful word, in fact. I hate people's forced, gratuitous use of it to show their "hipness," and that as we all know has become increasingly common. But, on the contrary, I have come to find that some new acquaintance's unemphatically saying "fuck" by happenstance is maybe the quickest indicator to me that he's going to be OK and that we can probably relate.
"Fuck" is a bad word that has power because of the dark side of human sexuality. Historically, sex outside of love and marriage often resulted in rape and/or infanticide. So while a lot of people will drop an F bomb, (including me), it's a good idea to reflect on why it's a bad word. 21st century concepts like "consent" and "birth control" are ways of avoiding the dark subjects of rape and infanticide.
I would urge our authorities to recognize the importance of emergency contraception for victims of rape. The right to contraception is still protected by Griswold v. Connecticut. Emergency contraception is a godsend for rape victims.
Contrary to what many newspapers will tell you, we do have rules in regard to when human begins die. "Total brain death" is the standard in all 50 states. To have doctors kill babies is a fucking disgrace. Infanticide should be off the table, except in a life-or-death situation like a tubal pregnancy. We don't need a billion dollar abortion industry in the business of killing unwanted children.
St Croix: if total brain death is the standard, then a human who has not developed a brain yet (very early stage pregnancy) is not alive? Not saying I agree or disagree - just trying to understand. CC, JSM
McWhorter has taught me, and can teach you, an enormous amount of historical linguistics, phonology, comparative linguistics and sociolinguistics. Check out his books and Great Courses. He is informative and judicious on many other subjects as well.
Sadly, he will ultimately vote Democrat just about every time. Nobody is perfect.
Whenever I took a Spanish class (and I always seem to be taking a Spanish class, I am up to 204 days on my duolingo), I would buy a Spanish-English dictionary. And of course I would always look up the bad words. Sometimes you can find them, sometimes you can't. I know how to insult your mother in Spanish.
Google Gemini says
"Based on a large-scale analysis of online English-language text, the United States has the highest frequency of using the word "fuck", followed by the United Kingdom, and then Australia.
Research that analyzed 1.7 billion words of online text from 20 English-speaking countries found the following general frequencies of vulgar language (as a percentage of all words):
United States: 0.036% (Americans use the f-word and profanity in general more frequently online than other nations).
Great Britain: 0.025%.
Australia: 0.022% (Australians are thought to use profanity more in face-to-face interactions and are known for more creative variations in spelling).
Singapore: 0.021%.
Ireland: 0.019%.
Canada: 0.017%.
India: 0.010%. "
coarse language is a sign of immaturity.
When you become more spiritual, the bad words kind of float away from you. Shitting and fucking are definitely earthy.
Shitting and fucking is animal behavior. Much of humanity tries to prove to ourselves that we are better than apes. That's why shitting and fucking are humbling. They remind us that we have much in common with animals. We are animals with souls.
The birth of Jesus in a stable was an act of humility for God.
>United States: 0.036% (Americans use the f-word and profanity in general more frequently online than other nations).
Great Britain: 0.025%.
Australia: 0.022% (Aus...etc...<
And then there's the Marine Corps...
FAFO = Speak softly and carry a big stick.
St Croix: if total brain death is the standard, then a human who has not developed a brain yet (very early stage pregnancy) is not alive? Not saying I agree or disagree - just trying to understand.
It's alive, for sure, but aborting an early embryo would not qualify as a homicide under our death statutes. I think very early embryos ought to be protected. Our death statutes might be wrong. We want to teach people to revere and love our children, not kill them. Doctors are in the business of curing illnesses and diseases, not doing surgeries on healthy patients for money.
I think our abortion laws ought to be overprotective, not underprotective. But to me it is well worth our time to focus on our definitions of human death and apply those understandings to the abortion controversy. I've had it up here with "educated" people saying they don't know when babies die, and it's a gray area, and blah blah blah. They don't know what a person is, they don't know what a woman is. They pretend to be humble but really they are faking it, to mask their indifference and callousness.
I think the federal courts ought to recognize the humanity of unborn children and ask states to bring their death statutes, homicide laws, and abortion rules into alignment. That's what equal protection requires. The Constitution doesn't say when life begins, or when people die. It just says that you can't take a class of human beings and dehumanize them and kick them outside the protections of the criminal laws.
States can and should require affirmative action for babies.
St Croix: "The birth of Jesus in a stable was an act of humility for God."
Yes. And there is a little bit of toilet and sex humor in the Gospels. Toilet: "What goes into a man passes out of him into the sewer." Sex: All the bride/bridegroom metaphors. To 1st century Jews, a betrothal was waving the checkered flag for legal sex; the bridegroom's "joy" was definitely physical. CC, JSM
" Ponce is a generic anti-gay slur, true. "
Hmmmm.. I thought a ponce was a pimp.
Various online sources agree. For what that's worth.
"Fuck" comes from a German root meaning to strike. SO the hostility is there right from the beginning.
St Croix: "it is well worth our time to focus on our definitions of human death and apply those understandings to the abortion controversy."
That is a cool idea. Definitely not the logic of Roe, and I don't think it's the logic of Dobbs, either.
It may only last a few years, until we have artificial wombs where we can plant an embryo that we just took out of a woman. Then maybe we could outlaw nearly all abortions and replace them with transplantations, documented with renunciation of parental rights and relief of parental responsibilities.
Of course, someone will find a "right not to have descendants" in a penumbra somewhere. But that will be news to millions of men.
Speaking of, I have a bone to pick with another of your statements:
"you can't take a class of human beings and dehumanize them and kick them outside the protections of the criminal laws."
We did it with 18-yo men in all the wars. Sorry, laddie, it's your turn to die. You didn't do anything wrong - you're just in the class of human beings we assigned this task to. I have previously said that analogizing to the draft could have given Roe a firmer foundation. CC, JSM
Surveys focus on online communication. Has anybody examined whether American really do swear more often in real life than Britons, Australians or Irish folk? And researchers may not be able to tell when Scots are swearing.
Similar surveys done in the US identify Maryland as the most foul-mouthed state, followed by Louisiana, Georgia, Virginia, and Ohio. Least foul-mouthed -- the Dakotas and Vermont. Minnesota too, though that may be changing.
McWhorter still suffering from TDS?
Mcwhorter has proved himself unserious on most things
Leave the Big Boys alone and learn your role in this new world order, ann. No c's allowed. You're a baby maker. Nobody wants to hear from you or you silly liberal twat paper.
You asked for this, you got it. Be submissive to meade and go back to the kitchen and bake some cookies for your grandchildren now. Let the Big Men with the big guns take care of things.
How many push-ups can't you do? Know your role, single mom of the queer boyz. Vulgar is in. You're not, hun. You're an old hole. Nttawwt. Hth.
The intellectual class is the first to be eaten, and not in a good wat, dearie.
FAFO is fighting words based on the superiority of the American Armed Forces.
It would be more mature to stop the pretense of being Holy People who fear the crime of using vulgar words. On the cable shows they still BEEP out all suspected bad words bad words until you lose understanding and the shows often sound like emergency alarms.
About 50 years ago, the Playboy Interview featured Paul Newman who revealed that a common late night conversation among cast and crew at remote locations involved an effort to catalogue all the different kinds of fucking - "trophy fucking", "revenge fucking", "mercy fucking", "mother/daughter fucking"... A project impossible to complete.
From a linguistic angle, "fuck" has far more meanings than even "Aloha" or "bitte".
DSNWBN has its uses but they are few.
Call it “Fool around and find out” if your sensibilities are offended.
The rudeness of swear words is using them without the other guy's permission and sanction. The reason that's rude is that it presumes an association that has not been granted, a social relationship assumed but not yet developed.
Barrack Obama did not scratch his nose in the debate because it itched. It was just an excuse to use his middle finger.
Princess Diana was recorded talking to one of her lovers about "my husband's fucking family." (the Squidgy tape) She found out the recording was out there, but it didn't become public for several years. If she weren't already nutty and paranoid, things like that would have made her so.
It started out as a perfectly innocent Anglo-Saxon word, used in place of the more effeminate-sounding French term favored by the elites. Somehow the eff word gradually became an all-purpose amplifier: if you disliked somebody, you would call him a bastard -- but if you really really disliked him, he became an effing bastard. The problem now is that it is used too much; when every other word in a sentence is
the eff word, it loses its power to startle, and becomes merely an annoyance to the listener.
In the early 1970's John Dean (Watergate) went on a speaking tour to help pay off his legal bills. I saw him speak at the college I was attending. He was interesting and, in pre-Internet times, still had information to share that was not well-known. In the Q & A, a young woman asked about the language heard in the Watergate tapes and why it was so harsh. He replied with a patronizing lecture that is was how grown-up men speak in meetings of various kinds. She listened respectfully but then replied that swearing was nothing new and not what she was talking about. She wanted to know why, with all the English language available, the men (remember it was the early 70's) in those meeting chose the words most aligned with violence and wondered if they deliberately did so and why. Dean flubbed the answer and lost his momentum. Gave the young woman a lot of credit.
The top hole, front hole, or back... black hole... whore h/t NAACP juvenile rhetoric at the intersection of racism and sexism under the Diversity umbrella is a fetus... feature of liberal license in grooming... transition is a clear and progressive 'burden" h/t Obama... uh, burden of class-disordered ideologies and Levine's Dreams of Herr Mengele. Applying Cecile's scalpel suggests that this is just Democrazis Now.
The “f” word is used less in Britain because they have their own synonym: sod or sodding. Short for sodomy, of course.
When we only had Nixon WH tape transcripts, my mother was offended by all the expletive deleteds. And she was married to a sailor!
I once thought "sod the bastards" meant burying them under grass.
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