Here are some of the things I’ve seen characterized as a shitshow (or a shit show) during the last 115 days: A Q-and-A session involving the ride-hailing company Uber The British Labour Party The B…

Shakespeare’s The Life of Timon of Athens is an overlooked gem in his corpus. Though less accomplished than many of his other tragedies, this moral drama is distinctive – and timely – in its focus …

New Zealand comedy duo Flight of the Conchords, consisting of Bret McKenzie and Jemaine Clement, had a two-season TV series in 2007–09 full of inspired parody and goofy adventures. The show’s langu…

The Greek philosopher Plato wrote, “Forms and rhythms in music are never altered without producing changes in the entire fabric of society.” He also said, “No evil can happen to a good man, either …

For the seventeenth year: Welcome to autumn, fuckheads.

Strong Language now has an account on Bluesky, @stronglang.bsky.social. Which means you can now get a skeet from Strong Language. Which, depending on what variety of English you use when you’re at …

When Stephen Sondheim was writing the lyrics for “Gee, Officer Krupke,” to be sung in the 1957 musical West Side Story, he was hoping to be the first person to use a serious four-letter obscenity…

OK, look at this f—ing s—. And this f—king sh—. And this f–cking sh–t. And how about this s—t? Really, who are the c—s, c—ts, or c–nts who do that? And, more importantly, why the —k don’t those —nt…

Sometime in the twentieth century, shit—having already long been a verb and then a noun—also became an adjective, as in He was a shit teacher or That restaurant has shit service. Exactly when this …

As much as the youthful Norman Mailer may have enjoyed inflating his self-image by inundating friend and foe with a superheated geyser of “fucks,” his favorite word wasn’t acceptable for the printe…

Abstract. Swearing involves the use of words interpreted as obscene, derogatory, or offensive, and so can have a significant societal impact in the digital

Four hundred years ago today, Shakespeare shuffled off this mortal coil. Across the globe, bardolators are observing the date – if not the whole month, nay, year – with various celebrations of his …

Strong Language aims to be free of AI-generated text and images. We want the site to remain the exclusive product of human effort and character – not becacked by something that anyone can toss off …

The Four Femmes on the Thames are a cabaret-style group who specialise in old-style jazz and swing music with a comedy twist. Their song ‘Woman Up’ was described by Holly Brockwell at Gadgette as t…

Strong Language aims to be free of AI-generated text and images. We want the site to remain the exclusive product of human effort and character – not becacked by something that anyone can toss off …

Puzzle editors choose solutions based on curated references and human judgment. But there’s more freedom in the guesses players can make.

Easter: It’s a fuckable feast. For its Christian observers, of course, Easter marks the salvific resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. A cornerstone of the faith, the holiday teems with symbo…

Here’s my presentation at the 2019 ACES conference in Providence on when and how to use “bad” English (not just swearwords but nonstandard grammar and other things some people look down on).

Warning: This is about profanity. Stop now if you don’t like swearing, because there will be a lot, and I am not going to use asterisks except once, in the next sentence. There is liberal use…

In Part 1 of “A Feline Profanity” I asked and answered a few questions about pussy, starting with: How offensive is it, anyway? Pretty fucking offensive when it’s a male epithet. But in other conte…

Pity the poor media-standards editor in this sweary era. One can only imagine, for example, the wringing of hands and gnawing of blue pencils last month when, at a mass rally, the short-fingered vu…

You may remember Jack Grieve’s swear maps of the USA. Now he has a nifty new web app called Word Mapper that lets anyone with an internet connection make use of the raw data behind those maps. Bein…

We spoke to Darren Blanchard, the man arrested while speaking out against data centers at a community meeting. He's sharing the bodycam footage of his arrest for the first time with 404 Media.