Effing avoidance (cont.)
The mail is in on
pronouncing
"unpronounceable" characters, and it appears that in addition to a
growing conventional use of the verbs
heart
(for the <heart> symbol, once pronounced like "love") and
bleep (for strings of punctuation
marks that stand for some nonspecific profanity), a convention is
spreading for the use of
eff
in reading things like "f*ck" and "f**k" and "f***", and in fact, for
replacing the word
fuck in
"polite" language, both in speech and in writing.
Eff has, of course, been
available for quite some time, along with other avoidance words (
frig,
fug,
freak, etc.) catalogued by Jesse
Sheidlower in
The F Word.
What's new is that many people seem to be unwilling to go all the way
to
fuck itself (as John
McWhorter proposes in
Doing Our Own
Thing, a suggestion that I'd endorse) and are instead settling
on
eff as the substitute of
choice.
In my e-mail, David Landfair (9/6/05) noted that he reads the second
word of the title "Totally F***ed Up" as "effed", but wouldn't read,
say, "s***y" as "essy". I certainly agree with him that
ess (or for that matter
esh) just won't do for "s***"
or "s**t" or "sh*t". Jesse Sheidlower himself (9/7/05) agreed on
"effed" in the Araki title, but introduced a subtlety: the title of
Araki's film is, in print, "Totally F***ed Up", with three asterisks in
it, and the titles of Johnson's books have "F*cking", with an asterisk,
in them; what about titles that have full frontal orthographic
obscenity, like the Arthur Neresian book titled "The Fuck-Up"?
Here, Sheidlower goes for the reading "fuck", honoring the author's
evident intentions.
Yet another subtlety from Jesse, who noted that when the
New York Times referred to Mark
Ravenhill's play "Shopping and Fucking" as "Shopping And..." (others
used "Shopping and F*cking" or printed Ravenhill's title unamended), he
read it, at least to himself, as "shopping and", reproducing the
Times's ellipsis dots as, well,
phonetic ellipsis. And he suggested that he'd probably realize
"#$*!" not as "bleep", but as a pause, as in "what the [pause] do we
know" for "What the #$*! Do We Know?!" I don't know how popular
the pausing strategy is for rendering these conventions of print, but
someone could study it.
The "eff" strategy, which also deserves study, was taken by the
Palo Alto Daily News on 2/7/04,
when it reprinted Jan Freeman's
Boston
Globe "The Word" column of 1/25/04 about taboo-avoidance
strategies (reported on by Mark Liberman
here
on Language Log that very day) under the headline "Ban cuss words?
Effing unlikely". The
Globe
itself, no eff-up, chose the head "The eff factor".
Meanwhile, Lauren Squires (9/6/05) wrote to say that in
her blog she has several
times questioned the contention the asterisks, <heart>, etc. are
unpronounceable, and notes that these entries contain some interesting
comments by readers. Check the entries for 11/5/04, 1/26/05,
5/30/05, and 8/24/05.
And Alison Blank (9/6/05) reported on other names that present
pronunciation difficulties:
there is a band that goes simply by the
name "!!!". As explained by
Jesse Ashlock,
"the name is subject to myriad pronunciations, as the utterance of any
repetitive sound in triplicate (for example, "Chik Chik Chik" or "Pow
Pow Pow" -- or "Prince Prince Prince," if you like) is considered
acceptable." In practice, the pronunciation of the name is not as
unrestricted as this implies; "Chik Chik Chik" is definitely the
accepted title here, although, for all I know, at Stanford "Pow Pow
Pow" may very well be more common. As with phrasal names, this
seems to be another instance of band names helping to introduce new
conventions into English.
Finally, Lissa Krawczyk (9/7/05) noted that the avoidance characters
almost always replace a vowel letter (or, I amend, a string of letters
including a vowel letter) and goes out on an interpretive limb to
speculate that "immorality or general uncouth behaviour" is "associated
with the open mouth". Ingenious, but a sufficient explanation for
this fact comes from schemes for telegraphic writing in English -- "f u
cn rd ths u cn gt a gd jb" -- which eliminate most vowel letters, on
the grounds that enough information remains in the consonant letters to
allow readers to reconstruct the original. Same with taboo
avoidance: enough needs to be left to allow readers to home in on the
word the writer intended, but vowel letters are generally dispensable.
Well, not exactly finally. I just wanted to point out that
unpronounceable is a hard word to
spell; not all of my correspondents managed it, and I fairly often fall
into error myself. Some raw figures from a Google web search:
unpronouncable: 34,300
unpronoucable: 1,160
unpronouceable: 576
unprouncable: 509
unprounceable: 488 [I incline to this one]
unpronunceable: 214
unpronuncable: 179
unpronucable: 11
unpronuceable: 6
And I can't tell you how hard it was to type that table.
zwicky at-sign csli period stanford period edu
Posted by Arnold Zwicky at September 13, 2005 01:46 PM