On The Blocking Of Cock Talk

The linguists, the swears, and who gets to say what where

Then there was Scaramucci’s suggestion that Bannon is “trying to suck [his] own cock” — apparently meaning that Bannon is egotistically putting his own interests ahead of the president’s. It’s one thing to call someone a cocksucker, quite another to accuse someone of committing autofellatio. I can’t say I’ve ever heard of this form of self-pleasure being equated with elevating oneself to the detriment of others, but that’s apparently how it works in Mooch-speak.

My favorite language blog of late is “Strong Language,” the one dedicated to bad words. I don’t know about you but I’m loving all these discussions about profanity, not because of the frisson of using dirty words freely in the wider media, but because of the absurd mundanity of parsing out the euphemisms and whether “blow job” is two words or one (TWO), and how in the world autofellatio could be reputation-burnishing. It is also fun to see how FCC rules are applied to allow this word but not that word (MSNBC printed “fucking” in a chyron but would not say it aloud). But how about that comma splice in The New Yorker’s now-famous Twitter card?

Mooch mouth: Scaramucci takes public profanity to a new level