Gretchen McCulloch’s previous work for The Toast can be found here.
Sometimes people tell me, as a linguist, that they’re surprised I swear so much. They think linguists must have a mystic access to the higher realms of the language and that we oughtn’t to sully ourselves with anything as profane as swearing.
But what makes swearing so profane is social factors, not linguistic ones, because linguistically, swear words are fucking fascinating. In fact, it’s a professional advantage for me to be fluent at swearing, because I have better access to my linguistic intuitions about them, which makes them easier to study.
I swear, I curse for entirely academic reasons. At least, this is what I tell my father. I’m not sure if he believes me.
I’m going to concentrate on fuck, because it’s the most interesting, and also because there’s been enough research on it to more than fill an article. I could tell you origin stories about medieval monk cyphers and outlandish acronyms, and some of them (the monks) might even be true, but there are already several nice explanations of this side of the topic, so I’ll just point you here as a good start, and get on with the hardcore linguistics instead.
The seminal linguistics article about fuck is called “English sentences without overt grammatical subject” and was written by the suspiciously-named Quang Phuc Dong in the 1960s (we’ll come back to that). The article asks us, is fuck really a verb? That is, the command “close the door” is a classic transitive verb followed by its object, but is “fuck you” the same?
It seems like it could be, until you realize that the equivalent sentence with any other verb just isn’t a thing: there’s no such thing s “*admire you” or “*express you”. You can, of course, say the command “admire yourself” or “express yourself”, but now “*fuck yourself” is the weird one. (We’ll set “go fuck yourself” aside.)
(Note that I will be employing throughout the linguistic convention of marking weird-sounding, aka ungrammatical, sentences with an asterisk. If you like, you may consider them all the natural evolution of doge. Also, for the record, please assume that all innuendoes in this piece are entirely deliberate.)
Furthermore, as Quang points out, an ordinary command can occur in a whole list of expanded sentences, like the following:
I said to close the door.
Don’t close the door.
Do close the door.
Please close the door.
Close the door, won’t you?
Go close the door.
Close the door or I’ll take away your teddy bear.
Close the door and I’ll give you a dollar.
And yet none of these sentences sound okay with “‘fuck you” as our verb+object:
*I said to fuck you.
*Don’t fuck you.
*Do fuck you.
*Please fuck you.
*Fuck you, won’t you?
*Go fuck you.
*Fuck you or I’ll take away your teddy bear.
*Fuck you and I’ll give you a dollar.
And that’s not all. One of the things that linguists have noticed is that if you want to combine two things with “and”, they have to be the same part of speech: two nouns, two verbs, etc. So it’s fine to say:
Wash the dishes and sweep the floor. (2 verbs+objects)
Wash the dishes and the floor. (2 nouns)
Clean and press these pants. (2 verbs, same object)
But when it comes to fuck, things get, well, fucked up:
*Wash the dishes and fuck you.
*Fuck you and sweep the floor.
*Describe and fuck communism. (Remember, this was written in the sixties.)
But wait! Quang has astutely noticed that if you replace “you” with “Lyndon Johnson” (or really any name, but again, this was the sixties), suddenly all those sentences that were bad with “fuck you” sound okay again.
I said to fuck Lyndon Johnson.
Don’t fuck Lyndon Johnson.
Do fuck Lyndon Johnson.
Please fuck Lyndon Johnson.
Fuck Lyndon Johnson, won’t you?
Go fuck Lyndon Johnson.
Fuck Lyndon Johnson or I’ll take away your teddy bear.
Fuck Lyndon Johnson and I’ll give you a dollar.
Fuck Lyndon Johnson and wash the dishes.
What gives? In fact, if you look at the meanings of these two sets of sentences more closely, we can see that there are two possible meanings of fuck. Quang calls them fuck(1) and fuck(2), but that’s rather dull and hard to keep track of, so I’m going to call them copulating fuck and disapproving fuck.
Now, by itself, “fuck Lyndon Johnson” can have either the copulating or the disapproving meaning, but as soon as we add any of this other material, only the copulating meaning remains: “don’t fuck Lyndon Johnson” can only be interpreted as meaning don’t engage in sexual relations with LBJ, and not as “I don’t disapprove of Lyndon Johnson”.
So copulating fuck is, in fact, a verb. Despite its rather more interesting meaning, syntactically it’s a humdrum, ordinary transitive verb just like close and wash and all the others. And you can do with copulating fuck all the same things that you can do with any verb; we saw some of those things in the examples above, but here’s a few more of them:
Fuck Lyndon Johnson tomorrow afternoon.
Fuck Lyndon Johnson on the sofa.
Fuck Lyndon Johnson carefully.
But disapproving fuck, the one that pretty much only exists to be a swear word, that one’s just…not a verb. Not really, by any normal way that we recognize verbs, because you can’t do with disapproving fuck any of the normal verby things. Some of these normal verby things we already saw “fuck you” utterly fail at above, but they also include getting more specific about time, location or manner, like we just did with LBJ. That is, it’s fine to say “fuck those irregular verbs” or “fuck communism”, but not:
*Fuck those irregular verbs tomorrow afternoon.
*Fuck communism on the sofa.
*Fuck you carefully.
(Things linguists in the sixties liked, evidently: teddy bears. Things linguists in the sixties disliked, evidently: communism, irregular verbs. Things linguists in the sixties disliked but were sexually attracted to, maybe: Lyndon Johnson??)
Anyway, the really nifty thing about realizing this is that it works for other swear words too.
Damn those irregular verbs.
*Damn those irregular verbs tomorrow.
Shit on Lyndon Johnson.
*Shit on Lyndon Johnson on the sofa. (Well, it’s okay with the literal meaning, but we’ve already established that’s not the most interesting one.)
To hell with communism.
*To hell with communism carefully.
And this may leave you wondering, as it did Quang, if we’ve at least figured out that fuck and other swears can have objects, kind of, even if they’re not really verbs, what about their subjects? Do they even have them?
If you’ve read any vaguely-medieval literature of the “Gazounds! = God’s wounds” and “Gazooks = God’s hooks” type, you might have assumed that the subject was God, just hanging out there invisibly, as celestial beings are wont to do. But is this actually the case? And how could we figure out whether or not we’re in the presence of the divine?
Fortunately, we’re linguists, not theologians, so we have an easy test. We know that if the subject and object are the same, then the object needs to be a reflexive: we don’t say LBJ fucks LBJ, we say LBJ fucks himself. So if we make the object also God, then if the subject is God, we expect that we’ll need to use a reflexive as the object. And that just doesn’t happen.
Damn God.
*Damn Himself.
(I will take the liberty of adding to Quang’s scholarship that the results stay the same if we do not assume that God is male: “*damn Herself” and “*damn Themself” are equally ungrammatical.)
And it works the same for the other swears:
Fuck God.
*Fuck Himself.
To hell with God.
*To hell with Herself.
In fact, we can even say:
Goddamn God.
*Goddam Themself.
And this is where we leave the original magnum opus of Quang Phuc Dong, which circulated in the 1960s, unpublished, in photocopies of photocopies passed from one grad student to another, along with a few other, similarly scandalous papers. But the true identity of this eminent scholar of the fictitious South Hanoi Institute of Technology (SHIT) didn’t remain a secret for long. And a few years later, once he was less subject to the vicissitudes of the job market (one assumes), the friends of the late James D. McCawley (pictured) actually organized the publication in 1971 of an entire book of articles in the sorely-neglected fields of pornolinguistics and scatolinguistics that McCawley, alias Quang, had founded, including the original unpublished articles that he’d written as Quang. And then they gave it to him as a birthday present. Adorable.
***
I had known about “English sentences without overt grammatical subject” for a quite a while, since it’s available online in several places, but when I found out a few months ago that there was an entire book of similar articles, I immediately knew that I would have to get my hands on it. I couldn’t find it in my usual sources, but a ling-friend at another university managed to get out a copy from the university library (both friend and university shall remain nameless to protect my friend’s reputation as a srs rsrchr). And when we finally found ourselves in the same city, we sat down with The Book, a third ling-friend, and a good drink to exult over our treasure. It was worth the wait.
It has a deceptively innocent name, Studies Out in Left Field, and an equally deceptively prosaic cover of the dull, greenish-grey textured stuff found in academic libraries all over. Inside, it’s sometimes hilarious, sometimes arcane, sometimes downright disturbing, and contains about as many misses as hits, complete with a dose of sixties-era racial and sexual politics that you may have already noticed in the faux-Asian innuendo pseudonyms. (I’ve taken the liberty of slightly modifying some of the example sentences for the sake of the current readership, but unfortunately “English sentences without overt grammatical subject” continues to be cited as the work of Quang, P.D.)
But even though it misses sometimes, there are plenty of hits amid its 200 pages. I’d be in violation of copyright—and perhaps decency—laws to reproduce them all (if you happen to have access to an academic library, though…), but here’s a smattering of highlights that continue to address the question we started with: what parts of speech do English swear words belong to?
In a reply to Quang’s original paper, a group of students writing under the collective name of U Pani Shad note that not only are fuck and so on not standard verbs, but fucking and the like are also not standard adjectives. For example, you can say:
That’s too fucking bad.
That’s no damn good.
That’s too goddam much.
That’s no bloody use.
But it doesn’t work to substitute the swear words with normal parts of speech, whether degree words like very or really, or adjectives like blue or happy.
*That’s too very bad.
*That’s no really good.
*That’s too blue much.
*That’s no happy use.
Another paper, attributed to Tina Bopp, notes a further problem with considering fucking as an adjective. Both fucking and any standard adjective formed from a verb, such as playing, can be used both before a noun, as we see below:
Turn off that playing radio.
Turn off that fucking radio.
But playing or play can also be found in a relative clause:
Turn off that radio which is playing.
Turn off that radio which plays.
What the radio did was play.
What the radio was was playing.
And fucking and fuck just don’t work in the same context:
*Turn off that radio which is fucking.
*Turn off that radio which fuck. (which fucks?)
*What the radio did was fuck.
*What the radio was was fucking.
Similarly, Bopp points out, you might think that fucking well is an adverb, like quietly:
John quietly picked the lock.
You fucking well took your time.
But it turns out that fucking well can’t do the things that normal adverbs do. For example,
Quietly, John picked the lock.
*Fucking well, you took your time.
And the same goes for similar profane expressions, like bloody well:
John left quickly, and Fred did so quietly.
*John fucking well paid up and you’d better do so bloody well.
At this point, you’re probably expecting some funny business when we ask ourselves whether swear words can be nouns. But it turns out that at least fuck and shit make quite unremarkable nouns. Here’s a slight elaboration on Bopp’s examples, showing that fuck and shit work just fine in contexts where you’d put man.
John is a man.
That stupid man tried to sell me insurance.
John is a shit.
That stupid fuck tried to sell me insurance.
Both Shad and Bopp also briefly mention the uniqueness of swear words among English words in their ability to be used as infixes, as in fan-fucking-tastic or un-fucking-believable. However, this phenomenon, known as expletive infixation, is a topic that’s actually been discussed in legit academic papers, so it’s altogether too high-brow for our purposes. (That, and there’s already a lovely cartoon explanation of the aforementioned legit academic paper, which you should definitely check out.)
So although the various authors aren’t particularly aiming for a consensus, quite a few of them end up noting that our current inventory of parts of speech is just inadequate to deal with swear words. McCawley, alias Quang, proposes a category of quasi-verbs, which Bopp expands to quasi-adjectives and quasi-adverbs, while Shad goes as far as proposing an entirely separate category of “frigatives”, to contain all and only swears.
Where are we now? Strange to say, but it doesn’t seem like the syntactic study of swear words has really progressed much beyond these obscure, semi-satirical papers from the 60s and 70s. I found a long-ass list on the “anal emphatic,” a sociolinguistics paper on fuck in the British National Corpus, a paper on taboo-term predicates in ASL, and some semantics papers on “that bastard” and on “fucking brilliant” (here’s an accessible overview of the semantics side) but otherwise not much has been written and it’s permeated even less into popular culture. Wikipedia, for example, currently has a mere four sentences under the grammar section of its fuck article, despite extensive usage and etymology sections. It’s certainly not for lack of interest: after all, the history, sociology, and culture around fuck and other swears generates practically a book a year. I do hope that any linguists reading this will let me know if there are other papers that I’ve missed, or perhaps even be inspired to write one. I mean, you’d think we’d know more about swears by now, for fuck’s sake.
Tags: Gretchen McCulloch, language, linguistics, magic, swears
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i love the toast so much.
gretchen, this is yet another fabulous post!
Only on the toast.
Love this
This is one of those times when I hear about the research people do in academic fields not my own and think, “I’ve made a huge mistake.”
I fucking loved this.
I’m sending this to my mom – maybe this Christmas she won’t lecture me about my “crass” language! No jk, she definitely will.
Hahahaha frigatives
I bet whoever thought of that was damn pleased with themselves.
I fucking crowed aloud there. It’s perfect.
Right?
I literally (literally!) laughed out loud with that one. Maybe I should have stuck with linguistics 20-umph years ago after all.
So, this is where we post our favorite The Thick of It quotes, right?
Mine’s a dark horse from Adam:
“One of the many things that baffles me about you is that you remain unmurdered.”
Unmurdered. This word completes me.
And, of course, the ever resplendent “Cuntcake?”
“Fuckity-bye” is classic, as is “eff-star-star-CUNT” from In the Loop.
And an unbearably philosophical one, also from In the Loop:
“I have spoken to the Prime Minister. Whether it happened or not is irrelevant: it’s true.”
I’m a huge fan of “Yeah, apparently, your fucking master race of highly-gifted toddlers can’t quite get the job done between breast feeds and playing with their Power Rangers.”
In The Loop quote but:
“Simon Foster: No, I’m making you pump Chad. It’ll be easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy.
Toby Wright: No, it won’t. It’ll be difficult-difficult-lemon-difficult. That is what it will be. Have a lovely afternoon. Stop a war for me. “
A few Christmases ago my mum had a sign made for the door of my dad’s shed, “Come the fuck in or fuck the fuck off”. He loves it.
I could go on all night but my absolute favourite has to be an out-of-left-field from Jamie to Robin, “Shut it Virgin West Coast!” So bizarrely apt!
I’ve always been partial to “What the fuck is this? Tinker Tailor Soldier Cunt?”
This is perfect. No other website looks quite as much like the inside of my brain as The Toast.
And “frigatives” is an excellent neologism! We paused in one of my linguistics classes in grad school to talk about how much we wanted to make “fricative” into a mild swear word–“I hate that fricative sound!” etc–so I’m glad to see we’re not the only ones who had that thought.
Yes, there was an interesting moment when buddinglinguist!me tried to explain to my mother all these new linguistics terms I was learning. She was particularly skeptical about “fricative”.
I like to tell people that I went to school to learn about bilabial fricatives. It provokes the raising of many eyebrows.
Frickative
Multiple sources identify Quang Phúc Ðông as the University of Chicago linguist James D McCawley
That is indeed what the piece says, if you read to page 2.
so sorry. technical error on my part when I hit view all. feeling like a f-ing idiot.
You are utterly and completely forgiven, because you have admitted your fault.
Here I imagine Nicole striking a pose rather like Elizabeth I.
Swears make me feel so connected to all of humanity throughout time. How can you read this and not think, “I know exactly how that monk in 1528 feels.”
Is this for real because that is incredible.
I think so! At least there’s an excellent blog post about it here: https://solongasitswords.wordpress.com/2014/09/01…
As does this:
fucking cats. competing for attention since the dark ages.
<makes that photo my Facebook profile picture because our Prime Minister is called Tony Abbott and is the epitome of a cuntcake>
“a long-ass list on the “anal emphatic,” ” CACKLING. Nicely done.
[WARNING: linguist-speak]
In the footnote of some Language Log post, Geoff Pullum directs the reader to CGEL, where it is suggested that English sentences without overt grammatical subject are of the type categorial grammarians would notate as Interj/NP—that is, they take an NP object (but not, according to my intuition, a CP: *Fuck that I can’t make this sentence work.) to form a complete interjection. This analysis sits well with me.
Also, quick correction: It’s called Studies OUT in Left Field. Loved this otherwise!
[continued linguist-speak]
Ooh, nice, so that would fit with the intuition that “Fuck irregular verbs” is similar to “Hooray for irregular verbs!” Although “Hooray that I can’t make this sentence work” sounds a bit better to me than the fuck equivalent? I get a really clear distinction between:
Hooray that you got the job!
*Fuck that you got the job/didn’t get the job.
So swears could be interjections which take NPs, but not all interjections take only NPs, at least on my intuitions here.
(And I’ll get that fixed, or if Nicole’s in the comments already…)
Yeah, I agree with your intuition on hooray, and “hooray that you” is attested.
*Shit on that you didn’t get the job., on the other hand, is abysmal.
Hooray for getting the job done!
Fuck getting the job done!
Seems like a close fit.
Fuck Lyndon Johnson or I’ll take away your teddy bear.
I will be laughing for DAYS about this (and “Fuck communism on the sofa.”)
I found this weirdly soothing to read.
I will print this to mail to my non-internetty mother. She is a retired English teacher who is really into grammar and also swearing.
I came very close to peeing a little bit when I got to “describe and fuck communism” and then I realized there were still 2 pages left. I need to go to the bathroom before moving on to the next page, just to be on the safe side.
This is brilliant. Even more brilliant is the fact that my university library does indeed have a copy of Studies out in Left Field. To the reading room!
This is far too little to say in praise of this bloody fine article, but FUCK YES.
Well “fuck Lyndon Johnson carefully” is my new go-to expletive. So there’s that.
I’m partial to “Shit on Lyndon Johnson on the sofa!”
I’m going to start saying it breathily in sex situations
Isn’t “thank you” the same kind of construction as “fuck you”? And, woudn’t the implied subject of both be ‘I’, as in, “I fuck you!” or “I thank you!”?
Hmm. For me, the intended reading of “fuck you” is much closer to “go fuck yourself” than “I fuck you”. And it doesn’t work in other contexts either:
I thank you for your kindness.
*I fuck you for your rudeness.
Also, consider “fuck off” – “you fuck off” is possible and, again, seems to me a close equivalent to “fuck you”.
If the implied subject were I (as with God), you’d have “Fuck myself!” instead of “Fuck me!”
Anyone else use to have this book?
http://www.amazon.com/The-F-Word-Edition-Jesse-Sh…
I had it as a young teen? maybe younger and was highly amused.
I could totally see myself saying “Wash the dishes and fuck you” under the right circumstances.
Well, sure, but they aren’t integrated. It means “Wash the dishes” (a command) “and” (by the way), “fuck you”. It’s not like “Wash the dishes and put the forks away”.
I choose to infer from this article that all experts of profanity have truly spectacular, terrifying eyebrows. (I love you Peter Capaldi.)
The moment I saw the photo, before I read the title, I knew what this article was going to be about. The power of Capaldi/Tucker.
This is relevant to my interests! As a semi-ex-linguist who enjoys a good swearfest, I think only good things can come of prodding the rest of the world to examine profanity in this manner.
I remember finding Studies in our grad student lounge. It was ratty and old and worn as fuck. Pages falling out, yellow, that kind of thing. You know, fucking classy. That was over a decade ago…I hope that same copy is still there, prodding new grad students to think deeper about all the fucking shit (and fucking and shit) the world throws at them.
Isn’t it the case, though, that extremely creative swear-ers will treat the disapproving fuck analogously to the copulating fuck and add adverbial bits to it for effect? What does this do to its classification?
“Fuck communism on the sofa” is hardly standard cursing, but it doesn’t sound outside the realm of things people would actually use – if I’m not failing at grammar, then it’s the same structure as “Fuck you sideways” or “Fuck you with a porcupine”, both of which I’ve seen in use. (Although “go fuck yourself [adverb]” is a lot more common.)
On the subject of infixes, I still love that Australian classic “The Integrated Adjective”: http://www.thepoetsgarret.com/2002/020506.html
That poem is DELIGHTFUL, thank you.
I have two favorite sayings: “I wouldn’t fuck that with George Bush’s dick” and derisively declaring various groups as being “masturbated by Consumerism” but I don’t know how to diagram either one.
I can only say that both are fun to declare.
The first is definitely fun but uses the comparably boring ‘copulating fuck’ as a regular verb.
Wait I don’t get it. If you do want to fuck something with George Bush’s dick, is that an insult or a compliment? Or are both bad?
My personal favourite is “I wouldn’t fuck that with a ten foot pole”. Find me an idiom that isn’t improved by swearing!
What about “thank you”? It certainly doesn’t have the versatility of “fuck”, but it seems to behave very similarly as a verb. Is the idea that it’s implicitly “I/we thank you”? Could “fuck” be implicitly “I/we fuck you?” (Or Lyndon Johnson, as the case may be.
I mean, calling something an "informal shortening" isn't really a helpful explanation in most cases. The "Hell if I know" example below seems to confirm that it's not really, in this case: we do have a genuine construction here.
Shit, you're right! But I think it's perfectly kosher for words to select for certain kinds of CPs:
I wonder if the Toasties are going to like my data.
*I wonder that the Toasties are going to like my data.
Arguably this could be a semantic constraint rather than a syntactic one—that is, the meaning of the verb "wonder" isn't compatible with "that"-headed CPs. I'm not sure how fuck/hell would be semantic, though, bringing us back to square one.
As a UChicago linguistics alumna I have so much love for McCawley and voraciously read this fucking shit as a first year in college. Guy was also a pretty serious foodie for his time and published a guide to deciphering the authentic, non-translated “secret” menus at Chinese restaurants: The Eater’s Guide to Chinese Characters.
Also if you are the academic library type there is a paper that I have saved to my computer simply as “the ass paper” that I use to explain to people why linguistics is FUCKING AWESOME. “An AAE Camouflage Construction,” Language 84(1).
Now looking up the ass paper.
this is fucking fantastic. 🙂
Love the article! Incidentally, you didn’t really have to work so hard to find a copy of Studies Out In Left Field. It’s readily available in more than a thousand libraries, and should be easy to obtain through Interlibrary Loan. http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/490201627
Which is why “Fuck that fucking fuck” is the perfect sentence.
Fuckin’A! A bit of fucking all right, to be English. Great fucking piece B-)
This reminds me of the section on taboo words in Swan’s Practical English Usage (the standard reference work for EFL teachers, from the UK at least):
“The meaning of a swearword is always different from its literal (taboo) meaning. … Compare:
What are you doing fucking in my bed? (= Why are you making love in my bed? – literal meaning of fucking)
What are you fucking doing in my bed? (= Why the hell are you in my bed? – fucking used as a swearword)
The meaning of a swearword can also change with its grammatical form…”
I just love how dry the discussion is, even after giving each swearword a star rating for how offensive it is (from * for ‘damn’ to **** for ‘cunt’; ‘fuck’ only gets ***).
I’ve been told my English grammar teacher at university (whom I fondly remember as a less good looking Dr. House) has recently given his students a handout where they had to describe and classify 48 different uses of the word FUCK. I wish he had done that back in the day when I was his student…
This article is fucking brilliant. Thanks.
Our bass player on finding that his guitar lead was faulty. “Fuck it – this fuckin’ fucker’s fuckin’ fucked.”
Your example reminded me of the joke with this punchline:
“My husband said, ‘he’s a lousy mailman; fuck him and give him a dollar!'”
And there’s this variant:
“So Mickey says ‘I didn’t say she was crazy, Doc, I said she was fucking Goofy!'”
So "I said to fuck you" doesnʻt work, yet we can say "I said to fuck off!" as I have done on many occasions! Growing up in a heavily conservative household where "pee" was a swear word (we had to say potty), when I discovered the genius of taboo words, I was mother-fucking hooked. Another one that perplexes me is that we can say "what the fuck" and "what the hell" but not "what the damn" or "what the ass" or "what the bitch." If you ever want a real lesson in swearing, hang out with a French Canadian. Those cats know how itʻs done.
The syntax of “fuck you/it”, like “screw you/it”, “bugger you/it”, “sod you/it” or similar, all seem to me to follow that of “damn you/it” (or, in a more positive sense, “bless you/it”). In other words they seem like curses/blessings rather than commands, appeals to God or the universe to condemn/uplift you rather than an instruction to the person directly addressed. “Damn/bless you” is more “may you be damned/blessed”, than “go damn/bless yourself”. “Damn” and “bless” are surely verbs in these constructions.
Very late on the comment train, but my favorite example of sixties-era example sentences comes from John Ross’s “Guess Who?” – various iterations of the phrase “J. Edgar Hoover, who I have a picture of in my locket, is a cutie.”
<3 u rossie
Very late on the comment train, but my favorite example of sixties-era example sentences comes from John Ross's "Guess Who?" – various iterations of the phrase "J. Edgar Hoover, who I have a picture of in my locket, is a cutie."
<3 u rossie
I have been studying Albanian for a while, and the structure of “fuck you” is interesting, to say the least. In the simplest form, it is “të qifsha”, which is is actually the 1st person singular (1P.SG.) Optative Present (Imperfective) of qij (fuck). The optative is usually used in requests, wishes, and curses. The phrase, in a rough translation is akin to “may I fuck you!” This structure confuses me, because, in the disapproving fuck seems to lack a subject, but in languages where the subject is part of the verb, it appears to be tasked into the 1P.SG. (another example like this is in French, “Je t’encule”, which again uses the 1P.SG.). This construction is unusual to me, given a predominantly Anglophonic understanding of syntax.
Of course it’s not true that you can’t modify “fuck him” in *any* way – there are certain ways it’s certainly possible to modify that kind of phrase (but only as an intensification, not even remotely ever meant to be taken literally), such as, “fuck him twice sideways”, “fuck him and his little dog too”, etc.
Also reminds me of a great quote I wrote down back in college when I was in the habit of writing down funny or interesting things people said, the context being a discussion about how a friend put together a Star Trek marathon night, and all his friends showed up “…except for Jacob and his fucking girlfriend. That referring both to an adjective describing her state and a description of exactly what he was doing.”
I prefer to interpret the lack of an overt grammatical subject as defaulting to the speaker as subject.
Thus – when another male says, “Fuck you”, my response is, “Fuck yourself faggot”.
I enjoy making fun of people using trite swearing, in the, probably vain, hope of discouraging them, by changing the disapproving meaning to the literal, copulatory meaning. When someone tells me “I hate my fucking job.”, I reply, “If I had a _fucking_ job, I would really love it (for a while anyway).”