Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

It’s all just conspiracy shit beamed down from the mothership.

The gop is a fucking disgrace.

Damn right I heard that as a threat.

You cannot love your country only when you win.

And now I have baud making fun of me. this day can’t get worse.

Hey Washington Post, “Democracy Dies in Darkness” was supposed to be a warning, not a mission statement.

Anne Laurie is a fucking hero in so many ways. ~ Betty Cracker

Conservatism: there are people the law protects but does not bind and others who the law binds but does not protect.

Pessimism assures that nothing of any importance will change.

Republicans don’t lie to be believed, they lie to be repeated.

If rights aren’t universal, they are privilege, not rights.

At some point, the ability to learn is a factor of character, not IQ.

Roe is not about choice. It is about freedom.

Republicans: “Abortion is murder but you can take a bus to get one.” Easy peasy.

Insiders who complain to politico: please report to the white house office of shut the fuck up.

Fuck these fucking interesting times.

rich, arrogant assholes who equate luck with genius

Do not shrug your shoulders and accept the normalization of untruths.

“But what about the lurkers?”

Dear elected officials: Trump is temporary, dishonor is forever.

“Everybody’s entitled to be an idiot.”

When you’re a Republican, they let you do it.

Of course you can have champagne before noon. That’s why orange juice was invented.

You can’t attract Republican voters. You can only out organize them.

You are here: Home / Open Threads / We Could Use Some Fun

We Could Use Some Fun

by | 108 Comments

This post is in: 

Wag sent me a link to this about a week ago, and unless I’m mistaken, this is right up the Balloon Juice alley.  Nothing else seems to be happening in the back room, and this feels like Friday night material.  I hope you’re not all in bed already!

I don’t know my way around Reddit, but this appears to be from colin_morris.  Why is the person not a commenter here?  So awesome!  (click the image to embiggen)

We Could Use Some Fun 2

Compound pejoratives on Reddit – from buttface to wankpuffin

Jun 28, 2022

Dirty words are, let’s face it, a lot of fun. If you want to express your dislike for someone and a standard insult like “jerk” or “moron” won’t cut it, you can get creative. There are a few reliable recipes for forming derogatory noun-noun compounds in English. For example:

Start with a word for a disgusting or worthless substance
Add a word for an agglomeration or container
Hence, dirtwad, scumbag, pissbucket, snotwagon…

(In case it’s not yet clear, this post will contain a lot of bad words. Most are merely silly or crude, but some are more seriously offensive, including slurs.)

Alternatively, -head, -face, and -brain(s) are incredibly versatile suffixes, which can be preceded by just about any taboo word.

The truly creative can go outside the box with oddball constructions like fucktrumpet, or wankpuffin, which perhaps succeed more by their euphony than their ability to invoke any coherent image.

If only we had some concrete data on how these pieces fit together…

Introducing the Reddit compound pejorative dataset

I collected lists of around 70 prefixes and 70 suffixes (collectively, “affixes”) that can be flexibly combined to form insulting compounds, based on a scan of Wiktionary’s English derogatory terms category. The terms covered a wide range of domains, including:

scatology (fart-, poop-)
political epithets (lib-, Trump-)
food (-waffle, -burger)
body parts (butt-, -face, -head, -brains)
gendered epithets (bitch-, -boy)
animals (dog-, -monkey)
Most terms were limited to appearing in one position. For example, while -face readily forms pejorative compounds as a suffix, it fails to produce felicitous compounds as a prefix (facewad? faceclown? facefart?).

Taking the product of these lists gives around 4,800 possible A+B combinations. Most are of a pejorative character, though some false positives slipped in (e.g. dogpile, spitballs). I scraped all Reddit comments from 2006 to the end of 2020, and counted the number of comments containing each.

As a corpus, Reddit has the virtue of being uninhibited in its profanity, and on the cutting edge of new coinages. For example, Google Books Ngram Viewer, which indexes the majority of all books published in English up to 2019, gives no results for fuckwaffle, whereas the term has been used in 1,096 Reddit comments.

The full “matrix” of combinations is surprisingly dense. Of the ~4,800 possible compounds, more than half occurred in at least one comment. The most frequent compound, dumbass, appears in 3.6 million comments, but there’s also a long tail of many rare terms, including 444 hapax legomena (terms which appear only once in the dataset), such as pukebird, fartrag, sleazenozzle, and bastardbucket.

In fact, the dataset approximately follows Zipf’s law, meaning that a log-log plot of term rank vs. frequency is close to a straight line:

The Matrix of Pejoration

The full 66 x 73 matrix of all prefixes and suffixes is too big to fit readably in a single plot, so I’ve shown a 20 x 20 subset below, which includes many of the most frequent affixes. Note that frequency is mapped to colour using a logarithmic scale, because it varies over several orders of magnitude.

Check out the whole thing.

 

Reader Interactions

108Comments

  2. 2.

    Villago Delenda Est

    A useful one that is not on the matrix that I picked up from my NCOs in the Army is “dickweed.” One of my comm chiefs used it musically…diiiiickweed, dickweed!

  4. 4.

    bbleh

    This — THIS — is what English is best at, of all the languages of the world.  (I am not dissing English.)

  6. 6.

    dmsilev

    For example, Google Books Ngram Viewer, which indexes the majority of all books published in English up to 2019, gives no results for fuckwaffle, whereas the term has been used in 1,096 Reddit comments.

    I’m pretty sure that this is not what DARPA had in mind when they funded the initial research that lead to the Internet.

  17. 17.

    mawado

    Better off Ted – Still the best exposition of American Business in the 21st century.

    The episode https://youtu.be/Bh7Nz4bIwss?si=j-xMRfg7ZmtLDvo5

    A typo leads the employees to believe they are required to insult each other. Lem and Phil invent an insult generator remarkable similar to the example.

    The outtakes may be funnier than the episode which is saying a lot.

    https://youtu.be/Bh7Nz4bIwss?si=Sxbwl3VjKN82d7Sr

    NSFW or households or anyplace really.

     

    Luck

  22. 22.

    mrmoshpotato

    @Spanky:

    “Trumpsucker” seems like it should be a thing.

    That’s all of the Trump trash in the world who all suck Dump’s ass.

  23. 23.

    SteveinPHX

    Some 17th and 18th Century English playwrights didn’t need this for inspiration, but damn! I bet they would have had fun!

    Brings to mind Hogarth’s “Gin Lane.”

  34. 34.

    WaterGirl

    @Punchy: Yes.

    Cole got email that said everyone who was being let go had been notified, and he had not been notified, so he (mostly) assumes that he is safe.

    But, you know, it would be nice if they were a little more clear than that!

  36. 36.

    NotMax

    Not a single word but an insult recently came across which is superb:

    “He could count his number of brain cells on both hands, if he knew that numbers go up that high.”

  37. 37.

    Martin

    @WaterGirl: Actually, I think only 2.3% of us would actually ‘love’ data nerds. 13.6% would ‘like’, 34.1% would ‘approve’, a similar would ‘disapprove’, 13.6% would ‘dislike’ and 2.3% would ‘hate’.

  41. 41.

    TS

    @WaterGirl:

    But, you know, it would be nice if they were a little more clear than that!

    Idea is to get folks so worried when they send out a new contract with the salary halved it is accepted with thanks.

    Fear is the operative word for any RW organisation.

  42. 42.

    WaterGirl

    @Martin: I dunno, I think that the stats related to like, love or approve would be pretty high on Balloon Juice.  Much higher than in the general population.

    Wouldn’t you agree?

  43. 43.

    Another Scott

    A friend tried to teach his young sons that bucket head was a near-swear insult. I don’t think it took with them, probably fortunately.

    ;-)

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  54. 54.

    WaterGirl

    @mrmoshpotato: We were supposed to have rain from noon until midnight, but it didn’t really start until a a few hours ago, and it’s supposed to be done by morning.

    You’re getting rain all weekend?

  57. 57.

    Central Planning

    @dmsilev: ​

    I’m pretty sure that this is not what DARPA had in mind when they funded the initial research that lead to the Internet.

    Those fuckwaffles!​

  58. 58.

    Other MJS

    @Rusty:

    I love that shit and fuck work with just about everything.

    True enough, but who says “shitshit” or “fuckfuck”? Some people, apparantly.

  59. 59.

    bbleh

    @Martin: 23% — nearly 1/4! — would “agree” or “mostly agree” with your estimates, and as usual 37% would “disagree entirely.”  The rest “partially agree” or “partially disagree” and have comments which are detailed below.

  60. 60.

    SpaceUnit

    If this is what passes for scientific research in 2023 then goddamn I need a time machine.

     

    The big question:  forward or back?

  64. 64.

    jonas

    This reminds me of the Twitter threads produced after the Brexit vote when SFB posted something to the effect that he was so proud of Scotland where his amazing golf resort was located voting to ditch the EU. A number of commenters kindly reminded him that Scotland had voted overwhelmingly to “stay”, in a cavalcade of multisyllabic, poly-imagistic profanity the likes of which had never been seen and which only the jaded, ale-lubricated wordsmiths of the British Isles can produce. This is the forum where the term “cheeto-faced shitgibbon” was first coined, iirc.

  65. 65.

    Ken

    @SpaceUnit: This reminds me, I want to thank whoever recommended James Gleick’s Time Travel: A History in the recent Medium Cool. Oddly, my library catalogs it under physics; I would have put it under literature.

  66. 66.

    Ghost of Joe Liebling’s Dog

    @bbleh: All taken care of by a non-parametric resampling approach, which requires no assumptions about the shape of the underlying bafflegab.  Thus do I refute Aristophanes!

     

    🤣

  67. 67.

    Wag

    @bbleh:  With a double fuck one simply adds an “ity” between the two, and voila! Fuckityfuck emerges fully formed.

    Unfortunately shitityshit doesn’t roll of the tongue with the same energy.

  68. 68.

    karen marie

    “twat clown”?

    How did that score so high?  I’ve never heard (or seen) anyone use that once.

  69. 69.

    Ken

    @Wag: You remind me of my pre-teen years, when having heard Shirley Ellis’s “The Name Game“, all the kids thought they were incredibly clever and the first to notice what happened when you used “Chuck”.

  70. 70.

    kalakal

    @Wag:

    The master of using fuck with everything was Malcom Tucker*, the Peter Capaldi character in The Thick of It

    eg always ending a hostile phone call with a snarl of

    “Fuckitybye!”

    * Based on Alastair Campbell, ex Journo and Blair’s comms director

  72. 72.

    John S.

    @Wag:

    That’s because for words already ending in “it” you don’t add the full “ity”. Simply add the “y” to avoid redundancy.

    Now you have a usable shitty* shit to go along with fuckity fuck.

    *And of course you have to add back the extra “t” in there because English.

    ETA: 🎶 If it ends in “it”, avoid redundancy. Just drop the “i” and proceed with “ty”. 🎶

  78. 78.

    Hoppie

    Not a single compound word, but I always liked “addlepated pilgarlic” as an insult most people are, er, puzzled by.  I guess asshat is the updated version

    Also the 70’s joke “impeach the Cox-sacker”.

  81. 81.

    Dangerman

    Fuck is such a flexible word (as opposed to flexible fucks and we fucking aren’t doing yoga in here).

    Anger: Fuck you!

    Regret: Fuck me!

    Philosophical: Who gives a fuck?

    … which leads to things like who gives a flying Philadelphia fuck, which I’ve never really figured out, but I think it involves flexibility and an unbalanced washing machine, so fuck it, we are NOT doing yoga here.

  83. 83.

    divF

    One of my favorite epithets is from the movie Scenes from the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills, in which Wallace Shawn calls Ed Begley Jr. an “ass-licking poseur”.

  85. 85.

    divF

    @Hoppie: Did you hear the one about the coke-sacker, the cork-soaker, and the sock-tucker ?

    I first ran across this in Gravity’s Rainbow, but my impression from looking at the internet just now is that it is a widespread joke in the Navy.

  87. 87.

    BruceFromOhio

    Compound pejoratives on Reddit – from buttface to wankpuffin

    There’s some letters of the alphabet missing, methinks. Like pejoratives that start with the letter ‘a’ perhaps.

  95. 95.

    HumboldtBlue

    Stanford trailed 29-0 at Colorado and the Deions, the Cardinal just made a historic comeback to win 46-43.

    We’re losing the Pac 12 as a collegiate athletic conference, and there is something criminal in that happening.

  100. 100.

    lowtechcyclist

    @Hoppie:

    Also the 70’s joke “impeach the Cox-sacker”.

    It wasn’t just a joke, it was a bumper sticker!  Saw it frequently in 1974.​

  103. 103.

    WaterGirl

    @mawado: I don’t think that show was ever on my radar.

    But I don’t usually watch comedies.  Exceptions: Spin City and Frasier.  Maybe one more whose name is escaping me at the moment?

  104. 104.

    EthylEster

    Re: hapax legomena

    I just learned this term today and then I encounter it here.

    If only I was clever enough to craft a comment about that….

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