What the F

by Benjamin K. Bergen

  More than their relative flexibility, the really remarkable thing about squatitives like jack-shit is, of course, that the negative and the positive versions of the sentences seem to mean roughly the same thing. As I mentioned earlier, this really is quite strange because putting a not in a sentence usually reverses some component of the meaning. Let’s sell the children should mean roughly the opposite of Let’s not sell the children. So when you use profane words as minimizers, the affirmative and negated versions of the sentence are similar in meaning. You don’t know dick is roughly synonymous with You know dick. He doesn’t know jack-shit means the same thing as He knows jack-shit. It’s almost like we’re looking at the sentence version of the English flammable-inflammable mess.d

  To be clear, I’m not talking about irony here. It’s always possible for a speaker (or writer) to say anything while really meaning the reverse. For example, you can say Mary doesn’t know jack-shit ironically to mean not what it literally means—that she doesn’t know anything—but instead to mean the reverse. For instance, Mary has spent twenty years as a veterinarian caring for orphaned kittens and puppies, so obviously she doesn’t know jack-shit about animals. Jack-shit and other squatitives make a sentence and its negated opposite unironically mean the same thing.

  To a first approximation, these profane words seem to be subject to special rules that simply don’t apply to the rest of the language. They’re outliers, but not random ones. They form little coalitions that pattern alike among themselves but flout the rules that apply to nonprofane words.

  # $ % !

  In Emma Lazarus’s poem “The New Colossus,” which is inscribed on the Statue of Liberty, you’ll find the famous verse “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” While this particular sentence has had immeasurable social impact, linguistically speaking it’s grammatically unremarkable. The sentence is all constructed around the verb give, and in this sentence, it’s doing what it normally does. The sentence explicitly identifies both the things that are to be given (your tired, your poor, and so on) and also the recipient, me. Who me is, I suppose, is subject to interpretation—it could be Lady Liberty or more likely the nation she represents—but it’s important for give to have a recipient. It’s kind of the sine qua non of giving. You can’t give something without giving it to someone. Consequently, even when not explicitly stated in a sentence, the recipient of give is almost always implied and inferable from context. For example, the statement I don’t give handouts implies that there’s someone you don’t give handouts to. Of course, you can put this person in the sentence: I don’t give handouts to bums like you, Mr. Lebowski. But even when such a statement does not expressly identify the recipient, it goes without saying that someone is or isn’t getting something.

  But profanity again is the exception. When you give profanely, and here I’m thinking specifically of giving a fuck, the rule about give having a recipient doesn’t appear to apply. You can give (or choose not to give) a fuck—without any potential recipient in mind. And the same goes for a shit, and a damn, and so on. For example, the famously resilient honey badger can reportedly be stung by a thousand bees, with what consequence? He doesn’t give a shit. At the end of Gone with the Wind, Scarlett O’Hara asks Rhett Butler what she should do when he leaves. His answer: Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn. This kind of giving or nongiving—of shits, damns, and fucks—is grammatically special. You don’t mention the recipient: you don’t specify whom you don’t give a damn to. But it’s even more bizarre than this. Not only is there no explicitly mentioned recipient; there’s not even an implied one. We can tell for sure that there’s no implied recipient because you couldn’t even force a recipient into such sentences if you had to. It doesn’t make sense to say I don’t give you a fuck or I don’t give any fucks to you to mean I don’t care.

  So why can’t you give a fuck to anyone? One reasonable explanation could be that this is merely a consequence of I don’t give a fuck being a fixed expression. Maybe it’s a set of words that implies a recipient but into which you can’t force one because those five words have to be said in exactly that order, as though I don’t give a fuck were one single word spelled with internal spaces. The problem with this argument is that the words in give a fuck are in fact quite flexible. You can make it passive: No fucks were given. Or you can be crystal clear: Not one single fuck was given. And you can modify the fuck that you’re not giving: it can be a flying fuck, the slightest fuck, or a single fuck. No, it’s not that give a fuck is too rigid to admit a recipient. It’s that there’s something about recipients that give a fuck doesn’t like.

  You’re going to start detecting a trend here, because it seems, again, that there’s a special grammatical rule at play for give a fuck, one that also applies to give a shit, give a damn, and so on, but doesn’t pertain outside of the realm of profanity. It’s not that give a fuck is more lax, as in the case of fuckall and other squatitives. No, in this case, the grammar is actually more rigid for give a fuck than for giving anything else. The general characterization of give and how it works (it has an explicit or implicit recipient) doesn’t apply equally to all its uses. In order to use these profane expressions grammatically, you must know very specific things about how to make a sentence—grammatical patterns specific to particular uses of selected words.

  # $ % !

  So we’ve now seen that in some cases profane grammar is more flexible, and in other cases it’s less flexible than the grammar of the language as a whole. But on the whole, the differences we’ve seen have been relatively superficial—subtle changes in specific ways that words can or cannot be used. How deep does the special behavior of profanity go? Are there ways in which profanity seems to follow its own, qualitatively different system of rules entirely? Maybe.

  It’s generally agreed in grammar circles that every sentence has to have a subject. In English, you usually express the subject overtly. For example, look at the sentences in this paragraph. The first sentence has the subject it, which the verb is (contracted to ’s) agrees with. The next sentence has the subject you, which express agrees with. Now, sometimes a sentence has no overt subject. Imperatives are an example of this. In Look at the sentences in this paragraph, there’s no subject. But still we all know who’s doing the looking: the person to whom the imperative is directed. You, dear reader, are the subject of Look at the sentences in this paragraph. Imperative sentences like this still have a subject; it’s just implicit.

  The idea that subjects can be implicit is a neat notion because it allows us to preserve the generalization about English sentences that they all have subjects. Some are overt; others are implicit. That’s believed to be a general rule of English. A very general rule. Science likes general rules because generalizations enable concise descriptions and explanations of diverse observations. Gravity explains both orbiting planets and plummeting skydivers, and that’s a good thing.

  So suppose all sentences have subjects. Great. In that case, what’s the subject of Fuck you?5e It’s not obvious. You might be tempted to think that the you in the sentence is the subject. And certainly in the case of the similar sentence You fuck (a declaration of what you do), the subject—the one performing the action—is obviously you. But in Fuck you, the you can’t be the subject because you isn’t performing an action.

  This is the topic of a classic piece of scholarship by James McCawley, a former University of Chicago linguist whose PhD from MIT was supervised by Noam Chomsky. By all accounts, McCawley was a polymath (for instance, he had several degrees in math), a prodigy (who started as a student at the University of Chicago at sixteen), and an inveterate prankster. Under the pseudonym of Quang Phuc Dong, ostensibly of the South Hanoi Institute of Technology (or SHIT), he wrote several seminal papers in what he called “scatolinguistics.” The first, “English Sentences Without Overt Grammatical Subject,” deals with the grammar of Fuck you. McCawley died in 1999 and with him a lot of the fun of linguistics. />
  In that case, you might reasonably conjecture, Fuck you is probably an imperative. And if it’s an imperative, it has an implicit subject, just like Look at the sentences. But that can’t be true either. And we can tell for a very subtle grammatical reason that I’ll now attempt to explain.

  Syntacticians pay close attention to how words can or can’t combine in order to figure out what’s really going on under the surface—in this case, whether something is a subject or not. Here’s a clever test we can use. When the subject and the object of a verb refer to the same person or thing, something special happens. The object adds -self to the end. For example, if I want to describe an act in which you cleaned yourself, I couldn’t say You cleaned you; I’d have to say You cleaned yourself, just like I cleaned myself, He cleaned himself, and so on. So we know that whenever we see these reflexive -self pronouns, the subject and the object are the same person. This is a kind of grammatical test you can apply to sentences.

  The powerful thing about this test is that it also detects the implicit subjects of imperatives. If I wanted to tell you to clean yourself, then I would say Clean yourself, not Clean you. Because yourself is required, we know that the implicit subject of an imperative must be you. Neat. Further evidence that imperatives have you as an implicit subject. But notice what that means about Fuck you. If it were Fuck yourself, then we’d know that this was an imperative with you as the implicit subject—just like Clean yourself. And indeed, it’s possible to say Fuck yourself, but this means something different from Fuck you. Fuck yourself is an actual imperative—it’s a command for the subject, you, to perform an action, fuck, on an object, which is also you. But with Fuck you, the subject can’t be you because the object is you, not yourself. The subject has to be something or someone else.

  So maybe Fuck you is just a special kind of imperative with a subject that’s not you. We can put Fuck you to a number of other grammar tests to diagnose whether it’s an imperative. And they all come back negative. For example, you can negate imperatives—for instance, Don’t read this sentence! But you can’t say Don’t fuck you! You can add please or do to the front of imperatives: Please read this sentence. Do look at this sentence. But there’s no way to interpret Please fuck you or Do fuck you. By all measures, Fuck you is not an imperative, and if it’s not an imperative, it doesn’t have an implicit subject, and because it also doesn’t have an overt subject, that means it has no subject at all.

  It’s not just Fuck you that’s missing a subject. Other vulgar maledictions are in the same boat. Damn you works the same way. Notice the same difference between Damn you and Damn yourself that we saw before. Damn you isn’t telling you to perform an act of damning on yourself, but Damn yourself is. And again you can’t negate it to make Don’t damn you. Same with Screw you. It appears that Fuck you, Damn you, and Screw you aren’t imperatives. And as a result, none of them have a subject, not even an implicit one.

  Right now, you might be thinking about God. As a subject, I mean. Couldn’t Damn you really be a shortened version of God damn you or May God damn you? And likewise for Fuck you, couldn’t it really be May God fuck you? It’s possible—at least for Damn you—that this is the historical source of the expression, as evidenced by the presence of God in goddamnit. But looking just at the grammar of the language as it’s used today, there’s no God left in Damn you or Fuck you, and we can tell by using the same reflexive pronoun test that showed us that you isn’t their subject. Suppose you want to denigrate not the person you’re talking to but some third party. You’d say Damn him or Fuck her. Well, it turns out that if the person you want to denigrate isn’t a person but a deity, then you can perfectly grammatically (albeit blasphemously) utter Fuck God or Damn God. And here’s the rub. If God is the subject of these sentences, then we shouldn’t be able to say Fuck God. It would have to be Fuck himself; God is the subject, so the direct object should agree with it. But you can’t say Fuck himself to mean Fuck God. And that implies that God is not the implicit subject of either Fuck God or Fuck you. They don’t appear to have any subject at all.

  This is a big problem. These profane maledictions are breaking arguably the most important rule of grammar. All sentences are supposed to have subjects, whether overt or implicit. That was the laudable generalization we started with. It’s as if we’ve found one type of matter that the rules of gravity don’t apply to. And so one of two conclusions follow.

  One: Fuck you doesn’t have a subject. But it’s grammatical. And if all grammatical sequences of words are sentences, then we have to conclude that some sentences, like Fuck you, can live without subjects. That’s going to be a hard pill to swallow. There’s an exception to gravity.

  If you don’t like that, you do have another option. Conclusion two: all sentences still have subjects. But Fuck you and other maledictions are something other than sentences. The reasoning behind this would be the following syllogism: Sentences have to have subjects. Fuck you doesn’t have a subject. Therefore, Fuck you is not a sentence. By this logic, sentences make up only one of several types of things you know how to say in English. There are also other things, like epithets. Perhaps certain epithets follow their own, distinct rules of grammar. Sentences have subjects. Epithets need not. They’re a whole separate class of things people know how to say. This would be as big a deal for linguists as finding a type of matter that’s immune to gravity would be for physicists or discovering a new phylogenetic kingdom would be for biologists.

  And it’s not just Fuck you. When you start to dig, you find that other profanity places you astride the horns of this same dilemma. Consider, for example, an utterance like White wedding, my ass! Is this a sentence? To begin with, it’s not clear what the subject is here. It might be white wedding, or it might be my ass. Or neither. But that’s not the real problem. Something else is missing. If you look closely, you’ll see that there’s no verb. And it’s not like there’s an implied verb. What could the verb possibly be? You couldn’t say White wedding is my ass! Sentences need not just subjects but also verbs. If this is a sentence, it’s profoundly degenerate.

  You can see the problem even in one-word utterances, like the isolated word Fuck! There’s one way to use this word that can, in fact, form a real sentence: an imperative one in which you are the implicit subject of a commanded action. For instance, it might be a command a breeder gives to her goldendoodles when they’re in heat. Fuck! But the more common way to use the same single word Fuck! does not form a normal sentence. When used as an expression of frustration, anger, or excitement, it has no subject. No one is being instructed to do anything to anyone else. The same ambiguity between sentence and epithet is present in Shit! or Crap! or any epithet that also happens to be a possible verb. Epithets appear to have their own rules of grammar.

  And although these utterances might not be sentences that we could construct using the general rules of grammar we’ve reviewed so far, they are still subject to very precise grammatical constraints. For instance, consider the nuances surrounding White wedding, my ass! For one thing, you don’t have much leeway with whose ass it is—you couldn’t get away with saying White wedding, his ass! or White wedding, our asses! And it seems like it has to be the word ass or a near synonym in that last position. So you could say White wedding, my tuchus! or White wedding, my butt! But it would be harder (though possibly still acceptable) to use other parts of the body: White wedding, my hymen!

  The upshot is this: Certain types of profanity, from Fuck you onward, belong to their own class, or classes, of utterance. They’re not sentences by any normal definition; nor are they abbreviations of full sentences that omit little bits. They’re their own class of thing that you can utter. There’s a chasm between the grammar of profanity and that of the language as a whole.

  # $ % !

  And yet, despite this profound specialness, the profane utterances we’ve been looking at—even though they aren’t normal sentences—still follow some general grammatical rules. For instance, in W
hite wedding, my ass– type sentences, even though the pronoun pretty much has to be my and the noun has to be a posterior-related body part, there’s nevertheless some flexibility. I believe it’s still grammatical to say White wedding, my fucking ass! or White wedding, my big fat Greek ass! That is, you can use the very same normal rules for putting things together into sentences, in these cases modifying nouns with adverbs, adjectives, and the like, that apply in the language in general. So these utterances live in a nebulous space. On the one hand, they’re a totally different type of thing—not like any sentence we know of. On the other, they can hook into the language’s general rules of grammar in limited ways. Profanity has its own grammar, but it is built on top of the general principles that govern the language as a whole.

  Here’s another case of a specific grammatical pattern that still follows other general rules. The verb tear is usually transitive, meaning that it has a direct object. For instance, you might say I tore my hamstring. Here, I is the subject, the “tearer,” and my hamstring is the object, the thing affected by the tearing, or the “torn,” as it were. But sometimes, rarely, tear can have more than one object. It can be “ditransitive.” An example of ditransitive verb use is Mary tore me a new asshole. There are two grammatical objects, me and a new asshole.

  Just like with give a fuck, there’s a little slack in this pattern. And this is where the rest of what you know about the grammar of your language comes in. The verb doesn’t have to be tear. You can also rip, ream, pound, or possibly even fuck someone a new asshole. And there’s a little leeway with the new asshole as well. It can be a new one, another asshole, or really anything that describes a new orifice. If I’m not mistaken, then, it would fit the pattern to say that you’re going to shag someone a supplementary shit shoot or hammer him home a hasty Hershey highway. Like give a fuck, this grammatical pattern imposes constraints on what can occur in it, within limits. But otherwise it behaves as you would expect, given the rest of the language.