What the F

by Benjamin K. Bergen

  So why do these profane grammatical patterns flout certain grammatical conventions of English while obeying others? In some cases, it’s hard to know. But perhaps not in all. There might be a hint of reason in this last pattern we looked at: tear someone a new asshole. Unlike general rules of grammar (the rule that sentences have subjects, for example), the patterns we’ve been looking at encode a very particular meaning or are tailored to a specific function. The tear him a new one pattern conveys the particular meaning that the person in the subject beat up the first object physically or verbally. And this meaning might explain how it patterns. Not just any verb can occur here—only verbs that can plausibly describe an act of orifice-creation qualify. And the verb takes not just any direct object. The first one has to be someone or something that can be beat up, and the second has to describe a new orifice. Could meaning or function impose constraints on the grammatical behavior of profane language?

  This might be clearer in a different pattern of profane grammar. Consider where you can stick the fuck, specifically, when used in questions. The fuck can of course be inserted directly after what to make what the fuck. Certain other “wh-question words,” like who and why, work the same way: Who the fuck do you think you are? Why the fuck would I tell you?f But the king of these wh-question words really is what—the now pervasive acronym WTF usually refers to what the fuck rather than why or who the fuck. (Notice that the list of relevant wh-question words includes how, even though it doesn’t start with a wh-, as in How the fuck should I know? But it might not include which—many, but not all, English speakers find it ungrammatical to ask Which the fuck should I choose?) When used in this way, the fuck is largely interchangeable with the hell, the shit, the devil, the deuce, and a few others, with corresponding changes in intensity.

  Much of this discussion is inspired by Fillmore, C. J. (1985). We miss you, Chuck.

  This is yet another case where profanity is behaving differently from the rest of the language. You can insert the fuck and friends into wh-questions, but only wh-questions of a certain type. The rule appears to be that the wh-word has to be the very first word of the clause. So it’s grammatical to say What the fuck did you open that jar with? but not With what the fuck did you open that jar? You also can’t say You opened the jar with what the fuck?

  These inserted fucks are also unique in the language because, as with the other profane patterns we saw before, there are no other words you can drop into just these places with these precise restrictions. For instance, it’s possible to insert did you say into a question directly after the wh-word to ask for clarification, as in What did you say you opened that jar with? But in this case, it’s also totally acceptable to put the with at the front, as in With what did you say you opened that jar? or even to embed it: You opened the jar with what did you say? In other words, the rules for profanity are similar to but different from those for the rest of the language. This should seem quite familiar.

  But this pattern is also revealing for the question at hand: Is the grammatical behavior of this pattern constrained by the meaning or function of these words?

  Consider the following facts: You can embed a wh-clause in a larger sentence. A clause is just a sentence-like thing inside another sentence. For instance, a sentence like I can’t imagine what he cooked contains the clause what he cooked. Now, in this case, the fuck can be inserted just fine, right after the what, because what is still the beginning of the embedded clause. This gives you the fully grammatical I can’t imagine what the fuck he cooked. So far so good. But you can’t always stick the fuck there. Sentences that seem superficially quite similar do not seem grammatical to most people. For example, what do you think about I can’t disclose what the fuck he cooked. If you agree that this sentence seems strange, or at least stranger than I can’t imagine what the fuck he cooked, then this must be due to a difference between imagine and disclose. Why is imagine more welcoming to the fuck than disclose is?

  They mean different things. In the case of imagine what he cooked, which can have the fuck in it, the thing that he cooked is unknown, wondered about. In the case of disclose what he cooked, the thing that he cooked is some specific thing that the speaker knows but doesn’t want to reveal. So could it be that sentences that you can embed the fuck in express uncertainty about the event? Let’s see. You can say I have no idea what the fuck he cooked. And sure enough, it expresses uncertainty and allows the fuck. But when the sentence expresses certainty, then all of a sudden the fuck seems out of place: I can’t eat what the fuck he cooked sounds strange to many people, as does This is what the fuck he cooked. In other words, the grammar of the fuck is in part constrained by what the sentence means. You insert the fuck after what to express incredulity at something unknown. And as a result, sentences that don’t express uncertainty don’t allow you to insert the fuck. This shows that grammar cares about meaning. What you know about how to put words together is sensitive to the meaningful work you’re trying to do with grammar.g

  One final thing that’s interesting about this case is that the profane word (fuck or hell) looks like a noun—it follows the, as nouns are wont to do—but it doesn’t behave like just any noun. That is, if we care about what people know about the grammar of their language, part of what we want to know is what categories they’re using in their grammatical rules. For instance, English appears to have a rule in which the can precede nouns in general, from aardvark to zythology. (Zythology is of course the study of beer making.) But the rule of grammar that allows us to create and understand what the fuck is far less general. You can’t insert just any noun whatsoever after a wh-word: What the aardvark is on your plate? seems out of place, as does How the zythology am I supposed to drink this? So how can we describe what people know about the fuck or the hell? What rule of grammar allows these words to be inserted as we’ve seen they can be? It certainly can’t be a rule of grammar stating that nouns in general can be inserted after a wh-question and the. It must be more specific. It must say that a short list of specific nouns are available for this particular rule.

  So you might again be tempted to think that the hell or the fuck is just a fixed expression or “idiom,” or maybe that What the hell is the idiom. If so, then you just memorize the whole thing and forget about applying rules. What the hell is basically just a big word with some spaces in it. But the problem is that hell and fuck in this expression are variable—they act a lot like any regular, lively noun. For instance, they’re available for certain normal grammatical operations you perform on nouns in general. You can modify nouns by putting adjectives in front of them. That works here too: What the bloody hell? You can add an adverb then an adjective, as in What the everlasting bloody hell? The point is that hell seems to be acting a lot like a noun here, just with very limited flexibility. It has to be preceded by the and not, for example, a. What a hell! doesn’t cut it. And it has to be singular, as there’s no sense to be made from What the hells!

  # $ % !

  There’s another reason why some profane patterns follow or refuse to follow just the rules they do. And that has to do with their history. To see this, let’s look at two other uses for the fuck.6 Although they look quite similar, each has its own idiosyncratic meaning and subtly different grammar.

  The first is found in sentences like Step the fuck down or Shut the hell up. We’ll call this the Get-the-hell-out-of-here construction, based on the earliest known attested use, from 1895, which was that, verbatim.7 Superficially very similar but, as we’ll see, clearly distinct is a second use of the + expletive. It looks like this: That girl knocked the hell out of that piñata or I’m going to eat the fuck out of this lasagna. Let’s call this one the Beat-the-devil-out-of-her construction, after the earliest known usage from an 1885 romance novel: Loubitza will beat the devil out of her when she gets her home.8

  Why should we think that Shut the hell up is a different beast from Knock the hell out of that piñata? After all, they have striking similarities. They seem t
o admit the same taboo words (shit, hell, fuck, and so on), and they display the same taboo form: the + expletive. But there are several reasons to think that you actually follow distinct rules for them: they have different properties and yield to different constraints.h

  Hoeksema, J., and Napoli, D. J. (2008) have a thorough and delightful exploration of these two constructions, which I’ve leaned on heavily for the following.

  First, the expletive seems mandatory for the Beat-the-devil-out-of-her construction but optional for the Get-the-hell-out-of-here construction. We know this because taking the fuck or the hell out of Get the hell out or Step the fuck down or Shut the fuck up produces perfectly grammatical sentences: Get out, Step down, and Shut up. Their meaning just becomes a little less intense, as you would expect when you omit profanity. But the same doesn’t hold when you take the epithet out of The girl knocked the hell out of that piñata. That produces the ungrammatical The girl knocked out of that piñata. Strange. Removing the fuck from I’m going to eat the fuck out of this lasagna yields I’m going to eat out of this lasagna, which can’t be interpreted as describing the same sort of thing that eating the fuck out of this lasagna does. (It might be interpretable, but with a totally different meaning, where the lasagna becomes a container for the food being eaten.)

  Optionality of the epithets is only one way in which Beat-the-devil and Get-the-hell differ. They also display different behavior when you apply other grammatical rules to them. For instance, in English, you can make an active sentence like John ate the carrots passive, so that it becomes The carrots were eaten by John. When you try to apply the passivization rule to the two constructions we’re looking at, you again see that they differ. Specifically, Beat-the-devil-out-of-her sentences can be made passive, but Get-the-hell-out-of-here sentences cannot. For instance, you can say The piñata got the hell knocked out of it by the girl and maybe even The hell got knocked out of the piñata by the girl. But take a Get-the-hell-out-of-here sentence like Get the hell out of here, and you’ll be hard pressed to passivize it. Neither The hell was gotten out of here nor Here was gotten the hell out of does justice to the active original. These two types of sentences, although they superficially contain similar inserted epithets, actually behave quite differently. The best we can do is call Get-the-hell-out-of-here and Beat-the-devil-out-of-her different grammatical patterns and try to understand why they work the different ways they do.

  And as I hinted at the outset of this section, we can find part of the explanation for their different and idiosyncratic properties in their histories. As its earliest use would suggest, the Beat-the-devil-out-of-her construction was originally patterned off of an existing sentence form in English. They beat the devil out of her is a sentence of the very same form as They pulled the survivors out of the ship or They forced the mayor out of office. Namely, there’s a subject (they), a verb that describes acting on something with enough force for it to move (beat, pull, force), then an object that is forced to move (the devil, the survivors, the mayor), and finally a direction it is forced to move in (out of him, out of the ship, out of office). This pattern is often called the caused-motion construction because it describes someone acting on something forcefully to cause it to move.9

  In other words, originally, sentences like Loubitza will beat the devil out of her when she gets her home were actually not unambiguous instances of a special Beat-the-devil-out-of-her construction. Instead, they were probably talking about actually acting on someone (her) via a forceful action (beating) to make something (the devil) move in some direction (out of her). Many examples of the Beat-the-devil-out-of-her construction remain ambiguous to this day, hovering between a caused-motion interpretation and a Beat-the-devil-out-of-her interpretation. For instance, does If you keep misbehaving, I’ll knock the hell out of you mean that upon completion, the hell (namely the bad intentions and behavior) will have been removed from you? Does They’re going to beat the shit out of me describe literal or metaphorical feces being punched out of the victim?

  The origins of the Beat-the-devil-out-of-her construction explain its idiosyncratic behavior. The epithet is mandatory because the hell or the fuck or the devil was, at the origin (and perhaps continuing in some ambiguous cases to this day), an actual thing being acted on such that it would move. The caused-motion construction generally makes this particular component mandatory. For instance, you can’t omit the mayor in They forced the mayor out of office; that produces the ungrammatical They forced out of office. And the Beat-the-devil-out-of-her construction, like the caused-motion construction it derives from, allows passivation without hesitation: The mayor was forced out of office by them. In other words, the Beat-the-devil-out-of-her construction behaves the way it does in terms of grammar because of patterns established when it was still being created.

  The Beat-the-devil-out-of-her construction originated in ambiguity. But over the more than one hundred years of its use, this construction has expanded to include other cases that we can no longer interpret via the originating caused-motion construction. For instance, I’m going to eat the fuck out of this lasagna clearly doesn’t imply that there’s fuck in the lasagna that I will somehow remove via eating. And this construction seems to be on the move in that more and more verbs are being recruited to it. It now seems to many people perfectly grammatical to say I’m going to sprint the fuck out of this marathon or After this semester, I’m going to know the hell out of physics. These are clearly not about causing motion, but remarkably they still exhibit the hallmark grammatical properties carried forward from Beat-the-devil’s origins. The epithet is still mandatory: you have to say you’ll know the hell out of physics; you can’t say you’ll know out of physics.i So our grammatical minds are littered with traces of the history that these particular profane expressions have traversed.

  However, in some cases, it cannot now be passivized: The hell will be known out of physics by me and Physics will be known the hell out of by me are both quite ungrammatical. See Hoeksema, J., and Napoli, D. J. (2008) for an explanation.

  # $ % !

  Profanity has a grammar all its own, after a fashion, but it’s not a tidy affair. If the grammar of a language is a system of regularities—uniform patterns of behavior—then profanity simultaneously taps into some of the regularities and imposes a number of distinct subregularities all its own. Sometimes this produces utterances that, by any of the standard criteria, are not sentences at all. At other times it produces sentences that appear to be missing components or that flout the overriding rules of the language. Some of these subregularities we can explain by appealing to the meaning they’re used to convey, the function they’re put to, or the history of how they came to be.

  When we broaden our scope a bit, it’s fair to speculate that other types of language, aside from profanity, may work similarly. There are probably specialized subgrammars for each of the purposes we put language to. There’s a special way we recite numbers and dates. Recipes have a particular formula (compare the standard English Mix the eggs into the flour and beat them together with Recipese: Mix eggs into flour. Beat together). So does speech directed at children or pets. And of course we know that different groups of people use different rules of grammar and that some people who can easily flit between such subgroups may even have the capacity for language in multiple distinct dialects of a language, with different rules of grammar. Although we began with profanity, a bigger question is really at play here. When we talk about grammar and try to understand how it works in the human mind, should we be talking about a single grammar for a language or a patchwork of subgrammars specialized for particular purposes? The structure of the grammar seems to be shaped by what you’re trying to do with it.

  I’m all for simplicity. And it would be far simpler if grammar would just keep to itself. Let words convey meaning so grammar can just be in the business of putting them together into bigger structures. But human language doesn’t appear to work this way. Instead, specific grammatical choices s
eem to carry with them—or to be driven by—the meanings and functions they’re paired with. The question that remains is, how much of language is like this? What’s the balance between the specific, meaningful, idiosyncratic patterns we’ve been looking at here and the ostensible patterns of grammar that are truly general and truly meaning-free? Profanity raises the question, but we don’t yet have the answer.

  7

  How Cock Lost Its Feathers

  A thousand years ago, people living in the British Isles spoke various manifestations of Old English, the language that would evolve over the subsequent millennium into what we now know as Modern English. In terms of its words, what they mean, how they’re pronounced, and how they’re arranged grammatically, Old English is probably just as foreign to the contemporary speaker of English as is German or Dutch. For example, take the Old English version of the Lord’s Prayer (to jog your memory, this is the one that now goes “Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name,” and so on). In Old English, it looks like this, in its entirety:

  Fæder ure þu þe eart on heofonum; Si þin nama gehalgod to becume þin rice gewurþe ðin willa on eorðan swa swa on heofonum. urne gedæghwamlican hlaf syle us todæg and forgyf us ure gyltas swa swa we forgyfað urum gyltendum and ne gelæd þu us on costnunge ac alys us of yfele soþlice.1

  If you’re lucky, you might be able to pick out a couple of vaguely recognizable words, especially once you know that a rough word-by-word translation into Modern English starts with “Father ours, you who are in heaven . . .” As you can see, father used to be fæder, and heaven was heofonum. Like great-grandparents depicted in a blurry black-and-white photograph, some of these words bear a family resemblance to their modern kin. Other words are totally unfamiliar. Gedæghwamlican means “daily.” Alys means something like “redeem.” The passage of time does this to a language. As the years tick by, words morph into progressively less recognizable forms, while others are replaced entirely.