Fuck an A

[Arnold Zwicky]

[warning: taboo language, reference to gay male sex acts, possibly
more information about my private life than you'd like.  if any of
these things make you uneasy, skip this posting.]

tom kysilko reports on instances of "fuckin' a" in sayles' The Return
of the Secaucus 7.  i can now report on multiple instances of the
expression in The Joint, a recent gay male porn flick starring a guy
whose stage name is Zak Spears.  (yes, the names are often hilarious.)

spears varies the frequent "yeah, yeah" of the genre with "fuckin' a".
what makes this (possibly) worth reporting is that on a number of
occasions when he utters "fuckin' a" meaning 'yeah, oh yes', he is in
fact fuckin' a (and at least a few times when he says it he's playing
catcher rather than pitcher), so that we get what is almost surely an
unintended combination of the formulaic expression and its literal
applicability.  no other participant (i hesitate to say "actor") in
the film uses "fuckin' a", and i don't recall its use in other films
in the genre.  presumably it's a piece of improvisation by spears,
something he says naturally; scripting in these movies tends to be
minimal, especially in the sweatier sections.

of course, it's true that people (regardless of sex or sexuality, in
real life and in the movies) sometimes cry out the exclamation "fuck"
while engaged in intercourse, without any intention of referring to
sexual acts.  in that context, "fuck" is an alternative to, among
other things, "oh god", "christ", "jesus" (none of these carrying any
religious commitment), or "shit".

(i'm probably not the first person to point out that the path of
"shit" from 'feces' to an exclamation of dismay to an exclamation of
strong feeling, usable even in contexts of pleased surprise or joy,
involves, in its last step, an astonishing bit of amelioration,
especially remarkable in that the much milder "piss" has made it only
to the exclamation-of-dismay stage.  probably not a suitable example
of amelioration for semantics textbooks, though.)

arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu)