Fuck an A

[Laurence Horn]

Arnold writes:
>
>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),...

Unless the latter is an instance of "fucken a", with the archaic or
dialectal past participle (cf. discussion of _shitten_ in Horn, to
appear, "Spitten image").

>(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.)
>
Note along these lines that it's much easier to find _holy shit_ than
_holy piss_.

larry