Real linguistics (sort of) on CNN

[LanDi Liu]

I just finished watching DVDs of the available Battlestar Galactica
episodes and was following the development of frak in the series.
They started out using it as an expletive and then after several
episodes it started appearing in gerund participle form and then just
blossomed to include the majority of attested uses of fuck.  It
crossed my mind that the writers might have at that point just been
going through one of those variations of Carlin's "many uses of the
word fuck" lists to see how many they could squeeze in.

The CNN article couldn't get it quite right though and spelled it
wrong ("fraking").  What the frake?

Randy

On Wed, Sep 3, 2008 at 6:30 AM, geoffnatha <geoffnathan at wayne.edu> wrote:
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> Raises some interesting sociolinguistic issues about form and meaning.
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> Title: The curse word 'Battlestar Galactica' created - CNN.com
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--
Randy Alexander
Jilin City, China
My Manchu studies blog:
http://www.bjshengr.com/manchu

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