more on fa-word

[Jonathan Lighter]

"F-g word" also looks euphemistic for something else.

JL

On Sun, May 29, 2011 at 2:25 PM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu>wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: more on fa-word
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> At 1:50 PM -0400 5/29/11, David Barnhart wrote:
> >I found _fa' word_, _fag-word_, and _fag word_, too.
> >
> >>>  Date:         Sat, 28 May 2011 18:21:02 -0400
> >>>  Reply-To: American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> >>>  Sender: American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> >>>  From: David Barnhart <dbarnhart at HIGHLANDS.COM>
> >>>  Subject:      Fa-word: encountered in NPR news today
> >>>
> >>>  In April, basketball superstar Kobe Bryant of the Los Angeles Lakers
> was
> >>>  fined $100,000 by the NBA for calling a referee the Fa-word.  In
> >>>May, Joakim
> >>>  Noah of the Chicago Bulls was fined $50,000 by the league for hurling
> the
> >>>  anti-gay slur at a fan.
> >
>
> Fa-word has the wrong vowel (looks like it's used for contrasting
> with "Sol-word" or "La-Ti-Do" word), and fag-word is, well, not
> exactly euphemistic, which I thought was the whole point.  I'd opt
> for f-g word, although it's hard to pronounce.
>
> I was also thinking back to the brouhaha discussed here (and
> elsewhere) over the episode in the '90s when then Majority Leader
> Dick Armey (R-Tex.) accidentally[!] referred to his (gay) House
> colleague Barney Frank (D-Mass.) as "Barney Fag" and explained
> afterward (not entirely persuasively) that it was a simple slip of
> the tongue. Perhaps Kobe Bryant and Joakim Noah could have avoided
> their 6- and 5-figure fines by explaining that they had intended to
> call the respective referee and fan a "Frank", thus alluding to their
> targets' corpulence resulting from their over-fondness for hot dogs,
> but they then suffered that same well-established innocent lapsus
> linguae.
>
> LH
>
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