[Ads-l] An aside about Irish f-bombing, and a further aside about Google Books Ngrams; Re: Final F-Word appeal: recent evidence?

[Stanton McCandlish]

On Thu, May 23, 2024 at 8:33 PM Jeff Prucher <
000000b93183dc86-dmarc-request at listserv.uga.edu> wrote:

>  This is my absolute favorite fucking quote:
> Caryl Churchill, Top Girls, 1982. Samuel French, Inc. Act II, sc. 2, p. 90
> MARLENE. ... / Don't you fucking this fucking that fucking bitchJOYCE.
> Christ.MARLENE. fucking tell me what to fucking do fucking.


Reminds me of my trip to Ireland (1991), where (at least in the urban
parts) "fuck[ing]" (with varying dialectal pronunciations like "feck" and
"foak") is used kind of as a form of audible punctuation, from an "um"
replacement to an emphasizer, sometimes several times per sentence.
Sounded very coarse at first, but I got used to the rhythm of it quickly. A
typical example is something like "So I was having my fucking pint, and,
fuck me but here come's that old fuck Billy, drunk as fuck, and wants to
fucking re-start an argument from a fucking week ago."

I think the now-common (in the US) "for fuck's sake" is mostly an Irish
import. I'd barely encountered it before that trip, but it seemed like one
of the most common expressions ever over there. I'd love to n-gram that
with fine-grained data, but the best the n-gram tools at Google Books
provide is a split between American and British English. Maybe there are
other easily accessible corpora these days.

Speaking of which, I've noticed that if you do a Google Ngrams search on
stuff in their all-of-English corpus, and then do the same search on the US
vs. UK corpora, you may get wildly inconsistent results. While some skew
could happen from inclusion of Canadian, Australian, Indian, etc., source
material in the total English corpus, I don't think it can explain the
discrepancies I've seen.  I suspect that the corpora were built from rather
different source material. (More clearly, I mean that the materials used
for the US corpus and for the UK corpus, separately, may not have been
combined with other material into the general English corpus, but that the
latter may have been started from scratch using mostly different source
texts.)  I didn't screen-cap such a result, but a few times I've searched
for some this-usage-versus-that-one and seen a slight preference for A in
US and a slight preference for B in the UK, but not a huge split either
way, but then in the total-English corpus found either A or B vastly
dominating over the other.  Sometimes it's toward the inverse of such an
effect, e.g. the general corpus showing about an even split, and the UK
corpus showing about the same, but then the US corpus showing one version
utterly dwarfing the other, enough that it isn't possible for the US
separate stats and the UK separate stats – even with interference from a
comparatively small number of AU, CAN, NZ, etc., sources – to produce a
general-English result that is so even-handed.

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