Monday 11 June 2012

stupid as*f*ck

To say something is "as /adjective/ as fuck" is low English but hardly out of the ordinary in these uncouth times. By contrast, the word "assfuck" is offensive and rather too Tarantinoesque for most people's tastes. The way that some people blithely mix these two expressions up - well it caused my jaw to drop the first time I saw it. It is difficult to believe that someone could write "Irritated assfuck" or "Sneaking out of the house is fun assfuck" until you actually see it. And there are even people on Twitter with handles like Pretty Assfuck and ImDopeAssfuck. Technically, this is just part of two common phenomena: one is the tendency to join words that should be apart (alot, awhile, everyday) and split words that should be together (paper back, fire man, any thing); the other is the belief that a word must be right because it's in the dictionary (and assfuck *is* in the dictionary) whether it's the right word for the context or not. Microsoft Word has been guilty of exascerbating this problem as people have become reliant on spellcheckers, though I'm not sure that assfuck is in the MS Word dictionary :-)

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