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Blake Patterson Feb 22, 2025

Word has it that "Fifty Shades of Grey" was originally going to be titled "Eleven Patterns of Shading."

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Strong Language Jun 30, 2024

If there’s one place you’ll find fuckery, it’s in a fuckery. In fact, you’d probably find all sorts of fuckery in a fuckery, including:

—treachery, ill treatment or behaviour
—nonsense, foolishness, bullshit
—something causing frustration
—sexual activity.

That’s some polysemous fuckery. And the fuckery you’ll find it in, if you’re still with me, is a brothel.

Physical fuckery

‘Brothel’ seems to be the word’s oldest sense, dating to the late 19thC, according to Jesse Sheidlower’s The F-Word, Green’s Dictionary of Slang, and the OED. Just as there are fish in a fishery and baking in a bakery, so there are fucks and fucking in a fuckery.

Irish author Kevin Barry has used this word in a couple of his books, including the novel Beatlebone:

There are pockets of coke burn on the air – bitter-grey and teasing – but the Amethyst Hotel more generally has the stale eggy waft of a fuckery.

The ‘sexual activity’ sense emerged a few years after the ‘brothel’ sense – 1900 is the oldest example on record – and is exemplified by an exchange in E.L. James’s Fifty Shades Darker (2011):

“Do you want a regular vanilla relationship, with no kinky fuckery at all?”
My mouth drops open. “Kinky fuckery?” I squeak.
“Kinky fuckery.”

We may not know, shorn of context, specifically what is being referred to, but we get the general idea: this fuckery refers to fucking, and fucking-adjacent activity. I’d be willing to find out more only if Charles Dance read the rest of it:

Figurative fuckery

Then there are the figurative uses, which are now far more common than the ‘brothel’ and ‘sexual activity’ ones. These are trickier to pin down, but generally they fall into the first three categories outlined up top.

I saw it recently in Fernanda Melchor’s 2017 novel Hurricane Season, published in Spanish-to-English translation (by Sophie Hughes) in 2020. The narrator is approached by her estranged cousin and finds herself

heading home with her mind racing, going over all the things she could have said to that little shithead, all the trouble his fuckery had caused, the hell he’d put the family through . . .

Green’s, The F-Word, and the OED all date figurative fuckery to the late 1970s. A comment from White Ram on a 2015 post by Mark Peters suggests it’s a bit older than that, but concrete records of sweary slang can be elusive.

White Ram also describes the Jamaican influence that may have helped it spread; this certainly fits with the word’s distribution in continental USA, as featured in my 2016 post Sweary maps 2: Swear harder:

Some of you will already be hearing figurative fuckery set to music in your mind’s ear, from Amy Winehouse singing, over the course of ‘Me & Mr Jones’,

What kind of fuckery is this? . . . What kind of fuckery are we? . . . What kind of fuckery are you?

Precisely how fuckery is meant in each case is open to interpretation, but bullshit seems as close a synonym as any. Winehouse considered making ‘Fuckery’ the song title, according to James Callan (who says fuckery may be his favourite fuck-derivative), before confining it to the lyrics.

Her first question does particularly good rhetorical work, making it popular on sites like Etsy and Instagram, as in this artwork by K J Pesce:

Defining fuckery

The two physical senses of fuckery are easy to define, the various figurative senses or subsenses less so. The OED lumps them together under one broad sense: ‘Unjust or meddlesome treatment; that which causes frustration or consternation. Also: foolishness, nonsense. In later use frequently Jamaican.’

The 4th edition of The F-Word, due out later in 2024, does likewise but a little differently: ‘despicable or unfair behavior; treachery; (also, esp. in Jamaican English (also in form fuckry)) nonsense; “bullshit.”’ This expands considerably on the current, 3rd edition’s ‘despicable behavior; (also) treachery’.

Green’s splits the figurative noun senses into (1) ‘unfairness, ill treatment; treachery’; (2) ‘nonsense’; (3) ‘a stupid mean person’; and (4) ‘a nonsensical situation’. (Whether a nonsensical situation differs significantly from nonsense is perhaps debatable.) Green’s also lists a lesser-known adjectival use, labelled West Indian and Rasta:

Bricky does have decent streets but with all that fuckery stereotyping and media shit, you well-booted living in Berkshire and wherever wouldn’t know that. (Alex Wheatle, The Dirty South, 2008)

Sheidlower quotes David Moskowitz, in Words and Music of Bob Marley, describing fuckery as ‘Jamaican patois for wrong or unfair actions’ – possibly inspiring sense no. 4 in Wiktionary, labelled Jamaican: ‘An unfair or morally wrong action’. This chart from the GloWbE corpus illustrates its tremendous relative popularity there:

Meanwhile Urban Dictionary, a more chaotic crowdsourced effort, has dozens of definitions that generally ignore the older, physical meanings.

So should the figurative senses of fuckery be lumped or split? This may be a matter more of lexicographical style or sensibility than of discrete and objective concepts. One person’s ill treatment is another’s nonsense, treachery, or that which causes frustration: the subsenses of fuckery overlap in the expansive realm of bullshit. Sheidlower tells me he tends to be more splitty than lumpy,

but for F-Word purposes it’s often necessary to lump things because (1) the boundaries are hard to define, or (2) I don’t have great evidence for each sub-(sub-)sense. . . . Fuck(e)ry is tough, because I think it’s a very diffuse boundary between the (broadly) ‘treachery’ and the (broadly) ‘foolishness’ senses, and even with tons of evidence, it would be hard to split this up. . . . Dictionaries (usually silently) pretend that sense divisions are hard boundaries, but that’s not how they work at all.

Nor is it entirely clear how fuckry fits in – that is, as Sheidlower writes, ‘whether it should be regarded as a different word, or a spelling variant of one word’. Either way, it seems to apply only to the ‘foolishness, nonsense, bullshit’ patch of the semantic terrain.

Fuckery in the wild

To better gauge how fuckery, fuckry, and fuckeries are being used in this fuckery 21st century, I browsed various corpora, especially the iWeb corpus, which has almost a thousand examples. Most fall under what the OED broadly calls ‘that which causes frustration or consternation’ and which on Strong Language we might say is ‘shit that’s fucked up’.

Sometimes fuckery refers to specific interpersonal or social misbehaviour; sometimes the ‘nonsense’ meaning is to the fore; and often it’s shenanigans of a political, economic, technological, corporate, cosmic, or other systemic nature, whether treacherous/malicious or not. Here’s a flavour:

How do you create art in a time of unfolding fuckery?

Oh, dearies, it was another week of fuckery in the world.

dealing with this LA traffic fuckery and rain

. . . keep the spoilers off this website. Save that fuckery for Facebook

We came together as a band to talk about and against injustice and fuckery

There are too many damn men trying to bully our bodies and yank us all into some Handmaids Tale fuckery.

I was taking the unending election fuckery in stride

I could not catch the show or reply earlier because of computer fuckery

The amount of fuckery in this comment section is appalling. Idiots, complete idiots.

Everything you wrote in that post is complete and utter fuckery.

We are good people. We don’t deserve your fuckery, Monday.

But these low-level OS “updates” from MS is pure fuckery.

Pure recurs as a modifier of fuckery, appearing in the works of Stephen King (see below) and even in cosmetics branding, as Nancy Friedman has reported.

Fuckery is usually a mass noun, but not always:

No one understands why [we’re] together, but somehow in the midst of all our fuckeries, we just work.

Ladies – due to, erm, ya know, TTOM [that time of month] fuckeries; your weight can fluctuate way more than us dudes

It can serve as an intensifier, a playful or emphatic elaboration on fuck:

She is endlessly thoughtful + loyal as fuckery.

it hurt like fuckery where he hit the old scar

Which recalls a line by the inimitable Malcolm Tucker, patron saint of Strong Language, in season 3 episode 8 of The Thick of It (2009):

Occasionally fuckery has positive connotations, meaning something like ‘skilled and complicated activity’:

The latter months of 2011 seemed to have a lovely feminine touch, with Nigella [Lawson] making love to our eyeballs with her own unique brand of food fuckery

Or the way that “Minimum Effort” combines uncut white funk with brain-melting synth fuckery and guitar insanity, the whole thing suggesting Duran Duran jamming with an enraged HAL 9000 and the reanimated corpse of Jimi Hendrix.

And it shows up in variably open compounds like mind fuckery, dumb fuckery, and what the fuckery,* where the –ery suffix modifies not fuck but the whole compositional phrase:

How much of this sexual mind fuckery can Robin take?

this is taken a step to [sic] far to dumb fuckery

Starlight randomly producing evil magic red clouds is just “What the fuckery” at its core

Sexual uses are infrequent, aside from probable E.L. James references via the phrase ‘kinky fuckery’: kinky is the word’s most frequent collocate in iWeb.

Stephen King is fond of the word, using the phrase ‘pure human fuckery’ in both Dreamcatcher (2001) and The Stand (1978: one of the earliest figurative uses on record) and having Dolores Claiborne (1993) hear that her husband has been ‘up to fuckery’. That line didn’t make the screenplay for the film, or you can be sure as fuckery I’d post a subtitled pic from the DVD.

I’ll leave you with Alex and Paul Cannon’s marvellous short film The F-Word (2022), starring Chris Gethard and Delaney Quinn. Fuckery makes an appearance at 4:25, but the whole film is well worth its brief running time. (Though, if you’ll permit some pedantic fuckery, compounds are not cognates.)

* Edit: The The F-Word 4th edition will have new entries for WTFery and shit-fuckery. Happy days.

https://stronglang.wordpress.com/2024/06/30/what-kind-of-fuckery-is-this/

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