Can you freaking believe that "freaking" is almost 100 years old? @stancarey salutes a popular euphemism:
https://stronglang.wordpress.com/2026/01/22/another-freaking-f-word/

#swearing #slang #euphemisms #freaking #language #linguistics #intensifiers

Another freaking f-word

I never fully adopted freaking as an intensifier, euphemistic for fucking, partly because I swear fairly freely, and maybe also because fecking was available in my Irish English dialect. But I like having freaking available, and with its hundredth birthday round the corner, it’s a good time to showcase it.1

Freaking substitutes for its ruder cousin in all sorts of lexical and syntactic contexts, modifying adjectives (that was freaking amazing), verbs (let’s freaking go), and nouns (how is it still freaking January?), among other word classes; it’s also used as an infix (un-freaking-real) and in set phrases like freakin’ A – euphemistic, obviously, for fucking A.

Origins and use

The earliest known use of this freaking – the first citation in Green’s Dictionary of Slang, Jesse Sheidlower’s The F-Word, and the OED – is in the 1928 novel Georgie May, where author Maxwell Bodenheim uses two freakings and a freakin’, including:

“Gawd, ah hate the hull, freaking pack uh you,” she cried, between her sobbing.

The next example those dictionaries list is in Nelson Algren’s The Man with the Golden Arm (1949):

“You point that freakin’ finger at me ’n you’re one dead pointer.”

That 21-year gap doesn’t mean no one was using it in the meantime. I found the line “You freaking fool!” in the 1937 screwball comedy Nothing Sacred, available on YouTube and the Internet Archive at around the 47m 40s mark:

Films and TV, with their heightened emotions and industrious regulators, are a natural home for this expressive but family-friendly expletive. A chart from COCA shows its use concentrated in those media, occurring at over four times the rate in fiction generally and over six times the rate in speech:2

As Wiktionary notes, “Freaking (or fricking) is often used in motion pictures as a substitute for fucking so that characters can be shown to swear without the motion picture incurring censorship or a higher certificate than it otherwise might.”

Less discerningly, the Encyclopædia Britannica says freaking is “used to make an angry statement more forceful”. That’s not wrong, but it’s misleadingly narrow: freaking can amplify all sorts of emotions, even joy – ask Ned Flanders.

WikiHow knows this. An article by Wits End Parenting and Elaine Heredia says you can use freaking “to emphasize how great something or someone is” and that it “can be a positive or negative word based on context”. It adds that the word “isn’t a sin to say”, in case you were wondering.

Data

Freaking is on the rise but has been levelling off, according to data in COCA and Google’s Ngram Viewer. Rows under the dates below show frequency (i.e., number of uses), number of million words in the sample, and (hence, by division) per-million figures for direct comparison:

That levelling off is despite global use. Geographically, freaking is most popular not in the US but in Singapore, per the GloWbE corpus (freakin has the same top two, reversed). Malaysia comes in third, followed by Canada, Australia, and the Philippines:

Jack Grieve’s eye-catching swear maps of the USA, meanwhile, allow us to zoom in on what States are especially partial to freaking and freakin. Californians’ relative coolness towards them came as a surprise:

Browsing the word’s collocates (freaking/freakin’ ___) in COCA shows the company it keeps. High-ranking +1s include the adjectives awesome, amazing, hilarious, crazy, cool, hot, stupid, hard, and huge; nouns like idiot, mind, thing, break, genius, clue, and deal; and occasional verbs, like love, hate, kidding, and kill.

Some of these invite us to extrapolate the full phrases, or chunks: big freaking deal; give me a freakin’ break; not have a freaking clue; out of my/your/etc. freaking mind; Are you freakin’ kidding?

Other language corpora, such as the 14-billion-word iWeb, show a similar pattern of collocations:

Easily topping the +1s are the preposition out and the pronoun me: a sign of how well freaking [me] out caught on as an idiom, with multiple senses, after being coined in the 1960s. That’s a different usage, of course: not the intensifier freaking but the verb freak (or rather the verb phrase freak out) in the present progressive tense.

Pragmatics

Zappa fits right in here: freaking offers outsider energy for any self-defined freak (or geek) who cares to use it.3 The word’s gently countercultural flavour is also apparent in dictionary citations, where Tom Wolfe’s name recurs.

What makes freaking effective as a minced oath, and attractive to mild and novice swearers, is that it offers proximity to (and thus evocation of) strong swearing while remaining relatively benign. We see this niche exploited expertly by a child in the vampire comic 30 Days of Night: Return to Barrow:

A little later the boy defaults to freakin’, this time automatically obeying his father’s no-swearing rule, and making the word more casual by dropping the g:

Freaking is not always a straightforward substitute for fucking, however. The particular way that it lands caused slight consternation for slang expert Michael Adams when his son started using it at the age of seven:

. . . he’s not just saying That’s freakin’ cool or No freakin’ way. No, he’s saying things like What the freak?! which is a long way from Oh, my gosh on the euphemism scale. There’s the underlying profanity. There’s the phonetics. There’s the fact — apparently — that What the hell? and What the freak? — while parallel — signify differently.4

Films redubbed for TV broadcast have mixed fortunes with it, as my post “Freak those monkey-fightin’ melon farmers!” shows. “I don’t need full freakin’ forensics” in Die Hard 2 (1990) is passable, if implausible in a police station, while “Freak you!” in Casino (1995) is comically underpowered.

In his 2016 book In Praise of Profanity (which I reviewed here and recommend), Michael Adams discusses how the vowels, consonants, and pragmatics of various “partial euphemisms” for fuck – feck, frak, frick, frig, and their freaky fraternity – do their work:

. . . although people usually think euphemisms work because they substitute for profanity, in fact many euphemisms are themselves partially profane, because they more or less cover up profanities—usually less—that are still inscribed in the situations of their use, and our minds’ eyes see through them to the profanities . . . . what makes profanity and the relevant euphemisms pragmatically powerful and interesting is that the euphemisms are often both euphemisms and profanity, a fact not unknown in linguistic circles but too often overlooked when we calculate the logic of language attitudes.

We’re advocates of strong language here at Strong Language, but we know it’s not suitable for all occasions: sometimes a softball is called for. And among the many euphemisms for fucking, freaking has, in a century or so of use, established itself as a truly effective and useful option. It may be mild, but it’s got freakin’ game.

*

1 The OED also lists an obsolete, mid-17thC sense of freaking (adj.): “Of a person: inclined to change his or her mind, mood, or behaviour suddenly and unaccountably; given to freakish ideas; capricious, fickle, whimsical.” One of its fans was Samuel freakin’ Pepys: “He told me what a mad freaking fellow Sir Ellis Layton hath been” (Diary, 25 January, 1665).

2 I was unable to separate the verb freaking from the intensifier using part-of-speech tags in COCA, GloWbE, and iWeb, so these uses are combined in the graphs. To fortify the data somewhat I checked 300 examples in each corpus and found that, in COCA, 76% were the intensifier and 24% were the verb (freaking out, or plain freaking with the same sense); in GloWbE it was 74% and 26%, and in iWeb 68% and 32%. So you can consider the graphs broadly indicative but with that significant caveat.

3 We still don’t know where freak came from: origin unknown, the dictionaries say, though the OED offers speculation. Skeat says freak in the sense “whim” is of Germanic origin, being frec “bold, rash” in Old English.

4 Adams has also analyzed the use of freaking in the TV series 13 Reasons Why, tracing a character’s graduation from euphemistic to full-bore profanity.

What in the sweet suffering blue holy ever-loving literal shitting fuck? @IvaCheung looks at how we intensify a popular phrase:
https://stronglang.wordpress.com/2016/01/29/when-fucks-get-real/

#language #idioms #swearing #profanity #intensifiers

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/

#AmyWinehouse #dictionaries #ELJames #etymology #fuck #fuckery #GDoS #intensifiers #JamaicanPatois #language #lexicography #linguistics #OED #popCulture #semantics #sexualSlang #slang #spelling #StephenKing #swearing #TheFWord #theThickOfIt