Sunday, 31 January 2010

Swearing in The Wire


A recent immigrant to my Alamut for exhausted journalists has brought with her not only the suicidal plants I mentioned a few days ago, but a complete set of the Digital Versatile Discs of The Wire, which I have settled down to throughsuffer.

I was watching the fourth episode today, in which there is a reasonably long scene towards the end that uses only the word fuck and its cognates (by cognates I include the oedipal pejorative and the mysterious fuckin' A). It is a fascinating, if slightly obvious, linguistic exercise


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1 comment:

  1. nemryn31 January 2010 at 19:23

    I've always heard "fuckin' A" used to indicate approval of some kind, which would suggest that the 'A' stands for 'awesome' or 'amazing'. Or that it doesn't stand for anything and is just an A, as in 'A+' or 'A-1'.

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