Spelling lesson
« previous post | next post »
From Kai Ryssdal:
I always find it helpful to remember tariffs end with FFS
— Kai Ryssdal (@kairyssdal.bsky.social) March 6, 2025 at 4:00 PM
For longer and less humorous takes, see here or here or here or here or here or etc.
AntC said,
March 8, 2025 @ 6:32 pm
DOGE: putting the effs in efficiency.
DOGE: putting the fishy in efficiency.
DOGE: putting the mental in Governmental.
Chas Belov said,
March 8, 2025 @ 7:54 pm
@AntC: That last one only works with the first two if you interpret "mental" as the slang term for having mental illness. If you interpret it with the non-slang definition, it makes it sound like a good thing, which would conflict with the sense of the first two.
Actually, the first of the 3 doesn't make sense to me. I'm guessing it's a reference to the F-word, but it doesn't read that way for me.
AntC said,
March 8, 2025 @ 9:10 pm
You're not familiar with "I can't tell you how many effs I don't give"?
if you interpret "mental" as the slang term for having mental illness.
I'm interpreting it as the (Brit) yoof do:
The word has long since left behind the offensive sense.
unekdoud said,
March 9, 2025 @ 4:00 am
@AntC: I thought it was exactly the opposite – only British millenials use it for "something shockingly unusual", and everybody else avoids it because of the offensive connotation.
Not to say the offensive sense doesn't apply, as in DOGE actions are compatible with mental incapacity.
ardj said,
March 9, 2025 @ 6:39 am
'mental' has been used from the 1920s onwards, by English people who were not noticeably yoofful, to mean "mentally disordered or defective" (OED)
Martyn Cornell said,
March 11, 2025 @ 9:45 am
@ardj but also "to be very angry" – "he went mental when I told him" – and "surprising and alarming" – "that's mental!"
Philip Taylor said,
March 11, 2025 @ 11:53 am
I would suggest that not "everybody else avoids it because of the offensive connotation" but rather than those who do not avoid it frequently prefix it with the F-intensifier. See https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=went+f*****g+mental&year_start=1800&year_end=2022&corpus=en&smoothing=3 for examples, replacing my asterisks with the corresponding unbowdlerised letters.
J.W. Brewer said,
March 11, 2025 @ 8:18 pm
I for some reason associate that sense of "mental" with the Canadian comedian Martin Short, born 1950. I don't use it myself, not so much because of fear of giving offense but because I have no motivation to sound like an elderly Canadian who is presumably channeling foreign slang of many many decades ago. (Was it once more current among Americans of my approximate generational cohort before falling out of favor due to the vagaries of fashion in slang? Maybe? If so some decades back. My memory is hazy and unreliable on the topic.)
I do accept that making fun of the vagaries of the U.S. government and affiliated personalities is fair game for people all over the world, and that there's thus no requirement to do so in currently-idiomatic American English.
Rodger C said,
March 12, 2025 @ 12:03 pm
like an elderly Canadian who is presumably channeling foreign slang of many many decades ago
I remember Martin Short saying "mental" as a young Canadian playing a character who would now be characterized as neurodivergent. I don't know what such a person's association to "mental" would be.