{"id":20048,"date":"2015-07-18T08:38:30","date_gmt":"2015-07-18T13:38:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=20048"},"modified":"2015-07-20T02:41:45","modified_gmt":"2015-07-20T07:41:45","slug":"expletive-deficits","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=20048","title":{"rendered":"Expletive deficits"},"content":{"rendered":"

Josh Marshall, \"Obama on the Hoofbeats of History<\/a>\", TPM 7\/17\/2015 (emphasis added<\/em>):<\/p>\n

As the budget deficit has receded from public view, Obama's fucks deficit has come to the forefront. After six and a half years in office, he may have a small stockpile of fucks left. But he has none left to give.<\/strong> He is increasingly indifferent to the complaints and anger of his political foes and focused on what he can do on his own or with reliable political supporters. You can see it too in the more frequent lean-in-on-the-lectern moments during press conferences and speeches. He's truly out of fucks to give.<\/strong>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

We\u00a0could stretch\u00a0the metaphor into a theory of Keynesian therapy, where the prescription for an emotional downturn is to stimulate the psychic economy by running a fucks deficit. But that's the opposite of Josh's argument, and in any case we'll stick to the linguistic issues.<\/p>\n

The linguistic\u00a0mechanism here is the playful reification of what John Lawler has called the \"minimal direct object\" in negative-polarity expressions like give a damn<\/em>. (See\"Negation by association<\/a>\", 7\/13\/2004, for discussion.) A related\u00a0set of constructions have been studied by Haj Ross and Paul Postal under the name of \"Squatatives<\/a>\", and an older tradition of relevant work has described what is known as the \"Jespersen cycle<\/a>\".<\/p>\n

Know Your Meme<\/em> documents several illustrated variants of minimal-object reification, dating back to\u00a02010 (\"Look At All The Fucks I Give<\/a>\", \"And Not A Single Fuck Was Given That Day<\/a>\"), and there are many similar\u00a0examples Out There (e.g.\"Behold! The Field In Which I Grow My Fucks<\/a>\", \"Welcome to the room where I keep my fucks<\/a>\").<\/p>\n

Those images,\u00a0just to guard against future internet bit rot:<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/a><\/td>\n\"\"<\/a><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
\"\"<\/a><\/td>\n\"\"<\/a><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

And the appropriate scientific measuring instrument<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The linguistic blogosphere has recently been tracking the language of expletive deficits:<\/p>\n

\"How many swears can we give?<\/a>\", Strong Language<\/em> 12\/14\/2014
\n\"The number of fucks you need\u00a0to not give<\/a>\", LLOG 2\/11\/2015
\n\"Hyperbolic scalar indifference<\/a>\", LLOG 7\/14\/2015<\/p>\n

Update — A note on evolving norms<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Update #2 — Josh Marshall explains himself (\"The Tall Guy and the F-Word<\/a>\", 7\/19\/2015). Interesting that he has to…<\/p>\n

As long as I created confusion over this, here's what I meant: Obama no longer gives a fuck. I assume you don't give fucks when you simply have none left to give. It's a supply-side phenomenon, which I think squares with most our personal experience. And when I thought of Obama's sometimes achilles' heel of extreme accommodation of his adversaries, often getting little or nothing in return, it occurred to me that President Obama had been overdrawing his fucks account for sometime. Let's call it deficit spending in fucks. And now, he has none left. I noted that he may have private reserve for extreme or personal need. But basically he is out of fucks to give.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Josh Marshall, \"Obama on the Hoofbeats of History\", TPM 7\/17\/2015 (emphasis added): As the budget deficit has receded from public view, Obama's fucks deficit has come to the forefront. After six and a half years in office, he may have a small stockpile of fucks left. But he has none left to give. He is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20048","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-language-and-politics"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20048","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=20048"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20048\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20112,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20048\/revisions\/20112"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20048"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=20048"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=20048"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}