And wouldyalookatthat, a foreword by Lewis Black. Count me the fuck in.

Many moons ago flying back to Blightie from Aden, the flying waitresses did say they would serve cocktails when English be spoken, else only water be handed out. Squaddies lingo was ripe, as it be fully seeded with the biological impossibilities.

Fuckin A George! This is fuckin copacetic!

I wouldn't call the Erica Jong example from Fear of Flying to be "without an emotional connection", after all, her relationships with the three men described in just this one small journey pretty much fit that description. It's more like the physical inconveniences and realities that lead to fumbling (like trying to get zippers to function) are lacking.

Re "zipless fuck (noun, an act of intercourse without an emotional connection... 1971 E. Jong Fear of Flying 11: My fantasy of the zipless fuck… Zipless because when you came together zippers fell away like petals)". I have never previously encountered this expression, but Erica Jong's explanation does not seem to tally very well with the preceding definition. To my mind, "zipless" in this context would suggest that no pair-bond subsequently ensued -- i.e., that the two parties involved failed to "zip together" emotionally as a result of their act of congress.

I was quite surprised in 2005-ish to see the big signs in the windows of the French Connection clothing stores in London that read:
F. C. U. K.
(i.e. French Connection, United Kingdom).
Any word that's displayed in shop windows in Oxford Circus and Regent Street is by definition not taboo in England, I'd say. I heard that Norwegian replaced all its Cs with Ks simply to avoid any public celebration of King Cnut.

I never claimed to be good at spelling.

Some of us oldies still don't much like FCUK, or T-shirts that have various expressions using fuck in them. Gross ...

What I remember most vividly about Fear of Flying were the Bremsstreifen (braking marks) left on the sheets by one of her men. At the time I thought: gross, but not exactly engrossing. How all this stuff depreciates by repetition. You can hardly shock anyone any more, except prudes - and that's like pulling the wings off flies, hardly worth the effort.

skidmarks, auf Englisch

Stu, I'm no prude by most standards, but your reference to fly-wing-off-pulling got to me.

Or as they say (or should say) in Germany, Fliegenflügelwegreißen.

Success! That was a controlled experiment, empty. I wanted to discover if it is still possible to shock by suddenly switching the context of indignation. I am tentatively calling it schlock tactics.

Pedantic comment: as so often in German, nobody could say that's wrong, but Fliegenflügelabreißen would be a bit more natural, to me anyway. Wegreißen is what a purse-thief does, or the winner in a dispute between two people both grasping something (tear away), or (intransitive) what the side of a building might do in an earthquake (tear away). Abreißen is a bit more violent: tear/pull/rip off a coupon, a limb. Intransitively it means "(suddenly) stop": Die Unterhaltung riß plötzlich ab, als Grumbly das Zimmer betrat.

Isn't German cute? Just like English!

Wouldn't it be useful to have a dictionary with, for each entry, sample sentences in different "registers", and (in some sense) alternative formulations! Duden is OK, but not a patch on the OED. Grimm is more like it, but out-of-date.

As an organizational principle, there could be say 10-20 situations or scenarios towards which most of the formulations would be oriented. There's a fabulous dialog example at Sig's site from Méthode à Mimile, L'argot sans peine. I find the example easy to remember, because it's funny. The structures of jokes are easy to remember. Although it is short, I learned new words, and old words with new meanings: au pieu, avoir la crève, crevée, à dix plombes. I can repeat the dialog in my head, and so practice the words.

The introduction says, tongue firmly lodged in cheek:

Pour parler en peu de temps un argot coulant et naturel. Indispensable aux étrangers qui veulent connaître la langue de Paris comme aux personnes distinguées désireuses de s’exprimer en termes vulgaires”

An well-known epithet relating to a game of soldiers springs to mind at the thought of reading this thing, but the exact form escapes me.

as so often in German, nobody could say that's wrong, but Fliegenflügelabreißen would be a bit more natural, to me anyway.

If nobody could say it's wrong, I feel I have triumphed. My Sprachgefühl is (ironically) terrible in German; I knew I needed a separable prefix there, but I just took a stab in the dark as to which might be appropriate.

Formulating rules(-of-thumb) about this weg- and ab- business, or about anything else in language, is as much a hindrance as a help. They can be seen to describe certain things - but which things exactly? Where are the boundaries of applicability? The rules for when to apply the rules?

After a certain point, it's easier just to speak the language, albeit scratchily, than to learn more rules. In my semantic analysis above, I thought of the examples first, then made up a spiel to go with them - not the other way around.

In the case of abreißen and wegreißen, I noticed how remarkably well ab renders "off", and weg "away". But better forget I said that!

But better forget I said that!

Never! The next time you tell us that translation is an illusion, that words are too effing ineffable for words, that reality is a rudderless boat ride in the fog with rocks, we will remind you how you flexed your ab at us today.

Sorry, don't know what came over me. Anyway, I am happy to have been a pawn in your little game of shockspiel.

<* squirms, suddenly aware of being hoist on his own patter. Checks vitamin pill schedule, decides provisionally to shroud himself in silence (Ger. loc.) *>

to decideprovisionallytoshroudoneselfinsilence

Is that with ab or weg?

Definitely abreißen.

To me, neither "weg-" nor "ab-" but "ausreißen" seems to be the most natural word in this case. Tearing limbs off is almost always that. For instance, you would say "reiß mir nicht den Arm aus" if somebody pulled you too hard; "sich kein Bein ausreißen" means not making a particularly hard effort.

I would use "abreißen" for tearing off loose or marginal parts mainly of the same material (if I had to define it narrowly), as in a coupon from a page in a magazine, a bit of string, a flaky nail. However, it's also used for tearing down a building (alternatively: niederreißen).

Apart from that, I also really enjoyed this 3rd ed. of "The F Word". One of the few things I (sort of) missed in Sheidlower's book is Anthony Burgess's taboo-avoiding spelling, in the Enderby-novels, "for cough", which he retained as an idiosyncrasy of the title-character even after "fuck off" had become printable in the late 1960s (as Burgess mentions somewhere).

Good point, syro0. We're discussing a German equivalent of "when would you say tear out, when would you say tear off?". My examples for wegreißen (tear away) were intended to show that Hat's use of wegreißen is not "wrong", but unidiomatic. It sounds in German like this English expression would: "to tear the wings away from flies", as if the flies were holding on to their wings like handbags. (Remember that this is a descriptivist site, so I could hardly say that Hat was wrong)

(r)ausreißen is indeed idiomatically what could be done to an arm or leg, literally or as a figure of speech (sich kein Bein ausreißen, as syro0 cites it). The aus ... (her)aus image is predominant. One thinks of a voluminous thing (body) in which another thing is anchored (arm or leg). The arm or leg "wird herausgerissen" (torn out).

syro0 characterizes abreißen in the same way as I would: "tearing off loose or marginal parts mainly of the same material". It was because I was thinking of a fly as a small thing to which a wing is merely attached, not "anchored in" the fly, that I used abreißen - as if the wing were a coupon. The expression "pull the wings off flies" suggests this "marginal part" image. If the image were more of the "anchored in" type, one might say "pull/rip the wings out of flies".

For instance, if I saw the action (pulling the wings off a fly) under a strong magnifying glass, I would be seeing the body of the fly, and the wing anchored in it, and might then prefer to call the action a tearing-out of the wing: (r)ausreißen.

As for the strong magnifying glass, little boys tend to have such a thing. These are the little boys who proverbially pull the wings off flies. But instead of using the glass to see better what they're doing to the fly when pulling off its wings, they would more probably try to use it to fry the fly, to make it shrivel in heliotic agony.

My compact OED magnifying glass was lost due to similar activities regarding ants.

Ah, so there's an antecedent.

It's closer to a humano-magnifying-glass universal than to a mere antecedent.

this is a descriptivist site, so I could hardly say that Hat was wrong

This is a misunderstanding of the word "descriptivist": you can always point out to a non-native speaker that a word is wrong, or a usage is wrong, if it is something that no native speaker would say, or not with the meaning intended, especially if you can suggest a suitable alternate wording (as Grumbly is indeed doing). This is different from labelling a certain common usage as "wrong", rather than frowned upon in some circles.

Just for the record, Grumbly Stu is right about ausreißen and abreißen.

Oh, damn. Now he'll be insufferable.

Now, now, JE. I'm always insufferable! Merely being occasionally right is not going to change things.

Just a moment of sufferability now and then would be nice.

He had a sufferable comment once, but I had to delete it for fear of the cognitive dissonance it might cause.

Anyway, suffering builds character.

I guess I should have said "suffering builds fucking character," just to keep it on topic.

I for one will not stoop to the cheap device of using the word fuck in my comment.