I’m a near-daily reader of the Language Log blog. I’ve never felt the urge to place a comment, before, but a coincidence today has induced me to want to do so. Geoffrey K Pullum posted about a hapless Indiana teenager who was expelled from school for tweeting about the amazingly productive nature (in the syntactic sense of productive) of the English word “fuck.” I felt sad, but the student’s observation is hardly news to one with some background in linguistics.
Shortly after reading that Language Log article, however, I happened to see, on facebook, the posting of an acquaintance of mine. She’s a native Spanish speaker, who I believe I should allow to remain anonymous – I don’t know her very well, as she’s one of those encounters-in-passing who becomes a “facebook-only friend.”
Her post was fascinating seen so shortly after reading the Language Log post, because it shows that the amazing syntactic productivity of the word “fuck” is crossing linguistic boundaries pretty successfully. Here’s the relevant facebook text:
[transcribed: No voy a explicar más que ir a recitales me hace más feliz que cualquier otra fuckin cosa. FIN.]
