The Versatile Swear Word

The other night I was in bed, trying to fall asleep and like many nights I had the strangest thoughts. Yes, I have insomnia. Anyway, I was thinking about how some of my favorite swear words can be at a minimum both nouns and verbs, and perhaps even derivatives could become adverbs or adjectives as well and then my quirky little mind started to spiral. This isn’t going to be a terribly long and drawn out blog. Because although I can certainly ramble, with just the most rudimentary research, you’ll find so much on this topic!

Think about it. Let’s start with f*&k. We all know that can refer to the act of enthusiastic love-making, making it a verb as in, “They f*&ked like rabbits.” Or perhaps another definition of where someone is in big trouble, also a verb. “You’re so f*&ked.” As a noun, “That f*$ker is going down.” Of course, it can also be used as an adjective or adverb. In fact, as Adam Sandler once said, it can almost be every part of a sentence, such as, “F*&k the f*&king f*&kers!” The same can be said for another favorite of mine…Sh$t. I won’t list every example because even though the older I get, the more I feel comfortable talking about bowel movements, others may not share my openness. I’m sure there are other profane words with similar versatility, but not as obvious as everyone’s favorite f-bomb.

That got me thinking how many words can be used as nouns, verbs, adverbs, and adjectives and there is actually another blog on this where the person listed fifty-six words. Rather than list all of them for you, I thought I would simply provide a link to that blog: https://onweb3.wordpress.com/2013/08/14/663/. You gotta love the versatility of the English language. Although, writing this blog I had nightmares about diagramming sentences. Hint: I was never very good at it! I’m not even kidding about this…I had nightmares the very night I was pondering writing about this topic. You know the drill if you want to see how many different ways I’ve used various profanity as nouns, verbs, adverbs, or adjectives. Just click the links below!