I just sent my sister a text ~ 'shit just got real because NOAA is forecasting 5 to 7 inches of snow Saturday'.

My sister, who never swears, texted back ~ 'FUCK ME'.

🤣 ❄️ 😰

#chandra #snow #swearing

🤬 National poll: Less than half of parents say swearing is never OK for kids

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-01-national-poll-parents-kids.html

#swearing #polls #children #parents #parenting #morals #culture #survey #research

IngramSpark is raising prices again???

I just increased prices last year, I don't want to do it again! #writing #swearing #reallyBadSwearing #noEvenWorseThanThat

Can you freaking believe that "freaking" is almost 100 years old? @stancarey salutes a popular euphemism:
https://stronglang.wordpress.com/2026/01/22/another-freaking-f-word/

#swearing #slang #euphemisms #freaking #language #linguistics #intensifiers

Another freaking f-word. New post for @stronglang about "freaking" as a euphemistic intensifier:
https://stronglang.wordpress.com/2026/01/22/another-freaking-f-word/

#language #swearing #euphemisms #slang #freaking #linguistics #StrongLanguage

Another freaking f-word

I never fully adopted freaking as an intensifier, euphemistic for fucking, partly because I swear fairly freely, and maybe also because fecking was available in my Irish English dialect. But I like having freaking available, and with its hundredth birthday round the corner, it’s a good time to showcase it.1

Freaking substitutes for its ruder cousin in all sorts of lexical and syntactic contexts, modifying adjectives (that was freaking amazing), verbs (let’s freaking go), and nouns (how is it still freaking January?), among other word classes; it’s also used as an infix (un-freaking-real) and in set phrases like freakin’ A – euphemistic, obviously, for fucking A.

Origins and use

The earliest known use of this freaking – the first citation in Green’s Dictionary of Slang, Jesse Sheidlower’s The F-Word, and the OED – is in the 1928 novel Georgie May, where author Maxwell Bodenheim uses two freakings and a freakin’, including:

“Gawd, ah hate the hull, freaking pack uh you,” she cried, between her sobbing.

The next example those dictionaries list is in Nelson Algren’s The Man with the Golden Arm (1949):

“You point that freakin’ finger at me ’n you’re one dead pointer.”

That 21-year gap doesn’t mean no one was using it in the meantime. I found the line “You freaking fool!” in the 1937 screwball comedy Nothing Sacred, available on YouTube and the Internet Archive at around the 47m 40s mark:

Films and TV, with their heightened emotions and industrious regulators, are a natural home for this expressive but family-friendly expletive. A chart from COCA shows its use concentrated in those media, occurring at over four times the rate in fiction generally and over six times the rate in speech:2

As Wiktionary notes, “Freaking (or fricking) is often used in motion pictures as a substitute for fucking so that characters can be shown to swear without the motion picture incurring censorship or a higher certificate than it otherwise might.”

Less discerningly, the Encyclopædia Britannica says freaking is “used to make an angry statement more forceful”. That’s not wrong, but it’s misleadingly narrow: freaking can amplify all sorts of emotions, even joy – ask Ned Flanders.

WikiHow knows this. An article by Wits End Parenting and Elaine Heredia says you can use freaking “to emphasize how great something or someone is” and that it “can be a positive or negative word based on context”. It adds that the word “isn’t a sin to say”, in case you were wondering.

Data

Freaking is on the rise but has been levelling off, according to data in COCA and Google’s Ngram Viewer. Rows under the dates below show frequency (i.e., number of uses), number of million words in the sample, and (hence, by division) per-million figures for direct comparison:

That levelling off is despite global use. Geographically, freaking is most popular not in the US but in Singapore, per the GloWbE corpus (freakin has the same top two, reversed). Malaysia comes in third, followed by Canada, Australia, and the Philippines:

Jack Grieve’s eye-catching swear maps of the USA, meanwhile, allow us to zoom in on what States are especially partial to freaking and freakin. Californians’ relative coolness towards them came as a surprise:

Browsing the word’s collocates (freaking/freakin’ ___) in COCA shows the company it keeps. High-ranking +1s include the adjectives awesome, amazing, hilarious, crazy, cool, hot, stupid, hard, and huge; nouns like idiot, mind, thing, break, genius, clue, and deal; and occasional verbs, like love, hate, kidding, and kill.

Some of these invite us to extrapolate the full phrases, or chunks: big freaking deal; give me a freakin’ break; not have a freaking clue; out of my/your/etc. freaking mind; Are you freakin’ kidding?

Other language corpora, such as the 14-billion-word iWeb, show a similar pattern of collocations:

Easily topping the +1s are the preposition out and the pronoun me: a sign of how well freaking [me] out caught on as an idiom, with multiple senses, after being coined in the 1960s. That’s a different usage, of course: not the intensifier freaking but the verb freak (or rather the verb phrase freak out) in the present progressive tense.

Pragmatics

Zappa fits right in here: freaking offers outsider energy for any self-defined freak (or geek) who cares to use it.3 The word’s gently countercultural flavour is also apparent in dictionary citations, where Tom Wolfe’s name recurs.

What makes freaking effective as a minced oath, and attractive to mild and novice swearers, is that it offers proximity to (and thus evocation of) strong swearing while remaining relatively benign. We see this niche exploited expertly by a child in the vampire comic 30 Days of Night: Return to Barrow:

A little later the boy defaults to freakin’, this time automatically obeying his father’s no-swearing rule, and making the word more casual by dropping the g:

Freaking is not always a straightforward substitute for fucking, however. The particular way that it lands caused slight consternation for slang expert Michael Adams when his son started using it at the age of seven:

. . . he’s not just saying That’s freakin’ cool or No freakin’ way. No, he’s saying things like What the freak?! which is a long way from Oh, my gosh on the euphemism scale. There’s the underlying profanity. There’s the phonetics. There’s the fact — apparently — that What the hell? and What the freak? — while parallel — signify differently.4

Films redubbed for TV broadcast have mixed fortunes with it, as my post “Freak those monkey-fightin’ melon farmers!” shows. “I don’t need full freakin’ forensics” in Die Hard 2 (1990) is passable, if implausible in a police station, while “Freak you!” in Casino (1995) is comically underpowered.

In his 2016 book In Praise of Profanity (which I reviewed here and recommend), Michael Adams discusses how the vowels, consonants, and pragmatics of various “partial euphemisms” for fuck – feck, frak, frick, frig, and their freaky fraternity – do their work:

. . . although people usually think euphemisms work because they substitute for profanity, in fact many euphemisms are themselves partially profane, because they more or less cover up profanities—usually less—that are still inscribed in the situations of their use, and our minds’ eyes see through them to the profanities . . . . what makes profanity and the relevant euphemisms pragmatically powerful and interesting is that the euphemisms are often both euphemisms and profanity, a fact not unknown in linguistic circles but too often overlooked when we calculate the logic of language attitudes.

We’re advocates of strong language here at Strong Language, but we know it’s not suitable for all occasions: sometimes a softball is called for. And among the many euphemisms for fucking, freaking has, in a century or so of use, established itself as a truly effective and useful option. It may be mild, but it’s got freakin’ game.

*

1 The OED also lists an obsolete, mid-17thC sense of freaking (adj.): “Of a person: inclined to change his or her mind, mood, or behaviour suddenly and unaccountably; given to freakish ideas; capricious, fickle, whimsical.” One of its fans was Samuel freakin’ Pepys: “He told me what a mad freaking fellow Sir Ellis Layton hath been” (Diary, 25 January, 1665).

2 I was unable to separate the verb freaking from the intensifier using part-of-speech tags in COCA, GloWbE, and iWeb, so these uses are combined in the graphs. To fortify the data somewhat I checked 300 examples in each corpus and found that, in COCA, 76% were the intensifier and 24% were the verb (freaking out, or plain freaking with the same sense); in GloWbE it was 74% and 26%, and in iWeb 68% and 32%. So you can consider the graphs broadly indicative but with that significant caveat.

3 We still don’t know where freak came from: origin unknown, the dictionaries say, though the OED offers speculation. Skeat says freak in the sense “whim” is of Germanic origin, being frec “bold, rash” in Old English.

4 Adams has also analyzed the use of freaking in the TV series 13 Reasons Why, tracing a character’s graduation from euphemistic to full-bore profanity.

#censorship #comics #corpusLinguistics #euphemisms #expletiveInfixation #freakOut #freaking #fuck #fucking #infixation #intensifiers #mincedOaths #phrases #popCulture #slang #swearing

Listening to the new Sleaford Mods album and if we we doing a swear jar I think there would be two hundred quid in it by now. 5 tracks left to play. Gwendoline Christine's outburst on the opening track is probably the best though. #swearing

Swearing Is A Super Power. More than relieve frustration, it could actually help you push harder and perform better. #swearing #strength #confidence #performance
https://www.instagram.com/p/DTdr2qmGG27/

HE KILLED STRIPPIN?!?! | #roflgator on #Twitch #shorts #robert #swearing #vrchat #erp #strippin https://www.twitch.tv/roflgator

@juliusgoat.bsky.social Brilliant! Thank you! #obscenity #swearing #MN #ICE

Once a liar always a liar, once a bitch always a bitch. Not for every case, but are common.

#swearing

Don't shit up your health, keep fucking swearing, mofos!

The Surprising Health Benefits Of Swearing:
https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/health-benefits-swearing_uk_69550d6ce4b0ed8017e0340e

#News #Newstodon #NewsTooter #Health #Swearing

@maxleibman I hope this helps?
(sth I wrote 5yrs back)
https://noodlemaz.wordpress.com/2020/08/15/offended-by-swearing-get-better-priorities/
#swearing #cursing #NewYearsResolution

It's back to work for me this morning 😒
Maybe now it's a good to time to share that swearing contains its very own superpower.
Not that we would ever do it at Matilda's Lab!
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1110041
#sciencenews #swearing

Watch: Zohran Mamdani sworn in as Mayor of New York City

Just after midnight on January 1st, Zohran Kwame Mamdani was officially sworn in as the 112th Mayor of the City of New York, by New York State Attorney General Letitia James. Watch a replay.

https://www.nwprogressive.org/microblog/2025/12/watch-zohran-mamdani-sworn-in-as-mayor-of-new-york-city/

#Swearing-Ins

@fesshole
Brilliant.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2eWDmUl4_Y
(Unfortunately some buggering arsehole has beeped this video which used to be jolly amusing.) :-(
#swearing #SwearWords

Have some Christmas-themed Strong Language! From the blog archives: https://stronglang.wordpress.com/tag/christmas/

#Christmas #swearing #profanity #Xmas

Does swearing make you stronger? Science says yes.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/12/does-swearing-make-you-stronger-science-says-yes/

Fucking knew it :)

#cursing #swearing #science

According to study author Dr Richard Stephens, “Swearing is an easily available way to help yourself feel focused, confident and less distracted, and ‘go for it’ a little more” when exercising.

It is so odd that some humans stigmatise some sounds. As someone who engineers sound, I know all sounds are equal, just frequencies, though some are more comfortable than others.

To an extent it is understandable, but hard to pin down as comfort is subjective. Both the unconsciously repressed, and the abusive narcissist/sociopath/psychopathy evades reality by conditioning fear of healthy sounds, attitudes or emotions in others.

Next to that is understandable avoidance of chaos caused by lack of internal emotional regulation, but the emotionally numbed person will stigmatise healthy expression. That becomes abuse fast. That makes me recall therapy clients who had been shamed and blamed by religious parents for representing or *being* realities the religion sought to deny. This is playing out in the current policies of the US, for instance, with many buying into hate largely processed unconsciously, rather than the slower and more rewarding socially enriching process of learning about the person or thing which is 'different'.

Sound is powerful, able to bypass conscious perception as it occurs so fast, and go straight to the accurate or inaccurate preferences of the unconscious mind. Like so many things, it can be labelled good or bad, but is really neutral. It is the limitation of our own processing that some say otherwise.

As they say in NLP, the communication is not what is said. It is what is heard.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/health/swearing-benefits-stronger-study-science-b2887663.html

#study #swearing #bigotry #prejudice #USPolitics #religion

Could’nt resist sharing this gem

It turns out profanities aren't just fun, they may actually be a secret superpower, boosting your strength and staying power, according to UK scientists(…)