risqué

Cary Wiggins alerted us to a recent, scholarly article about, of all things, the F-word. His blog, called Meeting the Sin Laws, covers the intersection of sin, vice, alcohol beverages, and the law.

Wiggins points to The Connotations of the F-Word. This is a post in The Language Log; it is a blog run out of the University of Pennsylvania since 2003. The post is by Chris Potts, a Professor of Linguistics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He wants to get a better understanding of why people tend to remain so fascinated with this term (and other “taboo vocabulary”). He wants to know:

Does it in fact have sexual connotations even when used as an intensive, as in Bono’s “really, really f-ing brilliant”?

Ed. note: F-word modified. It’s not an idle topic; the FCC needs to grapple with this and so does TTB. Potts applies some fancy academics to this not so fancy topic, with cosine measures, cooccurrences, fleeting expletives, formal linguistic theories, latent semantic analysis, and even rubrics of framing. He does not necessarily conclude that the term has much to do with sex.

This topic has a fair amount of relevance here, because this terminology pops up on alcohol beverage labels more often than you...

TTB is still very strict about things like an age reference on the front label of a wine (requiring how long it was aged and in what). But these labels show, about as well as anything, that TTB has eased up substantially in other areas. In the 21 years before 2001, we find not one BITCH approval. By contrast, in the 7 years since 2001, we find not less than 65 BITCH approvals. We don’t see any great need for the government to banish this term, on adult beverages, but we do wonder why it’s so prevalent. There is Sexy Bitch above, Royal Bitch, Tasty Bitch, and there are many others. Where is the wine relating to cranky men?

What with all the hullabaloo about Joe the Plumber, the least we thought we could do is bring you this “fine ale.” If you dare, please use the comments to expand upon this crack concept.