Favorite use of a fuck derivation? "Fucko" in Tim Powers "Last Call." A nasty character on his way to being whacked is called "fucko" by one of the hitmen. Said NC begins bitterly complaining that his executioners could at least have the courtesy of calling him "fucker" because "fucker" is active and implies that the soon to be dead asshole has fucked, whereas "fucko" is insulting because it just sounds like a midget clown's name.
@5: Wiktionary suggests that it's a pronoun in the "shut the fuck up"...
The blog post from LDC (which is written by, and for, linguists) seems to agree -- that in that construction, it's a semantically vacuous part of the idiomatic Noun Phrase (NP) "the fuck"
Now... depending on what syntactician you ask, many would probably consider such noun-like, but semantically meaningless words, (such as "it is raining" or "there is cause for alarm") as "dummy" pronouns (They're standing in for something noun-like, even if that something is unclear and idiomatic).
...either way, this whole post made my linguistics-student day.
Courtesy of Mike Royko, one of the best sentences uttered by a Chicago Police Dept desk clerk as an uncooperative perp was being hauled into the station: "Ahh, fuck the fucking fucker."
Any help?
The blog post from LDC (which is written by, and for, linguists) seems to agree -- that in that construction, it's a semantically vacuous part of the idiomatic Noun Phrase (NP) "the fuck"
Now... depending on what syntactician you ask, many would probably consider such noun-like, but semantically meaningless words, (such as "it is raining" or "there is cause for alarm") as "dummy" pronouns (They're standing in for something noun-like, even if that something is unclear and idiomatic).
...either way, this whole post made my linguistics-student day.
Fuckin' moron.
"Oh, it fails so many tests:
*The fuck was shut up by the audience.
*What they shut up was the fuck.
*That was the fuck they shut up."