I don't think fanny means what you think it does.

It's fucking amazing how few uses of the word "fuck" actually have to do with fucking. Un-fucking-believable.

A thrilling ride on the fuck truck, you mean!

I can see all the others, but I'm still trying to figure out how 'fuck' can be a pronoun.

Any help?

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.

Don't you mean it will soon be the ONLY reference manual?

I feel like I read this book back in the 1990's. Is there another book of the same name? I believe it had a yellow jacket though.

There's a popular documentary out all about it already. If the word truly isn't a big deal, I don't know why we obsess over it so much.

It ought to go well next to Watch Your Fucking Language.

Best in comments in the link, from NW:

"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."

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."