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This page is devoted to examples of the use of highbrow and lowbrow terminology simultaneously. Capische?


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    Law 
Prefatory comment: The law is a realm in which stuffy, old-fashioned decorum is the rule of the day. But sometimes lawyers get frustrated, and sometimes the courts have to deal with reality on its own terms...
  • This actual answer to a threatening letter from Dreamworks to the Swedish bitTorrent site The Pirate Bay ended with "It is the opinion of us and our lawyers that you are fucking morons, and that you should please go sodomize yourself with retractable batons."
  • In the libel case of Arkell v. Pressdram (Pressdram being the company that publishes Private Eye), the lawyers for Arkell (an obviously-corrupt local politician) sent Private Eye a letter informing the Eye that "Our client's attitude to damages will depend on the nature of your reply." Pressdram, thinking that this was a bit rich given that (for once) the Eye was likely able to prove its case at trial, sent a letter back which read "We would be interested to know what your client's attitude to damages would be if the nature of our reply were as follows: Fuck off". Ever since then, Arkell v. Pressdram has become a Running Gag for Private Eye; anyone who presses what Pressdram regards as a baseless lawsuit gets the reply, "We refer you to the reply given in the case of Arkell v. Pressdram."
  • This opinion (Yeagle v. Collegiate Times, 497 S.E.2d 136 (Va. 1998)), in which the Virginia Supreme Court had to decide whether the student newspaper at Virginia Tech captioning a photo of a university administrator "Director of Butt Licking" was defamation, has some choice quotes as well. For instance:
    We awarded Yeagle an appeal limited to the question whether the trial court erred in holding that, as a matter of law, the phrase "Director of Butt Licking" cannot convey a defamatory meaning.
    [several lines later] In this case, the phrase "Director of Butt Licking" is no more than "rhetorical hyperbole". The phrase is disgusting, offensive, and in extremely bad taste, but it cannot reasonably be understood as stating an actual fact about Yeagle's job title or her conduct, or that she committed a crime of moral turpitude.
  • Alex Kozinski, a Judge on the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, is famous for lacing his opinions with this trope. The most famous came in the 2002 case Mattel, Inc. v. MCA Records, Inc., 296 F.3d 894 (9th Cir. 2002), arising over Mattel's accusation that Aqua's song "Barbie Girl" turned Barbie into a sex object. Kozinski's opinion began as follows:
    "If this were a sci-fi melodrama, it might be called Speech-Zilla meets Trademark Kong."
    • And then ended as follows:
      "The parties are advised to chill."
    • (Kozinski held for MCA, which is why you can still find "Barbie Girl" on the market).
    • Kozinski's style can also be seen in this case (see this article for why going to "Costco to buy some food" is relevant to the case):
      Here’s what this case boils down to: Officers had a hunch that a drug transaction was going down. They saw nothing obviously suspicious but got tired of waiting, watching, and wiretapping. They then jumped the gun by executing a warrantless search. Until today, this was not enough to support probable cause, but going forward it will be. This is a green light for the police to search anyone’s property based on what officers subjectively believe—or claim to believe—about someone’s everyday conduct. That puts all of us at risk. Accordingly, I dissent, and I’m off to Costco to buy some food.
  • Similar to the Law & Order example in the Live-Action TV subpage, when Moral Guardian Jack Thompson sued 2 Live Crew in the '80s, part of his prosecution included reading the group's lyrics to jury members... who then asked if it was all right to laugh during the trial. Needless to say, Jackie Boy didn't win this one.
  • Lenny Bruce performed after being arrested for obscenity in Chicago and complained about testimony in his case consisting of a policeman reciting his act.
  • 4chan's moot in a direct examination for the Sarah Palin email-hacking trial explains several terms of /b/tardese at the prompting of Assistant United States Attorney Krotoski. (page 12ish)
  • In law, the term "Statute of Limitations" conveniently abbreviates to "SOL." Thus lawyers (in America at least) are wont to say that when the statute of limitations has run on an action, the potential plaintiff is "SOL('d)": that is, "shit outta luck".
  • In 2008, A Berlin court dismissed a case of a police officer feeling insultednote  by a passer-by snarking, "Hey, Oberförster!note  The forest's that way!", with the following words:
    Decision: ...[the defendant's statement] is a dumb, at best mediocrely funny quip that should not be attributed with any deeper meaning or attention. It is a statement that a police officer and likewise [the plaintiff] should, unless he can think of a quick-witted retort, ignore. In any case, the Prosecution sees no reason to charge such Schmarrn.note 
  • Ask a practicing lawyer how exactly he or she described what their client was doing to a Magistrate or Judge when their client was doing something publicly humiliating, stupid, or naked (or all three).
  • Bailey v. Mathers is a 2003 defamation case in which the infamously vulgar rapper Eminem was sued for defamation by DeAngelo Bailey, his former school bully, for writing a song Very Loosely Based On the abuse he faced. The document is written as one would expect, but at the end contains an attempt to describe the ruling in "a universally understandable format", which turns out to be rap-like rhyming verse. This has led to the case becoming popular in law schools, where students (usually drunk and/or high) will attempt to perform the rap.
    Everything Else 
  • Arnold Schwarzenegger here, in which he politely informs California State Legislature that they are idiots. Oh, and the first letter of each line reads 'FUCK YOU'.
  • A British newspaper sub-editor whose life had been made a misery by a bullying editor, a Mr. Piper, got his revenge on his last day. He arranged a series of short news bites, as with the Schwarzenegger example, so that the indented and enlarged first letter of each spelled out the phrase FUCK YOU PIPER as you read down the list.
  • James Franco. Not how he speaks but his interests. He's a writer and is into classic literature, art, and movies. He isn't called a Renaissance man for nothing. This makes it a little weird knowing he's done movies filled with toilet humor and is good friends with Seth Rogen. Also, he got Gucci to sponsor his film Dicknose in Paris which is exactly what it sounds like. This project seems to itself qualify for this trope.
  • This House Concurrent Resolution (no. 29) put forth by the Idaho State Legislature, commending Jared and Jerusha Hess for the writing and production of Napoleon Dynamite. The turning point comes long about page 2, line 4, though one should at least start with line 2 on the same page: "Whereas, any members of the House of Representatives or the Senate of the Legislature of the State of Idaho who choose to vote 'Nay' on this concurrent resolution are freakin' idiots and run the risk of having the worst day of their lives." It was passed 69-0, one member absent, by a voice vote.
  • In 1970, newly-elected Alabama State Attorney General Bill Baxley re-opened Birmingham's 16th Street Church bombing case (the basis for Spike Lee's 4 Little Girls and a turning point in the American Civil Rights movement). Over the years that followed, he received threatening letters from the state's still-powerful Ku Klux Klan chapter, including one from Klansman Dr. Edward R. Fields comparing him unfavorably to Robert Kennedy and implying that he might soon meet a similar fate to Kennedy. The full text of Baxley's response to Fields' letter, on official state letterhead:
    Dear "Dr." Fields: My response to your letter of February 19, 1976 is — kiss my ass.
  • The 1985 resolution in the Ohio General Assembly that made "Hang On Sloopy" the state rock song (there's a reason why you hear it at every Ohio State football game) had lines such as:
    WHEREAS, Adoption of "Hang On Sloopy" as the official rock song of Ohio is in no way intended to supplant "Beautiful Ohio" as the official state song, but would serve as a companion piece to that old chestnut
    Whereas, If fans of jazz, country-and-western, classical, Hawaiian and polka music think those styles also should be recognized by the state, then by golly, they can push their own resolution just like we're doing
    Whereas, "Hang On Sloopy" is of particular relevance to members of the Baby Boom Generation, who were once dismissed as a bunch of long-haired, crazy kids, but who now are old enough and vote in sufficient numbers to be taken quite seriously
    Whereas, Adoption of this resolution will not take too long, cost the state anything, or affect the quality of life in this state to any appreciable degree, and if we in the legislature just go ahead and pass the darn thing, we can get on with more important stuff
    Whereas, Sloopy lives in a very bad part of town, and everybody, yeah, tries to put my Sloopy down.
  • In 1984, Joschka Fischer, then member (for the Green party) of the German Parliament, addressed the President of the Parliament with "Mit Verlaub, Herr Präsident, Sie sind ein Arschloch." Translation: "With respect, Mister President, you are an asshole." (Using the formal form of "you.")
  • Some correspondence during the Battle of the Bulge of WWII as described in Stephen E. Ambrose's "Band of Brothers," and recounted in a later interview with Lt. General Henry Kinnard, then a Lt. Colonel serving on the 101st Airborne Division staff at the time.
    To: the USA commander of the encircled town of Bastogne; from: the German commander; there follows a four-paragraph message demanding an "honorable surrender to save the encircled USA troops from total annihilation".
    To: The German commander; "NUTS!" — The American commander.
    • Incidentally, this story was told, and later emulated, in an episode of Jericho (2006).
  • There are some who feel that if they attack us, that we may decide to leave prematurely. They don't understand what they're talking about. There are some who feel like the conditions are such that they can attack us there. My answer is, "Bring 'em on." — President George W. Bush
  • In An Utterly Impartial History of Britain, or 2000 Years of Upper-Class Idiots In Charge, John O'Farrell discusses the effect that Norman domination of Saxon England would have hundreds of years down the line:
    That is why you will never hear a BBC newsreader saying, 'Several British beaches have lost their blue flags after EC inspectors detected unacceptably high levels of shite. The Prime Minister described the decision as "bollocks".'
  • Barack Obama's speaking style is practically built on this. The man can switch from talking like the Harvard-educated master orator that he is to down-homey simplicity so fast it gives English majors whiplash. From the 2008 Alfred E. Smith charity event: "If I had to name my greatest strength, it would be my humility. My greatest weakness: it's possible that I'm a little too awesome."
    • Autotune The News has exploited this fact beautifully.
    • Him quoting swear-happy classmate "Ray" in the audiobook of Dreams from My Father is hilarious because he maintains his standard "educated" tone while doing so.
  • Attend any gathering of philosophy students, especially if there's alcohol involved, and you'll hear this trope in spades. It even makes its way into the classroom sometimes (the pattern of speech, not the alcohol, although that also occasionally happens too).
  • Many university students display this. It may come from the double nature of the college years: one side, the university teaches you an academic manner of speaking, introduces you to general culture, and gives you an advanced education which probably involves a large amount of technical lingo. On the other side, students are all young adults in the modern world, who witness an ever-increasing amount of vulgar pop culture. As a result, a discussion between two students can move from quoting Plato and Hemingway to extreme profanity in a heartbeat.
  • Computer Scientists; their entire jargon is based on this kind of thing. The result of an "infinite recursion causing total memory allocation," for instance, may be that your system will proceed to "barf".
  • Anyone who knows a smidgeon of Latin can pick up on the fact that early anatomists must have been using this kind of humor when they named so many bodily features "mastoid", which means "boob" — well, "breastlike".
  • The Weekly World News. Nearly every paragraph of an average issue uses it, usually to great effect. In fact, this deeply misunderstood and underappreciated institution produces top-notch journalistic satire and a deliciously surreal view of American life that would please Charles Fort and Aleister Crowley as well as John Waters and P.T. Barnum. For decades, behind a smokescreen of anonymity, in a newsroom where awards, fame, and journalistic integrity meant nothing at all, young writers with nothing to lose, mature writers who just wanted to blow off steam, idealists who refused to play the game, burn-outs who played the game too hard, Hiaasenesque Tough Guys who got screwed by the corrupt system, and pale, tense young men who believed every word have produced a weekly journal of the U.S.'s greatest hopes, its darkest fears, and above all its strangest and most inexplicably haunting dreams. To lump The Weekly World News in with the vicious, puerile, hate-mongering tabloids that surrounded it in the checkout line is to disregard a true American original. From jazz to rap, from Willie Nelson to the Residents, from comic strips to the American Beauty rose, American art has always grown best when its roots are planted in shit. Also, Batboy could kick your ass.
  • In The Unknown Marx Brothers, a cooperative real-life example of this pops up when Dick Cavett relates an anecdote (and it definitely helps to hear him tell this in his calm, mannered delivery) about Chico Marx being a notorious womanizer and a crude one at that. He is to meet Tallulah Bankhead, "a great aristocratic beauty", at a fancy party of some sort, and everyone's worried about Chico making an embarrassing pass at her and causing a scene. He promises he'll behave. The day comes, he meets her, they converse pleasantly, and everyone breathes a sigh of relief. Chico then tells Tallulah "You know, I'd really like to fuck you." She replies, "And so you shall, you old-fashioned boy." note  Cue Cavett's interviewers cracking up.
  • Channel Awesome has Fanfic Theatre and Lyrical Poetry, which are Exactly What It Says on the Tin, taking a highbrow approach to lowbrow entertainment.
  • According to The Other Wiki, even respected scholars refer to the tendency of semi-anonymous members of online communities to act more vulgarly and aggressively towards each other as the "Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory". In addition to potentially being a misapplication of the word "Theory," the vocal dissonance is fucking hilarious. (The polite name for this phenomenon is the "online disinhibition effect".)
  • Kevin Rudd, Australia's former PM (07-2'10), is guilty of this. Whilst explaining his reasoning behind the Government's latest actions with regard to the financial crisis, he broke his normal Spock Speak and actually said there'd be a "political shitstorm" in response to his plans. On national television, uncensored. The real kicker? The opposition parties actually accused him of employing this very trope so as to improve his polling amongst the workers. May also be a Precision F-Strike.
  • Five Thirty Eight (a political statistics blog) had this beautiful sentence when talking about denial of Global Warming:
    "There's just one little problem with this story, which reappears every so often in conservative discourse on the environment. Specifically, it's a crock of shit."
  • This academic paper, which analyses slang terms for genitalia. Notable as an academic paper that cites Roger's Profanisaurus as a reference.
    • A similar example is the famous joke computer science paper "The Complexity of Songs" by Donald Knuth, with such lines as: "We have seen that the partridge in the pear tree gave an improvement of only 1/sqrt(log n) [...] The next big breakthrough was [...] a class of songs known as "m Bottles of Beer on the Wall" [...]"
  • Ben Goldacre; Doctor, Author, Blogger, Science Geek. He gives talks on topics like the Placebo and Nocebo effects, scientific research, bias in media reporting, and drops phrases like "skullfucked with his datacock" and "metric fuckton" into the middle of these important issues with breathtakingly casual insouciance. It's not often you get to laugh out loud in a presentation about the numerous ways that shoddy science reporting is trying to kill you.
  • Dwight Eisenhower wrote, in 1954:
    Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are...[a] few other Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid.
  • George Takei has this policy when it comes to homophobia and anti-gay sentiments in the media. Remember, it's ok to be Takei.
    "No person, let alone an elected school official, whatever their personal or religious beliefs, should ever wish death upon another human being. You apologized for your 'poor choice in words', but you are always going to be a total douchebag."
  • The Irish parliament gives us this little exchange
    Deputy Paul Gogarty: I respected the Deputy's sincerity and I ask him to respect mine.
    Deputy Emmet Stagg: The Deputy does not seem very sincere from what he has been saying.
    Acting Chairman: Deputy Stagg will have his opportunity in a few minutes.
    Deputy Paul Gogarty: With all due respect, in the most unparliamentary language, fuck you Deputy Stagg. Fuck you.
  • News coverage during the 2008 Hurricane Gustav, which looked like it was going to be a much bigger deal than it actually turned out to be, had a prize quote from the Mayor of New Orleans:
    Mayor Nagin: [after explaining that he usually tries to reassure the populace in these situations] You need to be scared. You need to be concerned. And you need to get your butts out of town. Right now.
  • The classic linguistics paper "English Sentences Without Overt Grammatical Subjects". The sentences in question include "Fuck you", "Fuck Lyndon Johnson", and "Fuck these seven irregular verbs".
  • In Dirty Jokes and Beer, Drew Carey cites a number of examples of this, including "Please note the excessive use of ‘hell’ and ‘damn’ found on pages 4, 20, 21, 22, 28, 38, 40, and 52, and reduce this number by half."
  • This bit from Neil Gaiman's journal:
    Look, this may not be palatable, Gareth, and I keep trying to come up with a better way to put it, but the simplicity of things, at least from my perspective is this:
    George R.R. Martin is not your bitch.
  • One YouTube commentator was disappointed with the level of discourse over this clip from the Panel Game You Have Been Watching, with musician Jamelia in a low-cut top and wrote:
    I've seen a lot of depressing and puerile comments about how "incredible" the girl's tits are, as though a pair of tits has never been seen before. This kind of schoolboy leering and sniggering is what brings YouTube down and prevents it from being the cultural breakthrough that it should be. I'm so frustrated by it that the only thing that will cheer me up is buttering up two melons and bringing myself off between them as though they were Jamelia's very own shining, wobbling tits.
  • Another YouTube doozy about the hind parts of a very well-built lady in pink shorts from a music video by Cazzette at about 0:48 in:
    I would put my dick so far up that pink blonde ass, whoever pull it out would be crowned King Arthur.
  • The deceased Christopher Hitchens was truly a master of this trope.
    Hitchens: [wrapping up his description of the state ideology of North Korea] ...it's impossible to describe the nothingness of the life of a North Korean. But at least you can fucking die and leave North Korea.
  • There is a truly epic critique on the Erotic Literature page of 99chan.
    It is less than nothing, it is a paragon of terrible. I have never regretted reading something more than this... Don't take this story down. Leave it up, like the skeleton of a pirate with a sign hung around its neck. "Abandon all desire to fap, ye who enter here."
  • According to The Other Wiki, freshmen members of the Texas A&M Corps of Cadets (known as fish) are required to answer any questions asked of them by upperclassmen with certain prescribed answers. If the freshman doesn't know the answer to the question, the required answer is as follows (spoken very rapidly):
    Sir/Ma'am, not being informed to the highest degree of accuracy I hesitate to articulate for fear that I may deviate from the true course of rectitude. In short, sir/ma'am, I am a very dumb fish, and do not know, sir/ma'am!
  • Roger Ebert uses this from time to time in his film criticism. A famous example:
    "Speaking in my official capacity as a Pulitzer Prize winner, Mr. Schneider, your movie sucks."
  • A contestant on America's Got Talent juggled stun guns. Before the act, he said: "It's a scientific fact that if I catch two of these on the wrong end, it will suck."
  • Biologists, in published works and scholarly lectures, refer to individual animals that copulate outside their established pair-bonds and/or dominance hierarchies as "pursuers of status- and frequency-dependent secondary reproductive strategies". Anywhere but formal lectures or articles, they're referred to in off-the-record scientific discussions as "sneaky fuckers".
  • "You know, Minister, I believe that in the long view of history, the British Empire will be remembered only for two things. The game of soccer. And the expression 'fuck off.'"
  • Houston Texans running back Arian Foster tweeted "This is an MRI of my hamstring, The white stuff surrounding the muscle is known in the medical world as anti-awesomeness."
  • William F. Buckley Jr. and Gore Vidal met for a debate during the DNC in 1968. What began as a debate descended into an insult-fest made of this trope. Its nadir was this exchange:
    Vidal: As far as I'm concerned the only sort of... pro... crypto-Nazi I can think of is yourself. Failing that-
    Buckley: Now listen you queer (pronounced quee-ah), stop calling me a crypto-Nazi, or I'll sock you in the goddamn face, and you'll stay plastered. Tell the author of Myra Brack-Breckenridge to go back to his pornography and stop making any allusions of Nazism to somebody who was in the infantry in the last war. (At this point, he's leaning out over his seat and shouting)
  • Rapper Ice Cube did this short film on American Mid-Century Modern designers Ray and Charles Eames for the Los Angeles Contemporary Museum of Art. His praise of the Eames' use of local environment and land in their house design:
    This is goin' green 1949 style, bitch!
  • Peter Cook. The following one-liner about a Sex Pistols concert is commonly attributed to him: "And there you have it. The first recorded instance of the fan hitting the shit."
  • 419 Scam e-mails often have this; the writers usually seem to have only a vague grasp of how the words they use work, even when they manage to imitate a quite complex official or other language. (See also: Delusions of Eloquence.) It might even sound authentic for a moderately long stretch of text, and then you'll suddenly run into an Internet shorthand like "pls", or something similar. (There's also enough Rouge Angles of Satin and Wanton Cruelty to the Common Comma to go around.)
  • This letter from NFL player Chris Kluwe to a homophobic state legislator, which includes gems such as:
    "In closing, I would like to say that I hope this letter, in some small way, causes you to reflect upon the magnitude of the colossal foot in mouth clusterfuck you so brazenly unleashed on a man whose only crime was speaking out for something he believed in."
  • The venerable Dame Judi Dench embroiders in her spare time, weaving patterns that spell out wholesome slogans, such as "You Are A Fucking Shit", and "You are A Cunt". Yes, really.
  • Samuel 'Jalix' Mclean, a somewhat popular internet personality, has almost constant lapses of this, for example, in an assignment he had been making for his school regarding proper grammar usage, he came out with this; "Your spastic capital placements, your ignored commas, your unholy abuse of incoherent sentences. All blasphemous, heinous 'n heretical acts that must be purged, however only in curriculum because if I was going to complain about your bad use of grammar in a purely social situation with no provocation, I'd look a complete arse now, wouldn't I?"
  • St. Thomas More in his work "A Response to Luther". He was in a debate with Martin Luther, who was really foul-mouthed. More felt it was necessary to respond to him in kind.
    "Come, do not rage so violently, good father; but if you have raved wildly enough, listen now, you pimp. You recall that you falsely complained above that the king has shown no passage in your whole book, even as an example, in which he said that you contradict yourself. You told this lie shortly before, although the king has demonstrated to you many examples of your inconsistency. Suppose that the king here in turn asks of you why you have not produced even one passage as an example in which you say he blasphemes God. Your paternity must by all means search out and produce this passage. But meanwhile, for as long as your reverend paternity will be determined to tell these shameless lies, others will be permitted, on behalf of his English majesty, to throw back into your paternity’s shitty mouth, truly the shit-pool of all shit, all the muck and shit which your damnable rottenness has vomited up, and to empty out all the sewers and privies onto your crown divested of the dignity of the priestly crown, against which no less than against the kingly crown you have determined to play the buffoon. In your sense of fairness, honest reader, you will forgive me that the utterly filthy words of this scoundrel have forced me to answer such things, for which I should have begged your leave. Now I consider truer than truth that saying: 'He who touches pitch will be wholly defiled by it.' For I am ashamed even of this necessity, that while I clean out the fellow’s shit-filled mouth I see my own-fingers covered with shit."
  • A Royal Marine was convicted in 2013 for executing a Taliban insurgent. Just after shooting the wounded fighter, his helmet-cam recorded him saying "Shuffle off this mortal coil, you cunt. It's nothing you wouldn't do to us."
  • The Stranger, a Seattle-based alt-weekly, lives on this trope. Their news coverage of City Hall is far more in-depth than what's covered in the Seattle Times, they run an extensive pull-out section of endorsements and candidates for every local office each election, and won a Pulitzer for their coverage of a sensational criminal trial and in-depth serial investigation as to how the mentally ill murderer slipped through the cracks of the social system. On the other hand, they are home base to DanSavage's raunchy advice column (Savage himself being an example of the trope), NSFW personal ads, and are the main sponsors of an amateur porn film festival.
  • A common occurrence in many military services is for duty to require an NCO note  to deliver a verbal rebuke to a high-ranking officer. This typically consists of exactly the same rebuke he would deliver to anyone else, but with recognition of the recipient's status.
    Fasten your fucking seatbelt, sir.
  • In May 2014, Stephen Hawking was asked to calculate the odds of England winning the upcoming FIFA World Cup. His comment on England's poor penalty shootout record was… interesting:
    "As we say in science, England couldn't hit a cow's arse with a banjo."
  • "Uncle Fucka" being performed by an orchestra. With completely straight faces.
  • Palaeontologist Louis Leakey, when discovering what would be the enormously significant hominid fossil Homo habilis, at first glance thought it was something more common and exclaimed: "Oh, it's just another fucking gracile australopithecine!"
  • At one point in his 2017 Christmas message, Lord Buckethead included "and your rail systems continuing to be, to use a technical term, utter shite."
  • Of course, this page would not be complete without mentioning Winston Churchill's thoughts on the Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness Declaration of War on Japan:
    "Some people did not like this ceremonial style. But after all when you have to kill a man it costs nothing to be polite."
  • One of Siri's definitions for "mother" happens to be, well...
    Siri: As a noun, it's short for "motherfucker".
  • In astrophysics, the technical term for the stretching of matter under a very strong, non-homogeneous gravitational field, such as that near a small black hole, is "spaghettification".
  • Sultan Mehmed IV once sent a Strongly Worded Letter to the Zaporozhian Cossacks, demanding they lay down their weapons and surrender. The Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks to Sultan Mehmed IV is a magnificent display of Flowery Insults and elaborate, crude puns on the Sultan's various titles that end with "kiss our arse".
  • A specific problem in the operation of tokamak fusion reactors is that of particles becoming trapped in trajectories referred to, on account of their shape, as "banana orbits". While normally a curious, if appropriately descriptive term, what makes it Sophisticated as Hell is the fact that the largest possible banana orbit in a given plasma is referred to as "World's Fattest Banana" (refer to PDF page 396, listed on-document as 382).
  • The 2016 Ig Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to a research team for producing and publishing a paper entitled "On the reception and detection of pseudo-profound bullshit", in which the scientists in question made a point of clarifying that bullshit is neither lying nor nonsense.
    • The paper from which it takes this idea, Harry Frankfurt's "On Bullshit," is also a prime example. Its opening sentence:
      Frankfurt: One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit.
  • When asked about operetta, famous composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart described it as "those miniature compositions of bullshit which one only finds cold songs and couplets from vaudeville".
  • This is one of the joys of reading H. P. Lovecraft's letters. His letter-writing style is a slightly less polished version of his narrative prose, but it also contains bits of slang. Considering when these letters were being written it makes him sound like a character in an old gangster movie.
  • Scientific names are full of this. Some things have well thought-out names while others have whatever bullshit was the first thing to pass through some scientist's head, which is how to get spiders named after celebrities and proteins named after Sonic the Hedgehog.
  • Diego Fernández de Cevallos, a former Mexican politician, is well known for his flowery, but rather tame insults he throws at his political opponents, and his awe-inspiring eloquence while doing so. However, he does narrate about how much Emilio Azcárraga Milmo (Owner of Televisa up until his death in the late nineties, when it was still the de facto mouthpiece of the Mexican government) pissed him off, when he talks about Azcárraga Milmo attempting to win political brownie points with him, during an interview where he talked about key events during his political career. note 
    Don't play the fool with me, Emilio. You can't be the grateful one that I am here. I'm the grateful one. And for a very simple reason: You and I know very well, that for a very long time I have been savouring this moment with a very single purpose: To tell you to go fuck your bitch of a mother, cabrón. That's what I came here for. That being said, tell me what else can I do for you? Original quote in Spanish
  • 2023's Word of the Year as chosen by the American Dialect Society was a term invented by Cory Doctorow at the tail end of 2022 to describe the purposeful degrading of services, mostly by digital entities such as Facebook or Amazon, once they already had their customer/userbase locked in and no longer needed to play nice. This term, now being used in actual research papers and news articles? Enshittification.

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