Loose Lips	Loose Lips Archive

The first taboo was the incest taboo. In every human society, it's generally forbidden for children to have sex with their parents. The consequences of violating the taboo are dramatized in the story of Oedipus, who marries his mother and then blinds himself in horror when he discovers what he's done. So it shouldn't surprise us to learn that calling someone a motherfucker is an insult. Motherfucker has been used a term of contempt since around 1910, mostly in American English.

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But if being a motherfucker is a bad thing, why do people say things like, "He can play guitar like a motherfucker"? In context, it's clear that like a motherfucker is intended to means something like "very well." So the puzzle is that by itself, the word motherfucker is an insult, but like a motherfucker is not.

Actually, it's possible to distinguish a few different shades of meaning in like a motherfucker. Perhaps the most frequent meaning is something like "a lot; intensely; to the maximum extent." Consider these examples, all taken from the Internet:

I eat sunflower seeds like a motherfucker [a lot]
Snorin like a motherfucker, stretched on the couch [intensely]
I have PMS like a motherfucker [intensely]
We appreciate it like a motherfucker. [a lot]

Related to this meaning is "very well," as in examples like the following:

He sings like a motherfucker! He has one of the best voices that rock had ever heard! [very well]
So the bassist from Jamiroquai can play like a motherfucker; the product's still the same old rehashed shit. [very well]
Although the ideas of "intensely' and "very well" are related, they're not quite the same. One can certainly sing a lot or sing intensely without singing well!

Like a motherfucker is one of a group of expressions that generally mean something like "to the maximum extent." Other examples are like the devil, like hell, like crazy, and like mad. The general form of all these expressions is like _____ where you fill in the blank with the name of something bad. These idioms modify verbs. A related group of expressions modifies adjectives and uses as ______ (something bad), giving us examples like the following:

confusing as hell
mad as hell
ugly as sin
guilty as sin
blue as blazes
cool as shit
slow as a motherfucker
crazy as fuck

It's not completely clear why these idioms mean what they do, but Miss Poubelle will make a guess.

Imagine a moral scale running from the very best things in the world to the very worst. In conventional religious

mythology, one end of the scale has God, heaven, angels, and the saints. At the other end are Satan, hell, blazes, sin, sex, madness, craziness, shit, and motherfuckers. So suppose we want to talk about the extreme end of another scale-- like the scale of playing guitar , or snoring. Then we say someone plays or snores like the devil/crazy/a motherfucker to mean that they are at the very end of that scale. When we say that, we are comparing their position on a scale to the extreme end of the moral scale.

This idea of being at the end of some scale is probably also related to the use of several of these words in questions. For example, one might ask What the fuck/

the hell/the devil/in blazes are you talking about? In contrast to the ordinary What are you talking about?, the use of the fuck/the hell/the devil seems to imply that

the answer to the question is at the extreme end of some scale of reasonableness, propriety, or plausibility. And for that reason, questions of this sort sound hostile, as if the person being spoken about has done or said something that goes too far.

Although this idea seems to explain theses uses, what is disturbing about the moral scale is that it puts fuck down there with shit, the devil, and hell. Conventional Christian morality has always influenced our idioms, and this is just another example.

Unfortunately, even English speakers who don't buy into this morality will find it covertly presupposed by the way we talk. Readers of The Guide surely don't believe that sex belongs at the bottom end of the moral scale, but what the fuck can we do about language that presupposes it is?