On every frazzled parent’s reading list is a new children’s book: Go the Fuck to Sleep by Adam Mansbach.

Perhaps you wouldn’t read it to a child, but you might wonder where the f-word comes from, and why we can insert it into some sentences but not others.

Linguist Daniel Midgley will be dropping a few on this episode of Talk the Talk.


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36: Go the Fuck to Sleep

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Show notes

I don’t have many links for this one, but here’s a good article on “fucking” and “the fuck”.
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1608

Also a list of phrasal verbs. You can see that “the fuck” pretty much works in all of them.
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:English_phrasal_verbs