Full Title: Profanity: re-defining the limits
Short Title: WTF

Date: 24-Sep-2025 - 26-Sep-2025
Location: Arras, France
Contact Person: Florent Moncomble
Meeting Email: [email protected]
Web Site: https://wtf.sciencesconf.org/

Linguistic Field(s): General Linguistics; Translation
Subject Language(s): English (eng)

Call Deadline: 05-Jan-2025

Meeting Description:

This conference, which will take place at the Université d’Artois in Arras, France on 24-26 September 2025, aims at exploring the manifold nature and uses of ‘fuck’—‘the most important and powerful word in the English language’ (Sheidlower 2009)—from the viewpoints of linguistics, translation studies and culture.

Call for Papers:

(The following is an extract from the call for papers. The full version, with modalities for submission, can be found on the conference website https://wtf.sciencesconf.org/)

As an object of formal linguistics, ‘fuck’ is itself polymorphous: while as an autonomous lexeme it may be a noun, a verb or an interjection (Oxford English Dictionary 2024; Green’s Dictionary of Slang), it also shares morphological, syntactic and phonological traits with a variety of other linguistic objects (such as affixes or clitics) used in constructions equally challenging for analytical frameworks, where the freedom imparted by expressivity (in the sense developed by Guillaume 1991) takes over conventional morphosyntax.

This slipperiness lends the ‘f-word’ a plasticity which in turn invites reflection along sociolinguistic and pragmatic lines: as a salient contributor to the triad of taboo topics (religion, excretion and sex), ‘fuck’ bears the status of a totemic item whose symbolism simultaneously borrows from and extends beyond its literal meaning, turning its use, but also its avoidance, into flexible instruments of identification, belonging and social positioning. Beyond its transgressive role in social interactions, ‘fuck’ may then aptly serve as a pragmatic lens exposing how relational work is structured along the lines of various power dynamics: the committee encourages proposals exploring how these questions may indeed prolong or depart from the classical perspective of ‘facework’ (Goffman 1955) and politeness theory (Brown and Levinson 1987) in general.

The conference will also welcome studies of the concrete translation challenges that the f-word poses in relation to other languages: its nimbleness and close relationship with orality indeed often lead to compensation, or even to partial or non-translations in localization. Such choices when translating profanity combine or collide with many others which affect characterization and tone in the context of fiction for example, and which need to be examined. This also serves as a reminder that translation practices remain medium-dependent, as in the way the written form of subtitles trigger different reactions to on-screen profanity compared with dubbing for example (Rollo 2017). From the more global perspective of cultural transfer, taboos and ‘bad language’ also testify to the socially and politically charged process that translation is, prompting reflection on matters of positionality, reception and censorship, and which translation often crystallizes.

All those points of interest coalesce in the intense emotional and transgressive, sometimes playful dimension that ‘fuck’ retains in artistic and cultural expression in the Anglosphere. With its inescapable political content, notably as part of a form of ‘them-and-us’ polarising rhetoric, it is a weapon of choice for anti-establishment aesthetic practices—a ‘four-letter assault on authority’ (McEnery 2004), whether in music (punk in particular), cinema, or literature, but also on social media where it naturally flourishes (Morris 2022). As a metonymy of obscenity and transgression, the f-word could be seen as a barometer of how cultural scenarios of marginality, revolt and censorship reformulate themselves throughout the ages and the arts, and on which we invite discussion – whether it directs our attention to certain processes of self-marginalisation within reclaim practices for example, or to a society’s own relation to a puritanism which may obscure certain social realities in return.