{"id":109218,"date":"2017-03-27T08:47:43","date_gmt":"2017-03-27T12:47:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=109218"},"modified":"2017-03-27T12:21:19","modified_gmt":"2017-03-27T16:21:19","slug":"scared-shitless-and-other-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/03\/27\/scared-shitless-and-other-news\/","title":{"rendered":"Scared Shitless, and Other News"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"attachment_109219\" style=\"width: 1010px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/03\/scared.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-109219\" class=\"wp-image-109219\" src=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/03\/scared.jpg\" width=\"1000\" height=\"784\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/03\/scared.jpg 2889w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/03\/scared-300x235.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/03\/scared-768x602.jpg 768w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/03\/scared-1024x802.jpg 1024w\" sizes=\"auto, (min-width: 62.5em) 67vw, 100vw\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-109219\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Man and woman, scared shitless. Not pictured: absence of shit.<\/p><\/div>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Looking for a fun, easy way to spice up your writing? Try throwing in a fecal intensifier or two. They\u2019re the shit, and you\u2019ll be thrilled shitless with the results. As the translator Brendan O\u2019Kane writes, fecal intensifiers are the idiom of the moment, but it\u2019s hard to follow their logic: \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=31759\" target=\"_blank\">A certain distinguished Dutch professor emeritus \u2026 noted that \u2018people before about 1950 were mostly bored shitless.\u2019 This cracked the room up, naturally, but it also seemed slightly off\u00a0<\/a><a href=\"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=31759\">&#8230;\u00a0<\/a><a href=\"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=31759\">I might be scared shitless, but I\u2019m\u00a0unlikely to be amused, bored, delighted, outraged, or annoyed shitless<\/a>. This is curious, since shitlessness would seem to be the natural result of something scaring, boring, or annoying the shit out of me\u2014all distinct possibilities, according to my understanding of the idiom. In particularly unexpected circumstances, one might even shit oneself\u2014as a response to fear, outrage, amusement, or surprise, rather than delight or (unless as a last resort) boredom.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>If shitlessness is too taboo for you, there are other ways to jar and unnerve your potential readers. Take pains to pepper your prose with <em>irregardless<\/em>, for example, and watch the hate mail pour in. According to Kory Stamper, a lexicographer at <em>Merriam-Webster<\/em>,\u00a0\u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2017\/03\/22\/books\/three-words-we-love-to-argue-about-irregardless-posh-lingerie.html?smid=tw-nytimesarts&amp;smtyp=cur&amp;mtrref=t.co&amp;mtrref=www.nytimes.com&amp;gwh=0784111FD4167FE8D994C2A68A6CB048&amp;gwt=pay&amp;_r=0\" target=\"_blank\"><em>Irregardless <\/em>is one of those words that people love to hate<\/a>. No one is lukewarm about <em>irregardless<\/em>. I don\u2019t use it, but what I love about it that it has hung around on the periphery of English for over 200 years. It\u2019s like this barnacle that you can\u2019t get off the hull of the language, and I think that\u2019s great.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Every few years, it\u2019s good to make sure that the novel, as a form, has a pulse; it might die on us without anyone ever noticing. Two new books by Peter Boxall look into the novel\u2019s value and relevance these days, and the news is \u2026 well, it\u2019s mixed. Let\u2019s be real, things aren\u2019t what they used to be. Ben Jeffery writes, \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/www.the-tls.co.uk\/articles\/public\/how-dead-is-the-novel\/\" target=\"_blank\">The novel is the characteristic literary vehicle of a (modern, capitalistic) culture defined by instability<\/a>. In Boxall\u2019s account, the novel form acts as a piece of psychic equipment through which humans are able to apprehend and adjust themselves to the unknown; as a kind of mechanism for coping with change \u2026 It nourishes our desire for order but at the same time it consistently draws our attention toward the \u2018indistinctness at the heart of things,\u2019 the sense in which reality is neither as solid nor as plain as we might imagine. This dual capacity for reinforcing and exceeding conceptual thought is what Boxall describes as the \u2018formal genetics\u2019 of the novel, \u2018a genotype that underlies the phenotypical expressions of historical difference.\u2019 Its value, it seems, is that it cultivates a kind of profound epistemic receptiveness.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>I struggle to think of a book more often singled out for derision than Francis Fukuyama\u2019s <em>The End of History and the Last Man<\/em>, which has come to stand in for the failures of neoliberalism and the audacity of globalist thought. As it\u2019s popularly understood, <em>The End of History <\/em>argued that global liberal democracy was bound to flourish, ushering in an age of prosperity as halcyon days descended, forever, upon planet Earth. But that\u2019s not what the book is about at all, Paul Sagar writes.\u00a0In fact, it was much more prescient than it\u2019s given credit for: \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/aeon.co\/essays\/was-francis-fukuyama-the-first-man-to-see-trump-coming\" target=\"_blank\">Fukuyama never suggested that events would somehow stop happening<\/a>. Just like any other sane person, he believed that history (with a small <em>h<\/em>), the continuation of ordinary causal events, would go on as it always had. Elections would be held, sports matches would be won and lost, wars would break out, and so on. The interesting question for Fukuyama was about History (with a big <em>H<\/em>), a term that, for him, picked out a set of concerns about the deep structure of human social existence \u2026 Just because humans could do no better than liberal capitalist democracy\u2014could progress to no form of society that contained fewer inherent conflicts and contradictions\u2014it didn\u2019t mean that the unruly and competitive populations of such societies would sit still and be content with that. Late capitalist modernity might be the highest civilizational point we could achieve, because it contained the fewest contradictions. But there was strong reason to suspect that we\u2019d slide off the top, back\u00a0<em>into<\/em>\u00a0History, down into something worse.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>How about that Lenin? Big reader. Loved books. Tolstoy: loved him. Goncharov: couldn\u2019t get enough of him. Chernyshevsky: the best. But Tariq Ali notes that Lenin couldn\u2019t hang with the avant-garde, and that this had surprising ramifications for the Russian Revolution: \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/books\/2017\/mar\/25\/lenin-love-literature-russian-revolution-soviet-union-goethe\" target=\"_blank\">Lenin found it difficult to make any accommodations to modernism in Russia or elsewhere<\/a>. The\u00a0work of the artistic avant-garde\u2014Mayakovsky and the Constructivists\u2014was not to his taste. In vain did the poets and artists tell him that they, too, loved Pushkin and\u00a0Lermontov, but that they were also revolutionaries, challenging old art forms and producing something very different and new that was more in keeping with Bolshevism and the age of revolution. He simply would not budge. They could write and paint whatever they wanted, but why should he be forced to appreciate it? \u2026 Shortages of\u00a0paper during the civil war led to fierce\u00a0arguments. Should they publish propaganda leaflets or a\u00a0new poem by Mayakovsky? Lenin insisted on the first option. Lunacharsky was convinced that Mayakovsky\u2019s poem would be far more effective and, on this occasion, he won.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In today\u2019s roundup: a linguist ponders the role of fecal intensifiers; the history of the non-word \u201cirregardless.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":38,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2512],"tags":[16711,14166,27996,27999,27998,3505,1277,504,747,28000,27997,28001,2393],"class_list":["post-109218","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-the-shelf","tag-avant-garde","tag-diction","tag-fecal-intensifiers","tag-francis-fukuyama","tag-irregardless","tag-lenin","tag-linguistics","tag-literature","tag-novels","tag-russian-revolution","tag-shitlessness","tag-the-end-of-history","tag-words"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v25.4 (Yoast SEO v25.4) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>\u201cScared Shitless\u201d: The Weird Power of Fecal Intensifiers<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"In today\u2019s arts and culture news: a linguist ponders the role of fecal intensifiers; 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