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Who put the fuckin’ in Califuckinfornia?

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(As you should gather from the title, this posting is entirely inappropriate for kids and the sexually modest. Tons of reference to sex between men.)

There are two answers to the question in the title.

One is about the gay porn flick Califuckinfornia, and the answer to that question is Falcon Studios: hardly a moment goes go without one of the characters getting fucked (it’s pretty much non-stop fucking along the California coast).


Not today’s (1/8) e-mail ad for the Falcon DVD, Califuckinfornia, which I can’t reproduce on WordPress; instead, here’s a different ad, one without male genitals or anuses — just buttocks, which are ok

The other is about the English bit of playful word formation Califuckinfornia, and the answer to that question isn’t a who but a what: a general principle of playful word formation (known under several names, but especially Expletive Infixation) that allows the expletive fuckin’ to be inserted within the proper name California.

The gay porn DVD. The Falcon Studios DVD Califuckinfornia, released 1/2020; directed by Tony Dimarco; with cast Austin Avery, Cade Maddox, Colton Reece, Dakota Payne, Dan Saxon, Devin Franco, Dick Dawson, Greyson Lane, Josh Moore, Ryan Rose

description (from the Falcon site): Two friends embark on an epic road trip fuckin’ their way up and down the California coast and end up in a place they never expected!

Expletive Infixation. Here see the 1987 Zwicky & Pullum BLS paper, “Plain morphology and expressive morphology” (available on-line here), which looks at three English examples, one of which is Expletive Infixation. From that paper:

Siegel (ms 1971, 1974: 180-1) and Aronoff (1976: 69-70) observe that the insertability of such (mostly obscene) expletives as bloody, blooming, frigging, fuckin(g), (god)damn, motherfuckin(g), pissing, sodding, etc. into a word depends on the stress pattern of that word. According to Siegel and Aronoff, only base words with a 3…1 stress pattern (tertiary followed, not necessarily immediately, by primary stress) are eligible for expletive infixation, as the examples in (4) versus (5) illustrate (stress-level sequences shown in brackets).

(4)  a. Abso-blooming-lutely. [3 0 X 1 0]
b. Off we go to Massa-friggin-chusetts. [3 0 X 1 0]
c. To hell with Kalama-fuckin-zoo. [3 0 0 X 1]

(5)  a. *What the hell is the ablative abso-blooming-lute? [1 0 X 3]
b. *Off we go to Flori-friggin-da. [1 0 X 0]
c. *To hell with Chi-fuckin-cago. [0 X 1 0]

(There is some variability in the phenomenon, but the Siegel / Aronoff formulation comes close to fitting the judgments of a great many speakers.)

In any case, Califuckinfornia is a perfect fit: [3 0 X 1 0 0].

(And. yes, of course, inserting fuckin‘ in other words is iconic of inserting a penis in a receptive body cavity.)


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