Up until now, the name of this website has been living a filthy life in the language underworld of slang. Not that it hasn’t been a pleasant stay; the words “badass mofo” have kept us real, street-wise. Why, just today I told a meter maid that I was a “badass mofo” and that she needed to “step away from my ride.” She ignored me, but that’s not the point.
The point is, starting today, we’re going legit. Well, halfway..
It’s been uttered by movie stars, appeared on magazine covers and written into song lyrics.
Badass.
It’s just one of the words that has passed the test of appearing five times in five different places over five years and made it into the newest version of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford University Press, $150, 3,984 pages). The newly revised fifth edition of the most definitive text on the English language includes 3,500 such additions and zero removals. The two volumes that make up the dictionary weigh almost 15 pounds and define more than a half-million words.
There’s two ways to deal with this. One way is for the BAMF crew to just lie down and accept our fate as slang has-beens, like “radical mofo” and “groovy mofo,” and start wearing slacks and wingtips to bed at night. The other option is to get more offensive with the site name, such as “cuntcuntcunt.com” or “sexwithjesus.org”; too bad those were former Stileproject network affiliates, so we can’t use the names.
Or, we could just stick it out and wait for our mothers to use “mofo” in a sentence over Sunday dinner.