The Elements of F*cking Style: A Helpful Parody
By Chris Baker and Jacob Hansen
()
About this ebook
The truth about English is that it can get pretty boring. Dangling modifiers, gerunds, punctuation marks--it's enough to make you want to drop out of high school. Swearing and sex on the other hand, well, these time-honored pastimes warm the cockles of our hearts. Now, The Elements of F*cking Style drags English grammar out of the ivory tower and into the gutter, injecting a dull subject with a much-needed dose of color.
This book addresses everything from common questions ("What the hell is a pronoun?") to philosophical conundrums ("Does not using paragraphs or periods make my thesis read like it was written by a mental patient?"). Other valuable sections include:
•All I've got in this world are my sentences and my balls, and I don't break 'em for nobody
•A colon is more than an organ that gets cancer
•Words your bound to f*ck up
One glance at your friend's blog should tell you everything you need to know about the sorry state of the English language. This book gives you the tools you need to stop looking like an idiot on message boards and in interoffice memos. Grammar has never before been so much f*cking fun.
Chris Baker
Professor Chris Baker graduated from his doctoral studies at the University of Cambridge, before beginning a Research Fellowship there at St Catharine’s College and the Department of Engineering. In the early 1980s he worked in the Aerodynamics Unit of British Rail Research in Derby, before moving to an academic position in the Department of Civil Engineering at the University of Nottingham. He remained there till 1998 where he was a lecturer, reader and professor with research interests in vehicle aerodynamics, wind engineering, environmental fluid mechanics and agricultural aerodynamics. In 1998 he moved to the University of Birmingham as Professor of Environmental Fluid Mechanics in the School of Civil Engineering. In the early years of the present century he was Director of Teaching in the newly formed School of Engineering and Deputy Head of School. From 2003 to 2008 he was Head of Civil Engineering and in 2008 served for a short time as Acting Head of the College of Engineering and Physical Sciences. He was the Director of the Birmingham Centre for Railway Research and Education 2005-2014. He undertook a 30% secondment to the Transport Systems Catapult Centre in Milton Keynes, as Science Director from 2014 to 2016. He retired at the end of 2017 and took up an Emeritus position.
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The Elements of F*cking Style - Chris Baker
Introduction, or How I Learned to Stop Writing Like a Three-Year-Old and Love Grammar
If only your mother could see you now—a book balanced nervously in your hands, your eyes scouring the corners of the room to make sure that none of your friends catch you reading. But don’t fret—we promise not to reveal your secret. After who the hell knows how many years of formal education, it must feel pretty strange to be reading a grammar and style book, especially one with the word fucking in the title. Chances are that somewhere along the line you may accidentally have purchased another guide before locating this. If you did, it was most likely The Elements of Style, a widely distributed manual on grammar and usage that happens to be required by pretty much every college and high school English teacher on the planet. It has sold more copies than Harry Potter and The Da Vinci Code combined, and is about as dry a read as the obituary section of your local newspaper.
The Elements of Style was first published in 1918. Think about that for a moment. In 1918, gay meant happy, opium derivatives were prescribed for headaches, and top hats and monocles were un-ironic fashion choices. In spite of this, teachers and parents persist in propagating this archaic little book for no other reason than it’s always been done that way.
The truth is that you can’t blame them. Grammar isn’t a sexy subject, and Strunk and White, the same manual that’s been prescribed since the dawn of the twentieth century, has done all it could.
* * *
It is with this sentiment in mind that we introduce The Elements of F*cking Style: a guide to grammar, rhetoric, and style. Regardless of what a quick glance at Twitter might lead you to believe, we stand firmly by the notion that even in today’s ever-changing world there is a need for grammar and a subconscious desire to follow the rules of writing. It’s an inescapable fact—especially as one exits childhood and enters young adulthood—that it’s cool to be smart, fun to exercise a proclivity toward intelligent conversation, and an absolute necessity to be able to translate those skills into the written form.
How often have you logged into Facebook and seen someone mistake affect for effect or substitute your for you’re? The answer is that it’s happened often enough that we find ourselves writing these words in an honest hope that the art of intelligent writing will not die out in our lifetimes. Few of us can easily string together what passes for a coherent thought because the books teaching us are boring and dull, filled with useless and uninspired examples that only a few overachievers will bother committing to memory. For illustration, a rule from the original Elements:
Enclose parenthetic expressions between commas.
The best way to see a country, unless you are pressed for time, is on foot.
The rule itself, of course, is still valid. The phrase unless you are pressed for time
qualifies the original statement the best way to see a country is on foot,
and is correctly placed between commas. But honestly, who the fuck is going to remember a rule based on that example? There are dozens of more interesting and colorful examples to disseminate this information—for instance:
The easiest way to roll a joint, assuming you don’t have a rolling machine, is to roll the paper around a Bic pen.
or
The best way to deflower a virgin, unless you’re a sadist, is to bite down on her ear as you slide it in.
With a few short and concise sentences we’ve illustrated the grammatical rule and done it in a way that you might actually remember. You see, when learning is incidental rather than prescriptive it’s a whole lot easier and more enjoyable. It’s easier to recite lines from Pulp Fiction than from, say, King Lear. That is the aim of this book—to guide you through the painful world of English grammar and style by using sex, drugs, and fucking swearing. Why? Because we’re into that shit.
I. Rules That Even Foreigners Should Know
1. Possession is more than a rap on the knuckles.
These rules are all pretty fucking simple. Most people learned these rules in the first or second grade, and as a result, most have forgotten them and look like idiots because of it.
Form the possessive form of nouns by adding ’s.
You add an ’s to the end of the word, no matter what the last consonant is. Consonants, in case you’re unaware, are letters other than a, e, i, o, u, and sometimes y.
Charles’s bong is fucking enormous.
Jimmy’s sex tape represented the low point in a lifetime of porn viewing.
Kelly’s vagina is completely shaved.
If brevity is your shtick, you can kill the second s and just leave the apostrophe when the noun already ends in s. This works wonders on Twitter.
Chris’ girlfriend lets him fuck her in the ass.
Obviously there are exceptions to the rule—things like ancient proper names, etc. Forget about that. This book’s purpose is to keep you from looking like an idiot, and if you find yourself debating whether to add an ’s to the end of Jesus, you can Google it.
The next topic is pronominal possessives, which is the fancy term for hers, its, theirs, yours, and ours. If you’re using any of these words to replace a name—
That dildo is Kelly’s.
That dildo is hers.
—then it doesn’t take an apostrophe. This is a simple enough rule, but where most people screw up is deciding whether to use its or it’s. Its should be used when you can substitute in a name or a different possessive and still understand what’s going on. Example:
It’s a lucky dog that is able to lick its own genitals, and the best I can do is the occasional stranger.
It’s a lucky dog that is able to lick his own genitals, and the best I can do is the occasional stranger.
As you can see, replacing its with his still makes sense—so its should be used. Generally speaking, because this is a politically correct society we live in, its should