Hacker News Reader

Comment by hyp0 | Hacker News Reader

> The only word for it is a f∗∗∗ up of major proportions. Everyone was f-ing and blinding when they realised what had happened.

It's certainly more fuck up than farce, but what does what does "f-ing" and "blinding" mean? (Australian here)

But the key issue - in everything - is not whether you make mistakes, but whether you fix them. This one was fixed.

View on HN

Not sure if the mistake on the writer part or but f-ing and blinding is commonly written as effing and blinding.

http://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/effing+and+blinding

Apparently the link states (British & Australian informal).

Added: if you search for "f-ing and blinding" in Google you'll get did you mean effing and blinding?

"f-ing" and "blinding" means cursing and swearing. The "f" being obvious and "blinding" is a substitute for "bloody".

Actually I believe "blinding" is for "blimey", a (rather dated) contraction of "blind me." If that seems a little odd then you have to recall that blasphemy was once stronger than biological cussing. I'm told that the reason for some of the stranger grammatical usage of "fuck" in swearing is down to its substitution for religious words (e.g. "fuck you" for "damn you.")

The chapter on swearing in Bill Bryson's "The Mother Tongue" is interesting and very amusing.

"Blimey" does seem more likely. The urban dictionary has it as a contraction of "God blind me", which is presumably what you meant by your reference to blasphemy.

Hence "cor blimey"

There's also Stephen Burgen's Your Mother's Tongue, which is a whole book dedicated to European invective (in different languages). It's fun to see how the history of each culture shapes how people swear. For Edam example, it's much more common in Catholic countries to swear by blaspheming in a very strong and direct way.

Exactly what part of Australia do you live in? F-ing is a very common phrase here.

Is "everyone was f-ing" a very common phrase for swearing, or for engaging in intercourse? I assume hyp0 was asking about the unfamiliar regional idiom and has heard the phrase "f-ing" before. He's been on the internet for more than a day after all.

You're missing the point. I'm also an Australian, I'm curious which parts of Australia don't know this.

'Fucking' is, but softening it to 'effing' isn't, and 'blinding' is archaic, mostly used as an intensifying word rather than on it's own ('he was in a blinding hurry'). More likely to use 'bloody'.

I hear it all the time. I live in Sydney.

Weird, I've never really heard it except in the context of someone trying to sanitise their language, such as when kids are around.

Then again, there are some weird regionalisms out there. I once met a pair of sandgropers that said "type of" where other people would say "sort of". They were siblings, so it may have even been family-specific. Haven't heard it elsewhere.

I was just interested. But there you go, regional dialects. I have no idea what a "sand groper" is!

A sand groper is a small insect: <p> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandgroper_%28insect%29 <p> A "sand groper" is also slang for a Western Australian. As a "sand groper", I have never heard anyone use "type of" instead of "sort of" so I'm going to guess it was family specific.

I know what a sand grower is, just never heard the slang :-)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com