Note to bloggers: It's spelled "fuck," no asterisk..

We’re about to see a metric fuckton of asterisks in today’s RSS reader, because Eric Barbour decided to call his latest product, a guitar amp of all things, “Fucking Fucker.” I’ll be honest: if I knew it would get that much press, I’d have lobbied for naming Ricochet “Fucking Delay” or something.

Why someone isn’t offended when they see “f*ck” or “*uck” or “Fu*k” or (for the more linguistically adventurous) “fuc*” but is offended when they see “fuck” is completely and utterly beyond me. The word, at least in America, is so entirely ubiquitous and without any real meaning that it is really just a verbal tic, like “uh” or “like.” When this blog first started getting a lot of traffic, I would get an email every other day or so from people that were, like, “love the blog but do you have to swear so much?” As if I gave a fuck or something.

Luckily, that has petered out.

What I find interesting is thus: Eric found out with one product that he could (a) get away with this naming scheme, and (b) it would provide a certain amount of press. This is all aside from what the box actually did. While I sort of envy him this discovery, if Marshall had released any of those products, everyone would be all like “are you fucking kidding me? This shit is broken.” With or without asterisks.