The sys admin's daily grind – The Fuck

Expletives Not Deleted

Article from Issue 191/2016
Author(s):

In the 25 years of Linux kernel history, a huge amount of code and many comments have accumulated. They can be explanatory, enlightening, funny, or even profane. Charly prefers to do things differently, so he types fuck in the shell.

… profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer. – Mark Twain

As early as 1998, Sean Dreilinger created the first statistics on swear words in Linux [1]. It showed evidence of a sharp increase of the word "fuck" in kernel 2.1.5. Vidar Holen [2] delved even deeper into the murky depths (Figure 1). He found evidence of almost 50 incidences of "fuck," many incidences of "shit," and even 180 incidences of "bastard."

Figure 1: Kernel versions are shown on the x axis, and incidence of words on the y axis. Top to bottom: crap (blue line), shit (green), penguin (teal), fuck (red), bastard (violet).

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