Wednesday 9 April 2014

Is H a dirty letter?

I was reading a book "Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering". It said there that the author would've wanted to call the book "Fifty-Five Frequently Forgotten Fundamental Facts and a Few Fallacies", and people would then call it "The F-Book". But the publisher said that F is a dirty letter, and while D and H are also dirty, F is clearly the dirtiest letter of the alphabet and this is unacceptable.

I can understand why F is a dirty letter, and I can also somewhat understand why D is a dirty letter, but I have really hard time coming up with any frequently used dirty words that begin with H. The only ones I can think of are "ho" and "hump", but I think I'm missing something... native speakers (or non-native speakers), please help me out!

4 comments:

  1. "Hell" is the closest I can think of. Maybe the author was being sarcastic?

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  2. Ah, of course, it must be "hell". D'oh. And the dirty word for D must be "damn". My first association is too modern.

    I'm sure the author was serious - at least as serious as this blog.

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  3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H_word

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