fuck you
Pluralfuck yous
- 1An expression used to show displeasure with the person being addressed, or contempt for them.
After years of being ignored, she finally looked her boss in the eye and said, "Fuck you."
Someone had scrawled "fuck you" in black marker across the mayor's campaign poster.
Note
The phrase is vulgar and offensive in any company, and it works as a complete utterance: it can stand alone, open a sentence ("Fuck you, I quit"), or answer a question outright ("Fuck you, that's what"). Written on walls it does the same work, like the "Fuck you" signs Holden Caulfield despairs of erasing in Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye (1951). Go fuck yourself is its close partner.
- 2A dismissal telling someone to go away, or to go to hell.
Fuck you, and get off my porch before I call the cops.
You lied to me for a whole year, so fuck you, we're done.
Note
Where the contemptuous insult vents anger at a person, this use pushes them away. It refuses a request or ends the exchange, and the refusal or the reason sits right beside it, joined by a dash or by so: "Fuck you—I'm not giving you any," "so fuck you!" In meaning it is close to go away or go to hell.
- 3An action that insults and humiliates someone.
The CEO's giant bonus, announced the day after the layoffs, felt like a fuck you to every worker in the building.
Firing her by text message was just the last of many fuck yous from that company.
Note
The insult becomes something a person does rather than says: a fuck you is an act that delivers the message without the words. As a noun it takes an article and a plural, fuck yous, and it usually aims with to, as in a fuck you to both Wall Street and Elon Musk. It is just as vulgar in this form as when spoken.
Practice
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