Can you say it? Will your grandmother?
What does it even mean?

Everyone loves The Motherfucker With the Hat, tickets are flying out the door and with only 10 days of performances left, we hope you know by now whether it is a show you are going to see and have bought your tickets here.

With that said, let’s have some fun and talk about the etymology of the word “motherfucker.” Yep, we’re gonna break it down, science-style.

motherfucker, noun (and intransitive verb)
Pronunciation: U.S. /'m?ð?r?f?k?r/
Nonstandard forms: mothafuggah, motherfugger, mudderfucker,  muthafucka, muthafuckah,  muthafucker, muthafukka.

Coarse slang (orig. and chiefly North American).

 1. With negative connotation.

• An obnoxious, despicable, or contemptible person; a very unpleasant person. Frequently used as a term of abuse.                      
• An unpleasant, difficult, formidable, or oppressive thing, situation, place, etc. Also in weakened use and neutrally, without negative connotations.

2. With positive connotation (chiefly in African-American usage). 

• A person; esp. a formidable, strong, or otherwise admirable person. Frequently applied to a member of one's own circle or group.
• A large, impressive, or outstanding example of something.

The Oxford English Dictionary offers two distinctly different connotations for the term motherfucker. How and why did the shift change in our culture? It appears that the connotation of motherfucker changed around the 1950s. People have been calling each other motherfuckers for over a century, but until World War II the term was typically used as an insult. The earliest citations of motherfucker and motherfucking  in the Oxford English Dictionary come from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and they give a sense for how seriously the word was taken. However, there’s no evidence that the word was ever meant to be taken literally, as a reference to incest.  By the late ‘50s and ‘60s, motherfucker finally became, in some usages, a positive description. The first positive instance recorded in the OED comes from a 1958 recitation of the folk tale of “Stagger Lee,” the legend (based on a true story) of the black man who would not back down. A 1954 line in the The Life, a collection of oral poetry about black hustlers, reads, “I love him madly, he’s my motherfucking man,” showing that the adjective form could also be used positively.

Thanks to our fab intern Kate McMullan for putting this all together with help from the Oxford English Dictionary and Slate’s culture blog, “How Mofo Got Its Mojo.”

Get your mothafuggah tickets here or by calling our muthafukka Box Office at 503.241.1278.