---
title: "Effing and blinding" means swearing a lot; it is British slang. — Soft words for hard things: rudeness and swearing · tree and pragmatics
description: "Effing and blinding" means swearing a lot; it is British slang. Who acts: Effing, lot. A sentence of the lesson «Soft words for hard things: rudeness and swearing» of the euphemisms course of Mova's primary school with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# Soft words for hard things: rudeness and swearing, sentence 22

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"Effing and blinding" means swearing a lot; it is British slang.

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**Who acts:** Effing, lot · **What happens:** blind, mean, swear, be · **To what, where:** lot, British slang · **Speech:** someone speaks here

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This is a sentence of the lesson «Soft words for hard things: rudeness and swearing» of the euphemisms course of Mova's primary school. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (Effing, lot), what happens, when and where, as Mova's frames read it from the tree.

## The tree {#tree}

```conllu
# sent_id = school:euphemisms:039-pardon-my-french.lesson:22
# text = "Effing and blinding" means swearing a lot; it is British slang.
# source = school lesson (ours)
# course = euphemisms
# lesson = 039-pardon-my-french.lesson
# annotation = Mova annot: Rust (en) → Haiku 5.5 (medium, Batches API) patches; gates UD 2.18; agreed by treeagree rules (Stanza, Trankit, spaCy trf): R2-punct-next ×1, R7-rel-agree ×1
1	"	"	PUNCT	``	_	2	punct	_	_
2	Effing	Effing	PROPN	NNP	Number=Sing	6	nsubj	_	_
3	and	and	CCONJ	CC	_	4	cc	_	_
4	blinding	blind	VERB	VBG	Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Part	2	conj	_	_
5	"	"	PUNCT	''	_	2	punct	_	_
6	means	mean	VERB	VBZ	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
7	swearing	swear	VERB	VBG	VerbForm=Ger	6	ccomp	_	_
8	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	9	det	_	_
9	lot	lot	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	7	obl:unmarked	_	_
10	;	;	PUNCT	,	_	14	punct	_	Agree=R2-punct-next|Haiku=6:punct
11	it	it	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Gender=Neut|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	14	nsubj	_	_
12	is	be	AUX	VBZ	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	14	cop	_	_
13	British	British	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	14	amod	_	_
14	slang	slang	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	6	parataxis	_	Agree=R7-rel-agree|Haiku=6:conj
15	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	6	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

<!-- .note -->
No stored speech act for this sentence.

<!-- .fr -->
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **blind** *in a quote* | gerund | Effing *not said here* |  |  |  |  |  | tree rules |
| 2 | **mean** | present | Effing |  |  |  |  |  | vn intend-61.2-1 «NP V S»: agent=Agent clause=Topic |
| 3 | **swear** | gerund |  | a lot |  |  |  |  | vn conjecture-29.5 «NP V that S»: agent=Agent |
| 4 | **is a** | present | lot | British slang |  |  |  |  | tree rules |

<!-- .note -->
One row per clause the reader finds. «not said here»: a role filled from the clause above. «roles by»: a VerbNet class and frame when one fits the verb, else the reader's rules on the tree.

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**Licence: [CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/)**, as the whole of Mova corpus 0.4, of which this treebank (the agreed school, `mova-school-agreed-en.conllu`) is part. The lessons were written for Mova's primary school. Sentence `school:euphemisms:039-pardon-my-french.lesson:22`.

**The tree:** Mova annot: Rust (en) → Haiku 5.5 (medium, Batches API) patches; gates UD 2.18; agreed by treeagree rules (Stanza, Trankit, spaCy trf): R2-punct-next ×1, R7-rel-agree ×1. **The frames** are read from the tree by Mova's frames reader (`prag`) when this page is built, the lesson read in order, so a pronoun may be resolved from an earlier sentence.

See the [release 0.4](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/releases/0.4/).

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