About: Scatolinguistics

Jim McCawley (1938–1999, professor of linguistics at the University of Chicago, who wrote his scatolinguistic treatises under the pen names of Quang Phúc Đông and Yuck Foo, both of the fictional South Hanoi Institute of Technology) is credited, on page ix of the preface of Studies out in left field as having "created the interdisciplinary field[s] of pornolinguistics and scatolinguistics virtually on his own" in 1967. Technically, scatolinguistics is the study of the words for various forms of excrement (compare scatology). But, given the lack of any cognates such as "pornolinguistics" (despite the above) or "coitolinguistics", it has come to cover the study (including etymology and current usage) of all rude and profane expressions.