I Don't Fuck With You
Song of the Day 09/08/2022
I Don’t Fuck With You by Big Sean and E-40
I recall one of my German friends mistakenly using the phrase ‘I don’t fuck with you’ as a way of saying whether or not he’d sleep with someone. Men and women would pass by us and he’d regularly say, ‘ah yes, I would definitely not fuck with that person.’ Or: ‘Wow. Now that’s the kind of person I fuck with.’
Luckily, Urban Dictionary has a whole page devoted to this phrase for the droves of ESL speakers across the globe. It defines it as ‘wanting nothing to do with someone, whether as a friend/acquaintance or more. Can be abbreviated as idfwy or idfwu.' The Urban Dictionary goes even further to say, ‘not to be confused with the sexual meaning of fucking someone.’ Thanks for clarifying.
Even better is the example in usage that Urban Dictionary provides for us.
Jason: Hey baby I miss you, let’s get back together.
Kacey: No thanks, I don’t fuck with you.
I think this kind of muddies the water. If you are an ESL, as my German friend is, this example makes the phrase no less clear. The character Kacey could very well be saying, I don’t fuck with you, in a sense of conveying the notion, ‘you aren’t someone I’d sleep with, at least anymore’— no doubt allowing several central Europeans to continue rejecting suitors at nightclubs with a polite yet very literal, ‘I don’t fuck with you.’
Maybe I’m wrong. As proven above, I don’t fuck with you could be used as a kind of double entendre. A rejection of both the sexual and social nature, a thing you say to someone you’d neither sleep with nor spend time with, even though there are surely people some would sleep with but not be willing to spend time with. It all gets complicated.
But remember, despite the confusing example in usage, Urban Dictionary included the disqualifier: not to be confused with the sexual meaning of fucking someone. It should be clear that I don’t fuck with you is more a phrase for a racist who wouldn’t spend time with a particular type of people, less than a saying for a misogynist who wouldn’t sleep with a certain type of woman. It pertains to the spheres of the personal and the professional.
It's possible that I'm the one who misunderstood my German friend, that he knew very well what this phrase meant, but decided to conflate it with sexuality, just like Urban Dictionary’s example. He was walking around the streets saying ‘I wouldn’t fuck with that person’ in a very self-aware manner. He wouldn’t hang out with them, he wouldn’t sleep with them, he wouldn’t nothing with them. He was bending the English language to his will, reappropriating expressions as he saw fit. And me, my ignorance led me to believe that just because his English wasn’t perfect in other ways (I live in the near from there, there are many persons here, I am on a meeting) he was clearly misusing the phrase. Drawing conclusions and making assumptions is a quality of mine that I’m sure many wouldn’t fuck with.
Well, whatever. To the dismay of many grammar-nazis who seemingly are in this world but not of it, as contemporary usage proves, language is subjective.
Subjective, for sure. And also alive. We speak of "dead" languages, by which we mean that they are no longer in use, but also that they have stopped evolving. They are fixed at a point in time, and no further words or phrases will be added. I often feel ambivalent about particularly twee new jargon, but I'd rather speak a language that grows than one that is stagnant. Nice post.