#3 WORD SERIES: "F-word"
#3 WORD STUDY SERIES: “F-WORD” December 11, 2021
Remember. This is a Word Study. This, the third word in the series, is one I do not use, do not like its use, but I realize it is used frequently, regularly, freely in our current state of culture. I think it deserves some attention. I encourage you — don’t be offended, be attentive to the movement of profanity, and remember that profanity has been, is, and will be with us through the ages. Here then, our culture’s current profane word of choice:
The “F- Word”
Why is it, nearly everyone knows what that letter “F” stands for? Not for my Fingers that wish not to Finish Flying From the keyboard ‘F’ to ‘K’. Not for “Finally,” or “Funny,” or “Fabulous,” as in, that was one Fabulous day we had Flying First-class from France before they found out we belonged in Economy and had us move. Fuck.
The last word in that last paragraph is, I believe, the first time I’ve ever used it. In 1928, Hemingway’s editor, Maxwell Perkins, wrote the F-word on a scrap of paper then pointed to the page when discussing the first draft of Farewell to Arms with Ernest. Around that time, lexicographer Allen Reed described “fuck” as “the word that has the deepest stigma of any in the language.” (John McWhorter, author of “Nine Nasty Words.”)
It’s a chase I’m going to cut to here in this look at the F-word, even though I find that a peek into the history of profanity resembles the first sip of a Moscow Mule – there’s more there, and there’s no reason not to reach the bottom – and let me tell you, the bottom of English profanity, once it shifted subjects from human holes (e.g. A-hole!) to holy things (e.g. My god!) then back again to the human body mostly below the belly button—well, who can blame Maxwell Perkins: allude rather than articulate.
You might appreciate this—way back, before the English Renaissance, coarse expressions about bodily functions filled conversations. Even genuine family names, like that of the dairyman, “Simon Fuckbutter” or “Ye olde Fucker John” were easily come upon (no pun intended, but I saw it instantly as I innocently wrote this sentence, and likely you will see it, too).
England’s King Henry VIII’s son, Edward VI, “a rather humorless Protestant prig (which he was)” loved to swear. Not by God’s name did he swear, no. By body parts he seasoned syntax: sexual activity, excrement, sphincter-blown-wind and nasty names for private parts – he expressed quite openly. But eventually, so apt to follow customs of cousins on the Continent under the spell of cultural advancement, the Renaissance-smitten English barred the F-word from public pronouncement. Between 1795-1965 not a single English dictionary carried it. The subject for swearing shifted to holy things.
I’m not a linguist so I can’t tell you why swearing “by God’s name” slowly replaced the familiar and salty use of below-the-belly-button slurs. Perhaps it is because profanity needs shock value, and shock requires surprise. The F-word was no longer surprising.
Whatever the reason, by the early 20th century, at least by 1939, when Clark Gable shocked the American movie world with the word “Damn,” as in “He didn’t give a –,” English speakers, mostly Christian to the core, allowed Holy words to be exploited; human holes no longer held center stage. We children of the 20th century heard adult interjections such as:
Shock: My god! Someone hit my car!
Stunned: Jeez-us! Jesus Christ! Jesus, Mary, and Joseph! What do you mean your mother’s coming!
Angry: Damn! God damn! Not again!
Joy: Hot damn! I won the lottery!
Frustrated: God damn it to hell! I’ve tried and tried to tie a fly!
For nearly everything else: Hell, Hell’s bells, Hell in a handbasket! Hell and back, What the hell? Where the hell? When the hell? It’s a hell of a, The hell I did . . . .
Swift as cultural changes seem to come along these days, by the mid-20th century, as religion lost much of its grip, these battered holy words lost their punch, lost shock power.
What now, profanity? Well, what goes around comes around, right? In the 1960s, along with protest, hippies, bra-burnings, and all hell breaking loose, those bawdy, and once banned medieval expressions raced back in. We all use filler words, all the time, like “like” and “ah,” or “you know,” but the new favorite filler is Fuck.
How is “Fuck” used? Here, Whorter’s list from “Nine Nasty Words.”
Destruction: Fuck it up
Deception: Fucked me over
Dismissal: Fuck it
Daunting: Get your fucking hands off
Anger: F’n (add a noun or several)
Praise: He helped build the fuck’n spaceship
Question: What the fuck? How the, Where the, When the, Who the . . .
Emphasis: R-fuck’n-tistic, Fan-fuck’n-tastic
Sex: Fuck - as in a boast, an invitation, a description, a memory, a wish
In today’s culture, the F-word fits syntactically as assorted nouns, adjectives, adverbs, verbs, and independent, subordinate, or conditional clauses. It’s grammar magic. “Fuck” is back, but with a spin, it seems to me. Let me explain.
I have a 1973 NYT article written by Barbara Lawrence: “Dirty Words Can Harm You.” The author (a Redbook editor & professor) speaks of our word as “the best of the tabooed sexual verbs.” By ‘best’ she doesn’t mean ‘good.’ Derived from German and likely carried to English by conquering Vikings, it’s not a pleasing word, etymologically speaking. Whether from Latin, German, Celtic, Gaelic, or English, at its root one finds reference to “the male member,” “a staff or cudgel.” It means “to beat, to strike, to pierce.” It describes, says Lawrence, “what etymologists sometimes call ‘the sadistic group of words for the man’s part in copulation.’” The article I have warns of the “brutality of this word [which] . . . in their origins and imagery carry undeniably painful, if not sadistic, implications, the object of which is almost always female.”
So came warnings in 1973, in the dawning of feminism, when I first read “Dirty Words Can Harm You.” But language moves on, even stealthily. For example, McWhorter reminds those who might yet drink coffee once touted by the saintly Mrs. Olsen, that the origin of the name, Folger’s, is the French, “Flucher,” which literally translates—well, you know. No one flinches at the word “Folger.” Until maybe now.
In the 1940s, my grandmother banned playing cards from her home. She was taught that the Jack represented an invitation to licentiousness. The Queen? A mockery of Mary, the mother of Jesus. The Joker, the fool, ridiculed the Christ. Even the number of cards in a deck held some secret fallacy of faith. God help us. But by the late 1980s, my grandmother was playing Solitaire. Had the cards changes? They had not. Had my grandmother’s faith waned? Not a whit. The old taboo, like the requirement to dress up for dinner, had been cast off. The cards no longer held shock value. The deck had been tamed. My question is, “Is this good?”
What about the word, “F-word”? Personally, I can’t use it. But it does seem somewhat tamed here in the 21st century. Fuck’s taboo status seemingly abandoned. “Its usage is mostly non-sexual,” says Keith Allan, emeritus professor of linguistics at Monash University in Australia. “As a result, the word has become less extreme, and less likely to cause a freakout-type response by the average person who hears it,” says he. How well I know as I listen to TV, or to my thoughtful adult daughter rant with words her mother never taught her. The “shock value in saying fuck in public, I think is totally gone,” the professor says.
While I can’t say it, while it is likely I will never write it beyond these pages, the question persists: Is it good that we have tamed a word that is violent at its root? We humans have tamed the land, tamed wild animals, tamed the numinous spirit world. Is it possible to tame profanity? Mustn’t the “profane” be, well, profane? And if the holy and holes have been tamed, where will Profanity take us next? Keep your ears open – the newest category is already slipping into our conversations.
