The "F" Word

Fuck You!

With all these multi-purposed applications, how can anyone be offended when you use the word? Use this unique, flexible word more often in your daily speech. It will identify the quality of your character immediately. Say it loudly and proudly: FUCK YOU!
~Monty Python

My only true resource for material is that of my own life. The rest I consider “research findings”. My best resource is that of my childhood. Keeping that in mind, please read on.

My mother was, and is to this day, a very straight forward and expressive person. She feels it and she expresses it. To her that’s just the way it is. She hates pretension and she is far from subtle. If you have a hard time understanding her expressions you either don’t want to understand or you are so offended by her polite profanity that you would rather be at ground zero in Hiroshima the day the bomb was dropped than to have to listen to her. You would probably get another deletive explitive as you walked away from what you thought should have been a gentle conversation with slight disagreements.

I paint such a lovely picture of my mother, I know, but I love her. What she taught me most of all is be yourself and fuck the world. You don’t need anyone’s approval and you don’t need anyone who doesn’t want to be with the real you. Thanks, mom.

The most real thing about my mother, and myself, is the need to express. Now in polite society this can be seen as vulgar and indeed unwanted. The phrase Shit! That motherfuckin’ bus better hurry the fuck up before I piss my motherfuckin’ pants will make most Christians uncomfortable (excluding Catholics) and cause mothers everywhere to cover the ears of their children. But let’s not panic here. Perhaps a translation of the above sentence would be more polite and helpful: Golly! I sure do hope the mass transit vehicle arrives soon so I may hurry home to use the facilities to relieve myself and not soil my pants and thus be embarrassed in public.

That doesn’t clear anything up for me but maybe it helps you. See, language is a strange creature. For example: My girlfriend likes Buffy The Vampire Slayer but hasn’t caught all of the episodes in their consecutive order. Thanks to TiVo we had been watching the episodes but it’s hard to watch two episodes every day. When the series finished its run with the show’s finale the next day the network started the series from the beginning once again. Fantastic. So if I said to my girlfriend, “Baby girl (she loves my pet name for her), let’s just watch the start of the show instead of the end of it” she could easily mistake my meaning as, “Hey, moron, when you watch a TV show it’s traditional to start at the beginning of the episode instead of in the reverse.” And I’m sure with such a misunderstanding an argument would ensue and thus the couch be my comforter for that night’s sleep. One sentence can have two, or even several, meanings.

Shortly after the publication of Naked Vitality people started asking me why I used so much profanity. To most I was being polite with the reply, “Profanity may be vulgar but it’s far more effective than a censored expletive.” What I really meant was, “because I fuckin’ felt like it.” Those two sentences may not sound the same but they both get the point across. The first seems to be painted with education while the latter expresses my true emotion on the subject.

“But, David. Couldn’t you just say it upsets you to have to explain and justify yourself?”

Couldn’t you kiss my ass and shut the fuck up?

Freedom, people! The U.S. is still (for the most part) a free country and I’m still a free man. I’m free to write what I want to write and you still have the freedom to make the choice to not read it.

“But all that profanity makes you sound like an uneducated redneck.”

Alright, first off I’m not a redneck. Until the age of about fifteen I was raised in and around the projects. To all you suburbanites that’s the ghetto. Profanity was (is) a big part of everyday vocabulary in those neighborhoods and it’s not a big deal. Kids don’t get sent home from school in those neighborhoods because they said shit or fuck. They go to jail because they tried to shoot the teacher’s face off. It has nothing to do with the right vocabulary. They are just symptoms of a distopic life. If you weren’t raised there you have no idea what that life is like. Just the same as I have no idea what it is like to have to go to school afraid a bomb might be dropped on the building.

Secondly, what’s all this “education” talk? But, to see the point of view of the opposition to the use of profanity, I have to understand that to use a word responsibly I should fully know and understand that word. This is where education is important. Too many of us have no idea of the origins of our favorite expletives. When my mother washed my mouth out with soap for saying the F-word she had no idea where her favorite word came from. Only that I had smarted off and said I learned it from her.

I think it must be childhood animosity which drove me to want to understand that word and why it’s so offensive. Why is it so understood and misunderstood at the same time? I think it has to do with emotion. If someone tells me fuck you I understand they have no desire to continue the conversation. Or maybe they were joking. How do I know? The answer has got to be in the emotion of the delivery.

Oh, but there is so much more to learn about this four-letter word. It’s incredibly versatile and useful. It’s the only word everyone understands when you say, “Little Timmy used the F-word.”

Monty Python once wrote a humorous essay about the F-word that was never taken seriously. Personally I think it should be taught in public schools but what the fuck do I know?

In brief I will summarize Monty Python’s educational piece: The F-word can describe all of the human emotions. In English the word falls into many grammatical categories. Transital verb: “John fucked Shirley”. Intransitive verb: “Shirley fucks”. Adjective: “John’s doing all the fucking work”. Adverb: “Shirley talks too fucking much”. Adverb enhancing an adjective: “Shirley is fucking beautiful”. Noun: “I don’t give a fuck”. Part of a word: “Abso-fucking-lutely” or “in-fucking-credible”. Or as almost every word in a sentence: “Fuck those fucking fuckers” or the more popular “fuck you, you fucking fuck”.

The F-word expresses fraud: “I got fucked”, trouble: “I guess I’m really fucked now”, dismay: “oh, fuck it!”, aggression: “Don’t fuck with me, buddy”, difficulty: “I don’t understand this fucking question”, inquery: “Who the fuck was that?”, dissatisfaction: “I don’t like what the fuck is going on here”, incompetence: “He’s a fuck off”, and dismissal: “Why don’t you go outside and play hide-and-go-fuck-yourself?”

Why is it then, seeing as how versatile the F-word really is, society shuns its usefulness? Some would say it’s a simple matter of class and polite regard, such as television censors. You can say copulate, which (to the censors) means the same thing but you cannot say the F-word itself on TV. Although with the increasing popularity of many cable shows we are seeing more lenient rules amongst the major TV networks. But along with the TV censors there are still many who only view the F-word as a deletive explitive only used to shock and offend. So let’s see if it helps to look at profanity as a whole.

The history of profanity in the English language is the part of social class in England. Most vulgar words, like fuck, cock, shit and piss, have old Anglic, Gaelic and Saxonic roots. But words having the same meaning, like copulate, penis, defecate and urinate, have Latin and French origins, which were indeed the royal and upper class of society. The former words were relegated to the lower classes because they had been in use for so long as to become common. And we all know how much royalty hates anything common. Seems like nothing changes. Profanity is in common use among the lower class, such as the neighborhoods where I grew up, and polite words having the same meaning are preferred by the upper class, such as the censors who rule over television.

This may explain a few things but it doesn’t help me understand the F-word anymore than before. The history of the word fuck is debatable. Some say it is derived from the German word fliechen, meaning to strike. There are likewise sources that say it was a placard. FUCK (Fornication Under Consent of the King). It seems some people in ancient England could not get it on without the king’s approval. Guess it is good to be the king.

It was also used in American Colonial times when someone would be punished for prostitution or having sex outside of marriage or the likes: FUCK (For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge). The acronym was written on their stocks.

Jesse Sheidlower however, (author of “The F-word”, Random House, 1999) dismisses the former sources. According to him the earliest claims in print of the supposed acronym appeared in the 1960’s. Some of the more ridiculous acronyms have been Forced Unnatural Carnal Knowledge (rape) and Found Under Carnal Knowledge (doctors’ medical diagnosis of soldiers with VD). Sheidlower says it’s all wrong and he agrees with the American Heritage Dictionary, which tells us the first use of the F-word occurred in English literature with the satirical poem “Flen, Flyss” (1500) deciphered as fuccant, psuedo-Latin for “they fuck”.

Yeah. That explains everything now. Ugh! There simply is no way of knowing for certain where this magically offensive word comes from.

I had a lot of “research findings” with this subject but I opted not to go into it all. It’s interesting and I’m sure you could do the same research and be as entertained as I was, staring for hours on end at your computer screen and in the end getting no where. So I just went back to my mother and asked her about the F-word, to which she said, “What the fuck about it?”