It’s f—— sad. It really is. What’s happened to this word so f—— powerful that you could f—— end a marriage with it or start or a f—— fight. Or, the word having the power of a punch itself, not even f—— have to.
I can’t spell it out here, one of the few places left in the world where this word is still shown respect in the taboo against using it. Even the “The New Yorker” magazine, that holder-of-the-line, has been forced to allow their writers to use it, lest they appear completely out of touch.
The word has been around for half a millennium or more and until recently has always packed a punch. But it suddenly seems that the erstwhile f-bomb has become the 3rd or 4th most common word in the language (depending on how you rank “and”).
No longer is it the resort of those who don’t know any better, or of those with Tourette Syndrome. Everybody, it seems, is using it. All the time. (One’s friends. One’s wife. Oneself. (Even if one is a former English professor who used to preach that there was always a better way to express a strong feeling than swearing.)
Suddenly, the f-word is out of the closet. In the most public places such as movies and TV series, this formerly most blippable of words has become not only unblipped but de rigueur. “Spartacus,” of course—everybody knows the ancient Romans used it all the time, from lowlife gladiators to their patrician owners. And to judge by a popular series about contemporary life such as “The Affair,” we adults all use the f-word in just about every sentence—men, women, young and old, rich trophy house owners and their plumbers.
Used to be it was chief among those words that if the parents used it themselves on rare occasion, they would quite scrupulously keep it from the children (and be aghast if the argument got so out of control the kids overheard it, a sign the marriage was on the rocks). No more. Now, in “The Affair,” it’s how an upper middle-class writer and college professor talks to his teenage daughter.
The cleancut astronauts of the current blockbuster,“The Martian,” do not in the slightest fear eroding their heroic status by using the word, even when it’s being broadcast to the entire world. It just makes them more loveably real.
I expect to hear that man of the people, the Pope, start using it any time now.
Actually the word is used more in contemporary “realistic” TV and film dramas than in private life, to the point of undermining the realism. Even in an otherwise well-scripted show such as “The Affair,” the constant use of the f-word seems to function as a sort of Viagra, in place of actual creativity and passion.
But it’s not working. It’s gone from a sprinkling (easily blipped) used for f—— realism’s sake to almost constant f—— use in sentence after f—— sentence, sometimes more than once. Thus overused it has quickly come to have less effect than did “damn” a couple of decades ago. And heading for “darn.”
There is a clear need for an explosive replacement, but if there is one on the horizon, I’m not aware of it. The f-bomb, when it actually functioned like a bomb, is a hard act to follow.
The trivialization of a once proud and effective four- letter word. F—— tragedy, if you ask me.
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