Something Thoughtful

   Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him.

                                                                  F**K

            F**k? Yes f**k. The most objectionable word in the English language beaten only by c**t, although the feisty feminist Germaine Greer has made a good case for legitimising c**t and honouring it. But you do notice how I am bowdlerising my own words, don’t you? I am deliberately not spelling both words in full lest readers might think I am simply trying to gain attention or be smutty. So f**k and c**t they remain.

            I’m not an expert in the origins of c**t as a word, but the use and misuse of f**k really intrigue me.

A little bit of backstory. The word f**k has been in use for at least 700 years… and perhaps more. It originated in Germanic and Scandinavian languages and was probably used in Early French. And bear in mind that the English language as we now know it is largely a mixture of Old German and French, with some Scandinavian and a little Celtic thrown in. Etymologists are very clear about this and they note that f**k, in its first form, probably meant sexual relationships but without any derogatory connotations. I am pointing this out clearly because every so often you might encounter some nitwit who wants to tell you that f**k means “Found Under Carnal Knowledge” or other such recently fabricated acronyms. Acronyms – making words out of separate letters - are often made up by people who don’t know anything about the history of words [etymology]. That is why you will also have nitwits who want to tell you that the word “posh” originated by the P. and O. steamship company that was reputed to have given the best berths to the wealthier travellers who were to get the best sunlight when going to India and then going back to England. Hence “Port Out Starboard Home”, viz “posh”. Again this is nonsense. The word “posh” was around long before there were such arrangements – if they really existed, which they probably didn’t – and “posh” seems to have arisen in Cockney slang meaning the showy wealthy classes.

But to get back to this word f**k. What is its status now? Over the centuries it has become a curse word (“f**k you”) a term of despair (“oh f**k it”), an aggressive way of dismissing somebody (“f**k off”), an all-purpose utterance when annoyed, especially when things have gone wrong (“f**k!”), an amusing way of addressing a friend (“how are things going you old f**ker”) and many other variations too tedious to catalogue. But of course f**k and f**king are most often used as crude and derogatory ways of referring to sexual intercourse.

 The word was always freely used  by what were once referred to as the “lower classes”. Fun fact - recently [silent] newsreel films, of British Tommys in the First World War, were handed over to a lip-reader, who was able to show that they effed and blinded to their hearts desire. F**k in all the trenches.  Until very recently however, the dreaded word would never be printed in a newspaper, uttered in a court of law unless somebody wanted to be fined for using such language, used in a stage-play or film, or found in a novel [apart from under-the-counter pornography]. But censorship gradually eased over the 20^th century. First came the novelists – with Ulysses and Lady Chatterley’s Lover and others that followed -  with court cases that decided they could be published. Then in the early 1960’s, Hollywood, realising that television was now taking away much of its audience, began to allow the dreaded word into their movies. Then f**k became everyday speech in movies, American and elsewhere. Then f**k was frequently heard on television, it became mainstream, and even middle and upper classes began to casually use the word at need. And [I’m not a hypocrite] I have sometimes shouted f**k when I’m caught in a traffic jam or frustrated by the workings and codes of the systems of my desktop.

But there’s a problem here. Having hitherto been a scandalous word, a word that had some power, f**k has really lost its sting. It is all over the place. Once people would have been shocked by protesters bearing placards saying “F**K THE GOVERNMENT”. Now people just yawn and see this as passe. No wonder protesters now have to lie down in front of cars, or throw paint over revered paintings, to get attention.

There are two stories that come to my mind.

When Norman Mailer’s first novel was published [in 1948] The Naked and the Dead, his publishers insisted that he could not use f**k, even though the novel was about soldiers in wartime who, obviously, swore and cussed on nearly every page. So Mailer had to turn every f**k to fug. The jaded actress Tallulah Bankhead addressed him at a party saying “So you’re the young man who doesn’t know how to spell f**k.”

In 1962 the mainly comical English author David Lodge [I’ve written about him on this blog] wrote a novel called Ginger, You’re Barmy, about English squaddies doing their national service and often swearing a blue streak. He dutifully made every f**k a fug without having to be told. But two years later the novel was re-published, and without controversy, he was able to turn all the fugs into f**ks… But then even later, when the novel was getting a third publishing, Lodge changed his mind and decided that it was out of key to have a novel written in the early 1960s to be filled f**k – so back came all the fugs.

So see how f**k can still be contentious? We know it’s a foul word, yet we use it casually and then wish we didn’t. We worry that f**k  is losing its force because of over-use, yet we are aware that we are partly responsible for that loss. We know that the word is often used by people who do not have a very broad vocabulary, yet we don’t want to become patronising about this. Really it’s hard to know what to do with this word. F**kit.