It’s about the word fuck. Although it’s commonly heard uttered in public these days by more or less respectable people, it’s still supposedly considered inappropriate enough to be >bleeped< out in newscasts. If the word appears on something like a public sign or flag, it can’t be shown unless it’s blurred out, although of course it’s perfectly acceptable to render it with letters missing, e.g., “f*ck.” (As an aside, it’s also meaningless in other languages, the most obvious example being demonstrated by the German vehicle license plates that bore something like “FÜCK123” at least at one time.)

And yet, who today doesn’t know what’s being said, despite the bleeps or blurring or missing letters? So why try to hide the word in public?

Well, you say, it’s for the children whom we don’t want repeating the word and to protect people like our grandmothers who might be offended by it. But that’s only because we all agree that the word is shocking and offensive. What if we all agreed that it was not shocking and offensive?

I vividly recall how other words have lost their shock effect even during my lifetime. Does anyone remember the controversy about the word “damn” in the movie Gone With the Wind? That lasted some time after the film was released. It seldom if ever appeared in newspapers or was heard in public broadcasts, and certainly not in the comics pages. “Hell” was another one; does anyone besides me remember the sly upside down renderings of “7734” as a way of spelling it out without spelling it out? “Bitch” was enough to elicit nervous titters even when carefully used to refer to a female dog.

No one I know thinks twice about using such mild expletives in the politest company today, so why not defang other words? And it’s not like deshockitizing the “F” word will leave us bereft of alternatives to shock, awe, and possibly get us fired: “C” and “N” words come to mind.

This is of course unlikely to happen because I suggested it, but I often wonder if it will occur in my limited remaining lifetime. If it does, it will be one thing that I managed to predict correctly.

While I see your point, IMHO I would love to see us go the opposite direction.

I'd love to see us go back to a time where we didn't have to throw coarse language and vulgarity in the face of our children, and people prefer not to see it strewn across advertising and television and normalized for the sake of being able to say one more word they once couldn't say in public without getting shot a dirty look.

We still have plenty of company in which we can say things like this: bars, sporting events (even WITH kids present, it would seem), forums like these.... But even here, the boss draws a line on where and when you can say certain things, and I have to say I like it that way.

Everyone has their opinion, and I understand we disagree, but I respect where you're coming from just the same.

I agree it would be nice if everyone avoided coarse language.
I used it freely in my early days in the Army (although never the “F” word which was rarely heard in my experience), but in time I made the effort to remove it from my speech. Except with a couple of my closest friends, and even then only rarely, I try to avoid even the mildest “swear” words: demonstration of self-control and a better vocabulary and all that.

This is not intended to encourage use of words, but about how and why certain words enjoy such power with us.

I try to avoid profanity when I can but like Harry Truman once said, sometimes nothing else will quite do. Let's Go Brandon!

Not too long ago, I read this on SIGforum (can't remember exactly where): "Profanity is the linguistic crutch of an inarticulate motherfucker."

The dumbing down with a "letter-word" is just plain comical.
You can extend that to the shifting of woke words that offend.
It doesn't matter.
When someone says Dwarf everyone knows they it is a Midget.
Lot more examples.
I just don't care anymore.

Profanity coming out of a woman's mouth or off of her keyboard or on paper is to me, quite frankly, disgusting. Call me old fashioned, but it says something to me about a woman who wants to keep up with the men, and I don't give a shit what anyone makes of that.

My wife- I've known her more than 27 years. In all that time, she has uttered only once anything approximating profanity. When we first started dating, she would spend weekends at my place, or I would spend weekends at her place. She had two cats, and even though they were left with more than sufficient food and water for these two day intervals, the male cat, Chester, didn't like being left alone. So, one weekend, Chester expressed his displeasure by climbing onto my wife's bed in her apartment and taking a big greasy shit.

After she left my place on Sunday night, I called her to make sure she got home alright. She answered the phone and said- with understandable frustration- "Let me call you back. Chester crapped in my bed."

In 27 years, boys and girls, that has been the full extent of profane language from her, and that is how it should be. Yes, when it comes to profanity, I possess a double standard, big as life. You're Goddamned right, I do.

From the male of the species, I do not care if a man uses profanity, with two qualifications; don't overdo it, and don't use it in the places and at the times we all know it should not be used. No adult should have to be told the when and where of this.

There is a long-standing policy in this forum regarding the "where" of profanity. In order to see any profane language here, one must open individual threads. I consider this to be a reasonable, balanced approach. Disallowing the use of profanity altogether in a venue frequented overwhelmingly by men is in my opinion prudish and phony.

Fuck has no shock value for me. It's used within my professional circles. Maybe not in a public facing shareholder meeting, but certainly in the boardroom otherwise.

I won't shield my young daughter from it, or any other profanity. Words are powerful tools, and rather than keep them all on a shelf never to be used, I'm going to teach her how to use them responsibly. Like firearms.

Ultimately, I want her to be able to employ expletives when the occasion warrants in a way that would make Airsoft Guy proud. If she ever needs to cuss someone out, dress someone down, or defend herself verbally, I want to equip her with the ability to send that person home crying with some permanent emotional trauma, the kind that will need years of therapy to unravel down the road.

She may not need to use profanity to get her point across, but I'm certainly not going to hobble her by not teaching her their proper use.

There was a time, Victorian Age perhaps, when people of good taste simply "didn't hear" objectionable words. I believe after decades of self-imposed training and cultural pressure that this was literally true, not only were ladies and gentlemen behaving as if such words were never uttered, they truly could not hear them, they dropped out of the sound stream somewhere between their ears and their brain. There are still people in our midst who have not lost this ability, grandmothers (not) hearing what their grand kids are saying for example. As a defense against feeling offended this seems perfectly effective, perhaps it is a skill that should be cultivated more widely in our modern society?

After spending a couple of years in the Army, the bad connotations of that word completely disappeared for me.

But I agree with Parabellum that coming from a woman, I find it disagreeable and undoubtedly always will.

When I was a kid (I’m 73) growing up in the 50s/60s, it was considered inappropriate to use the word “pregnant”. When referring to a woman who was with child my mom and her friends would say she was “PG”.

I once asked my mom why and she just said “pregnant” was not used in polite company.

It seems very odd to me now. I assume, given the repressive times, that using the word “pregnant” would somehow imply that the person with child had engaged in sex. Engaging in sex or any discussion about it was taboo.

Those of us born back in the 40s/50s were all conceived through some kind of magic.

“Under certain circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer." I’ve used a persons range of vocabulary and frequency of the use of profanity as a measure of their intellect that hasn’t failed me to date. Mark Twain once commented that there should be a room in every house dedicated to profanity..

One of the smartest people I've ever known could make a truckdriver blush. I'm talking about a true genius and if you sit down with him when the gals aren't around, it's a hoot to listen to his mastery of profane language.

My wife is like Para's

I think there is a time and place for profanity and I will not use it in front of, women, children and strangers.

I don't like the direction we are headed in.

quote:

Originally posted by sigfreund:
What if we all agreed

Maybe our consensus supply is all stuck in one of those container ships bobbing offshore waiting to unload? It does seem in seriously short supply these days.

What I've observed is that used sparingly, expletives can effective at expressing something beyond what a normal adjective does. There is skill in learning how/when/where to swear effectively. F. Lee Ermey, for example had it. (ASG, too. Good luck Aeteocles in getting your daughter to that level!)

But, when profanity becomes standard, the effect is to transition from an expletive actually showing emotion, it's just meh. The end process is the New Jersey alphabet, "Fucking-A, Fucking-B,..."

And, once the process has started it's really difficult, maybe impossible, to stop or reverse, if that should be desired.

There's really no reason other than laziness for salting every conversation with over-the-top language, IMO. Where it's needed/warranted, fine. But there's surely value in keeping most discussion suitable for polite company.

^ That is very reasonable and is how I try to conduct myself. (Not always successfully.) It should be a spice or a seasoning, not the main course.

quote:

Originally posted by sigfreund:

I used it freely in my early days in the Army (although never the “F” word which was rarely heard in my experience)

How is that possible? Where you one of the Vatican's Swiss Guards?

I would point out that much the same thing happened to the word "screw" back in the 1980s.

I also don’t swear in public. But when I’m alone, by myself, I’ll cuss my self out. JFC Ed! If you had a fucking brain you know how to fix this. GD it son, GD it! GTFO ya SOB! Yeah, I give myself a good talking to. Funny thing is, I then feel good about myself, till the next time I need a cussin’ out.

For all that's good in this world, if you're going to say or write "Fuck" or anything else, just say/write it...

Don't mess aound... no asterisks, no substitutions, no cutesy kid words, go on, say/write the actual word...

Or don't. But don't fuck around and halfass it.

It's neither cute nor usefully different. Everyone and you knows what you meant, anyway.