The Year of the F-word 

Although just a simple one-syllable expression -- three consonants and a vowel -- there's something about the "f" and "ck" sounds that give it a harsh and forceful resonance, one that's guaranteed to elicit a reaction. For instance, telling someone to "shut-up" certainly gets your point across, but punctuate that same phrase with "fuck" -- as in "shut the fuck up" -- and suddenly you've got, shall we say, a more adamant expression of your sentiment, and one that's akin to a verbal slap across the face.

And it's so versatile -- Exclamatory: (Fucking-A! I won the lottery!) Conversational: (Whatcha doing? Nothing, just fucking around). Insulting: (Hey, fuck you!) Descriptive: (That kid's a real fuck-up). It also expresses shock or surprise: (What the fuck?!), general remorse or disappointment ("Ah fuck, the movie is sold out"), and can even be nearly every word in a sentence: "Fuck those fucking fuckers!" (translation: "disregard the very displeasing people"). And of course, there's the always popular sexual definition.

The F-word is with us always, and has been for quite some time. Lately, though, it's gotten a lot of extra attention. A couple of months ago, Vice President Dick Cheney famously told Sen. Patrick Leahy to go fuck himself after Leahy reportedly "challenged his integrity." Cheney's bon mot came on the heels of an interview with Rolling Stone in which John Kerry combined the F-word with "up" to describe the Bush administration's postwar Iraq policy. And most recently, Charlotte Congressman Mel Watt reportedly used the F-word during a heated argument with Ralph Nader.

What's going on here? It's not that it's suddenly OK to scream "Fuck!" in public (or is it?), but given Americans' looser tongues these days, it's time to examine, dissect, and even pay homage to the old F-bomb. After all, there's no other word that's equally maligned and venerated or that can so effectively launch a scandal. The word's origins are steeped in myth and legend, not to mention that it's one of the most studied words in the field of linguistics. We realize that this article may run the risk of offending some people, but in the words of that great philosopher Tom Cruise, sometimes you just have to say what the fuck.

F*** Is The Word

In the lexicon of curse words, fuck is the king, the ultimate four-letter word. It's the Muhammad Ali of curse words. It's the undisputed top dog in George Carlin's list of Seven Dirty Words, (except, perhaps, for the one that precedes fuck with "mother" -- always guaranteed to inflame the senses). In fact, just about all other obscenities are limp wannabes that pale in comparison to the F-bomb. For example, while the kids on Comedy Central's South Park regularly say goddamn, and in one episode uttered "shit" a record 162 times, fuck is still considered off limits.

When U2 vocalist Bono said it last year at the Golden Globes, the FCC called it "abhorrent" and stated "The "F-word' is one of the most vulgar, graphic and explicit descriptions of sexual activity in the English language."

In the movie Barbershop, when Cedric the Entertainer's character Eddie said "Fuck Jesse Jackson!," it set off an avalanche of controversy, including Jackson himself calling on others to boycott the movie. It's doubtful there would have been such a strong reaction if the Eddie character had said "To hell with Jesse Jackson," or even "Screw Jesse Jackson." But "Fuck Jesse Jackson?!" That was just going too far.

In the holiday classic A Christmas Story, little Ralphie Parker discovered the ramifications of uttering the F-bomb after he spilled a hubcap full of lug nuts while helping his father change a flat tire.

"Oooh fuuudge!"

"Only I didn't say Fudge," recalls the now grown Ralphie. "I said THE word, the big one, the queen-mother of dirty words, the "F-dash-dash-dash" word!

Later that night, poor little Ralphie was forced to dine on a bar of soap, compliments of his horror-stricken mother. Indeed, fuck is still the one word that most of us would never dare utter in front of our parents, regardless of if we're in high school or getting ready to retire.

No doubt about it, fuck remains one of the strongest, most controversial yet prolific vulgarisms in the English language. "There are perhaps one or two words that might be more obscene, but none of them are nearly as widespread as fuck," says Jesse Sheidlower, the North American editor of the Oxford English Dictionary. Sheidlower is also the author of The F-Word, a 272-page tome devoted entirely to the celebrated obscenity, and boy is it a hoot to hear him say fuck in his cultured, erudite voice.

F-Word Evolution

So just where did this incendiary vulgarism come from? One common-and erroneous-theory is that it originated as an acronym. There are several variations of the acronym theory, including one that says "fuck" stood for "Fornication Under Consent of the King," which was supposedly tacked up over the doors of government-approved brothels in early England. Another theory says the word originated as a medical diagnostic notation on the documents of soldiers in the British Imperial Army. When a soldier was found to have V.D., the abbreviation F.U.C.K. was stamped on his documents, which stood for "Found Under Carnal Knowledge." Still another theory says "For the Use of Carnal Knowledge" was stamped on condoms, or, alternatively, used as a law term in the 1500s when referring to rape as "For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge." The latter theory is so popular, Van Halen adopted it for the title of their 1991 album.

Most linguists now agree that the word fuck did not originate as an acronym, but instead crept, fully formed, into the English language around the 15th century. It's believed to have derived from the Old German "ficken/fucken" meaning "to strike or penetrate," which had the slang meaning "to copulate." Despite the fact that it was originally a German word, its first known appearance was in English literature in the satirical poem, "Flen, Flyss" (c.1500), which ridiculed the monks of a particular abbey in England. The word was both disguised as a Latin word and encrypted -- "gxddbov," deciphered as "fuccant," pseudo-Latin for "they fuck."

The word was first recorded in a dictionary in 1598 (John Florio's A World of Words), and its usage continued to grow more common. "In the 16th and 17th centuries, it was used by well-known poets like Robert Burns and Lord Rochester, and it appeared in numerous dictionaries," says Sheidlower. However, starting in the late 18th century, the word came to be regarded as increasingly vulgar and offensive, it grew rare in print, and was even banned from the Oxford English Dictionary. Sheidlower points out that it wasn't until after WWII that it started to appear again in the mainstream media, including magazines like Harpers and The Atlantic Monthly in the 1960s. The word made its first mainstream cinematic appearance in the 1970 films M*A*S*H and Myra Breckinridge. (The word did appear in less mainstream movies prior to this, including I'll Never Forget What's "Isname and Ulysses, both released in 1967.)

Decency and the Veep

A big part of the F-word's modern social evolution and proliferation can be attributed to pioneering comedians like Richard Pryor and Redd Foxx, who used it so masterfully -- and perhaps most important, so casually -- in their acts. George Carlin, of course, is credited with popularizing the F-word in his "Seven Filthy Words" routine. In fact, a 1975 radio broadcast of this routine on Pacifica Foundation Radio Station WBAI, New York, was a benchmark moment in defining obscenity laws.

The Federal Communications Commission received a single complaint about the Carlin monologue from a man named John R. Douglas, a member of the national planning board for Morality in Media. The FCC found that the program violated indecency rules, and the case made its way to the Supreme Court. The court held that broadcasters historically had received less constitutional protection than the traditional press and that "the broadcast media have established a uniquely pervasive presence in the lives of all Americans." The court thus approved the FCC's legal definition of indecency, which focused on "the exposure of children to language that describes, in terms patently offensive as measured by contemporary community standards for the broadcast medium, sexual or excretory activities and organs at times of the day when there is a reasonable risk that children may be in the audience."

Ever since then, the FCC has been engaged in continuous litigation to clarify the basic requirements of its indecency policy, and over the years the commission has leveled millions of dollars in fines against radio stations and media outlets that broadcast shock jocks like Howard Stern.

Throughout the 1980s, rap groups helped continue the promulgation of the F-word, particularly Public Enemy and NWA, with incendiary songs like "Fuck tha Police" from their 1988 album Straight Outta Compton. In addition, movies like Platoon (1987) and Full Metal Jacket (1988) were obscenity-laden to a degree the public had never before seen or heard. And of course Scarface (1983) -- practically required viewing today for any rapper worth his weight in gold teeth -- broke new ground; the F-bomb is reportedly dropped a record 219 times during the course of the movie. And more recently, the wise guys in Sopranos have taken up where Goodfellas left off, where saying the F-word is a strangely eloquent art form. And then there's actress Kim Cattrall, who practically made a career out of saying fuck with her libidinous character Samantha Jones on HBO's Sex and the City.

The rise of the internet is the latest phenomenon to stir up controversy over the F-word. Free speech advocates celebrated while others said it was yet another sign of our culture's continuing moral deterioration when, in 1997, the United States Supreme Court ruled the Communications Decency Act of 1996 as an unconstitutional abridgement of free speech rights guaranteed under the First Amendment. The decision, in effect, struck down a law that would criminalize free speech in cyberspace, which is, without question, littered with inflammatory material that goes way beyond four-letter words.

Aside from the internet, verbal frankness has only continued to spread throughout popular culture, particularly the F-word, and rules allowing it and other vulgar expletives have softened -- largely due to demand trends.

"For quite a number of years it's been considered less offensive," says Sheidlower. "It doesn't shock people the way it did 30 years ago. Even publications like The Washington Post are printing it."

Of course, those "publications like The Washington Post" made the decision to print "fuck" as they were reporting on Vice President Cheney telling Leahy to go fuck himself. As Newsweek columnist Anna Quinden recently pointed out, back in 1962 the New York Times quoted President John F. Kennedy saying "My father always told me that all businessmen were sons of bitches, but I never believed it until now." As a result, The White House went ballistic, the press office complained, and the publisher of the Times apologized and the AP noted that other newspapers had found the quote unfit to print.

"That was then. This is @#*!%," Quindlen wrote.

Just A Word/ Not Just A Word

Times have indeed changed. But as many folks say, so what? I mean, it's just a word, right?

Wrong, says Bob Peters, president of Morality in Media, a national, not-for-profit, interfaith organization established in 1962 to combat obscenity and uphold decency standards in the media.

"It contributes to the vulgarization of our society," says Peters, who is the author of such works as Information Superhighway or Technological Sewer: What Will It Be? and Marketplace of Ideas or Anarchy: What Will Cyberspace Become? Peters cites a recent survey from the Barna Research Group that asked, among other things, how people felt about "allowing the use of the "F-word' on broadcast television?" One out of seven adults (15 percent) who responded felt that allowing the word on broadcast TV was acceptable, while 83 percent said it was inappropriate.

"I'm thankful most people seem to agree with me," Peters says. "It's not that you want to commit hara-kiri because you hear the F-word, but most of us don't want to hear it. And that's despite the fact that it's said more often in society than ever before."

Peters attributes this divergence to the fact that we live in a mass media culture that's dominated by a group of people with a worldview very different from the general population. "The world of New York and LA is a very different world than what the average American inhabits," Peters says. "For one thing, religion is important to most Americans. But among the entertainment industry, religion is not important, and morality certainly isn't a consideration in their lives either. They have no sense of restraint in the realm of sexuality and vulgarity."

Concerning Cheney's recent outburst, Peters says: "I wish he hadn't said it. I'm in no way offering a defense, but he didn't say it at 9pm in front of an audience of children. He said it to Leahy, some other adults overheard it, and because this is an election year, it got widely publicized. It was the choice of the media to publicize it all over the world. I try not to swear, but once in a while I get angry and say a bad word. I think that's what happened with Cheney. It's unfortunate, but I think most of us would agree that while cursing is wrong, we're glad it's not a capital offense because a lot of us would be dead."

But not everyone sees the F-word or other obscenities as some insidious presence that's ruining our society. "As we become more enlightened and intelligent, I think so-called dirty words -- and even the idea of what is a dirty word -- becomes more irrelevant," says Chuck Stone, a professor in the school of journalism and mass communications at UNC-Chapel Hill, where he also teaches a course in censorship.

Stone says that just as the once-scandalous Gone with the Wind line "Frankly my dear, I don't give a damn" now seems tame, he sees the same thing happening with words like "fuck." He believes that such obscenities, although still considered offensive and beyond the pale by some, will soon become the norm on broadcast TV and other mainstream media outlets, and we'll be the none the worse because of it.

"As we evolve, words that are currently considered pornographic will become common," says Stone. "And our culture will never suffer as long as people are academically inclined and want to get a good job. Kids will always swear, but that doesn't determine their academic proficiency. So I don't think our culture will suffer one bit. Society is evolving to a broader embrace of words and vocabulary. Semantic proficiency and intelligence does not get diminished by vulgarity -- just look at Dick Cheney."

While there is certainly no shortage of passionate and articulate advocates with opposing viewpoints on this issue, perhaps the most salient statement regarding the F-word in our ever-changing society was issued over three decades ago. Back in 1968, a 19-year-old department store worker named Paul Cohen expressed his opposition to the Vietnam War by wearing a jacket emblazoned with "FUCK THE DRAFT. STOP THE WAR." Cohen was charged under a California statute that essentially prohibits "disturbing the peace...by offensive conduct." The US Supreme Court overturned Cohen's arrest in 1971. Speaking for the majority, Justice John M. Harlan wrote: "For while the particular four-letter word being litigated here is perhaps more distasteful than most others of its genre, it is nevertheless often true that one man's vulgarity is another's lyric."

Contact Sam Boykin at sam.boykin@cln.com or704-944-3623.