I can’t believe you said either of those outside the Pit!!!
There be a whole lot of whooshing in this thread. Could be me, could be others, but SOMEBODy is being whooshed!
As I learned (and used) it, a CH referred to when you had to move something juuuust a tiny bit, but an RCH was when you had to move it about half that distance. Because the red ones are finer.
I would never refer to a woman as the c-word, but I had a girlfriend who liked to use it for dirtytalk, specifically when referring to that part of her anatomy, and only in a sexual way.
I believe that for many years, the comic book industry was subject to a fairly strict set of self-censorship guidelines (much like the Hays code was for movies). Among the rules were proscriptions against using several innocuous words such as “flick” or the name “Clint”, because the all-caps sans serif lettering can make LI look like a U.
LOL! Which parents were these? 
Certainly not mine (I knew all the swear words, and some entertaining military phrases, by age 5).
And not my friends’ – and they were all the spawn of doctors and lawyers.
The dreaded suburban Bay Area parents. Not mine mine either though, I got in trouble my first week of kindergarten for teaching another kid “fuck.” Lest you think it’s uptight American parents here, his mom was British.
A CH is a “fine” adjustment. A RCH is an “ultra fine” adjustment. If a CH is in milliseconds, a RCH is microseconds or nanoseconds.
Missed the edit window again.
For LORAN C transmitting stations, we used cesium frequency standards because their output was 5 Mhz +/- 5 femtoseconds. For LORAN A transmitting stations, we got by with rubidium frequency standards with an output of 5 Mhz +/- 50 femtoseconds.
That’s a RCH difference in precision.
I find the C bomb to be the most offensive word. And yes, I am male.
Considering how ridiculous the Comics Code Authority could get, I could totally buy this. But since I read the current, excellent run of Hawk[del]guy[/del]eye, I had to go check it out, as it’d give Hawkguy’s name, Clint, another layer of meaning. Turns out to be a myth.
As to the OP… well, actually, the OP seems to’ve been a joke. As to the auto-threadjack, yeah, in isolation, for this American, ‘cunt’ is a stronger naughtyword than ‘fuck’. Context is everything, though.
Fuck is definitely losing some of its mojo. When I was a lad, in the far off days of the '70s, fuck was The Word You Did Not Say, lest your parents hear and inflict Dire Consequences. Cunt I don’t even remember us knowing, until much later. Now, it seems much less weighted. Cunt is still far more offensive, at least to us 'Murikans, although the experience of the British and the Australians suggest that it, too, will lose its potency in time.
But if the F-bomb is sliding down the offensive scale, other words are moving up. Again, when I was a child, racial and ethnic slurs were a lot more acceptable. Nigger was taboo, but only about as much as fuck is now. But we young barbarians tossed coon, jiggaboo, jungle bunny and spade about freely, as well as guinea, spic and wop. We were equally cavalier with sexual orientation: faggot was a common insult, and we had a game called “Smear the Queer”. We called the little loops over the plackets of our dress shirts fag tags. Among my child-rearing friends today, any one of those words (especially the “N-word”, which has now earned its own euphemism along the lines of “F-bomb”) would provoke more parental wrath than fuck, I think.
This is after all, the “Mundane Pointless Stuff” sub-forum: so there follows nonsense, kind-of about the C-bomb, from a British point of view…
Background: in the 1960s, the British Typhoo tea retailing company mounted an advertising campaign with the slogan, “Typhoo puts the T [clever pun :rolleyes:] in Britain”. There are, quite a way north in England, two fairly obscure and ugly industrial towns – definitely not jewels in Britain’s tourist crown – called Scunthorpe, and Penistone.
Graffiti-dialogue on the toilet wall at the university which I attended:
“If Typhoo puts the T in Britain, who put the cunt in Scunthorpe?”
“The same person who put the penis in Penistone.”
Nice post. Adds much to the evolution of words.
English cricket legend Ian Botham spent some time also playing football (soccer) for Scunthorpe United. I remember that at the time (1980 according to Wikipedia) he was referred to as “the man who put the cunt in Scunthorpe”. Being an Australian cricket fan, I agreed with the sentiment (although I now accept that I only disliked him because he was so damn good).
Speaking of “the F word” and “the C word”, Australian TV presenter Andrew Denton was once asked by a guest what the show’s rules about language were. His reply was something like, “we can say anything except ‘funk’ and ‘cult’.” It got the message over nicely, while not troubling the censors.
I’ve heard that about Flick, but the Marvel character Hawkeye’s real name is Clint Barton, and he’s been around since the early 60’s when the Comics Code Authority was in full force.
There’s a real double standard here though. Nobody bats an eye when someone, male or female, calls a person a ‘dick’ or an ‘asshole’, reducing the person to a body part. But people make the same argument that calling a woman a ‘cunt’ does just that, belittles her by referring to her as that part of her anatomy.
If we all strive for equality, why shouldn’t we be allowed to fold that word into our regular vocabulary along with the other two words?
[end of devil’s advocate position]
That ain’t the way language works. That’s why.
The F word has pretty much lost all meaning. People use it all the fucking time. You know what I fucking mean?
The C word is always offensive and usually aimed at a woman. Calling a man that word would get your lights punched out.
Not in England.