My wife and I say “fuck” all the time. We swear quite liberally. I swear around my friends. I don’t swear at work, but fuck that. I find its use in TV and movies perfectly reasonable.
Like, fuck is not like the word that I, like, wish the millenials I, like, know, would, like, use less frequently.
I daresay Shakespeare used a lot of words, now obsolete in their original sense, the modern equivalent of which would get bleeped on TV.
I use the word all the fucking time.
It’s often the first word I say in the morning.
That’s because my life sucks. Always has.
Swearing is the one vice I allow myself.
I’m very careful not to swear around our African Grey. He will outlive us, and I don’t want his vocabulary to be a hindrance for rehoming.
When a friend moved to Jamaica, I took his Blue&Gold Macaw so that I could find him a new home. I kept the bird at work in an attempt to find a [del]sucker[/del] caring bird lover. He had a tiny vocabulary consisting of “hello” and “fuck”. He’d say “hello” maybe once a day, and “fuck” maybe twice a week. He sabotaged one of his potential homes by saying “fuck” loudly and clearly one day. It took close to a year to place the bird.
The problem is that people are nowparroting the cursing of others!
Exactly! The main reason I couldn’t stand Another Life on Netflix was the overused expletives. (OK, that and the entire premise was stupid, but that’s another thread…)
Back in '73, when I was a naive new sailor at the training command in Memphis, I was waiting in line for something and a young Marine behind me was talking to his friend - it seemed like every other word was a variation on fuck. I don’t know if he thought he was manly or defiant or whatever, but he came across to me like an uneducated child trying to act like he was tough. That’s what I remember when the fucks fly.
And yes, I’ve dropped the f-bomb myself, but only when the situation warranted it. I’m classy like that.
Dennis Miller, when he was funny, and doing his short Rant Zone bits:
*Now, while I have upon occasion been labeled the E.B. White of the word “fuck,”
you do have to admit that I went an entire football season without saying it.
Take it from a connoisseur, it should be used sparingly, like saffron in a
fucking paella.
See–the word “fuck” is a beauty, isn’t it? From its fricative genesis,
blossoming into its ripe, rich middle until its cruelly truncated in its prime
by a merciless, glottal stop… In all of its earthy, salty, illicit
Anglo-Saxon glory, “fuck” is almost as satisfying to say as it is to do.*
I always think of this scene from Midnight Run: Best conversation ever - Midnight Run - YouTube
In about 60 seconds De Niro and Joe Pants say it at least a dozen times (or at least that’s where I lost count).
Designated Survivor was a network show for a couple of seasons and then got cancelled and somehow ended up getting picked up by Netflix. In the first couple of seasons, when Keifer Sutherland was getting really wound up because of a bad situation where lives were at stake he might call someone a son of a bitch. Along comes Netflix, with no language restrictions. Now all of a sudden every adult character is swearing like a sailor all the time and even the pre-teen daughter is describing things as “shitty”. It was a jarring change of pace.
Lucifier was in the same situation (Fox to Netflix) and they used the language liberty but sparingly. At one point a character who is an actual demon says “you scared the shit out of me!” and at another point a dismayed character tells Lucifer that everything he touches turns to shit (which is generally shown to be true). I thought that was a nice balance.
Here’s something I remember from Penn Jillette’s old column on Excite. He had it on his web site a long time ago, but it disappeared in a revision. It can only be found by looking on archive.org. Hopefully it is obscure enough that the mods will let me quote it in full, as I’m pretty sure I’m one of the only people who remember it and the Dope should:
I’ve stopped swearing. I’m 42 years old and from the time I was 16, I talked like carnies and rockers and truckers and sailors. I tried to talk like all the cool people, using obscenity for every part of speech. It seemed like a ticket into a special group of outsiders. I never used hard obscenity on stage, but I was always trying to slip expletives onto the radio (you do know that the FCC is unconstitutional on every front, right?). But in daily existence, I talked trash.
Several months ago, I went to see Slash’s Snakepit at a venue in Vegas. He played his guit-box like a ringin’ a bell. I was enjoying the show. After the third selection, when it was time for Slash to welcome us, he said, "Welcome. We’re really glad to be back in the USA. We were in South America and those people didn’t understand us. It feels good to be home.
But, he didn’t use those words. I don’t have a tape, and I wasn’t taking notes, but the words he said were along the lines of, "Oh # man. How you #ers doing? It is so #ing great to #ing be #ing back in this #ing coun-#ing-try. #, man, #. I mean, #. #, man, #. I mean #. Down there, well, #, they #ing don’t #ing speak #ing English, man. #. #, it’s so #ing great to #ing be here.
In the previous quote, “#” stands for the favorite root word of all wise-cracking, sophisticated, modern folk (it also drove my spell checker nuts). That magic word can be used for every part of speech (yes, its function can even be Conjunction Junction).
I sat in the balcony wondering if I sounded like that. I started becoming more aware of swearing. I had an epiphany – I realized no one thought I was talking like a carney. They thought I was talking like a mall kid. Nowadays, who knows how carnies talk? It’s like tattoos. They used to mean you were on the bally, in the joint, or on the sea. Now, tattoos and swearing just mean you’ve been to Tower Records. Even mall T-shirts proclaim the magic word.
I still use all those words, even the “C” one that still has some small amount of integrity and magic. However, I only use them for their literal meaning. If I’m talking about real sex, I don’t talk baby talk. You won’t catch me “making love,” “doing it,” or even “screwing.” But I don’t use obscenity as empty modifiers or even as a sexy synecdoche.
My decision to stop swearing is not a moral position. It’s not to be polite. It’s not to fit in. Quite the opposite. It makes me say what I mean and that’s often not polite. Not swearing takes my rants off auto-pilot. Not swearing makes me think. It gives those words their original magic in their literal meanings. It makes them sexier when I’m talking about sex.
I started stopping swearing with some friends. It’s difficult, but it’s pretty fun. We say more of what we mean. We’ve started making it clear whether we’re displeased with someone for their morals, their style, their hygiene, or their looks (all valid reasons). We no longer label them all with one compound body part metonym. We’ve become more precise. There’s more information.
When someone is talking nonsense, it’s bolder, more aggressive, and less acceptable to say, “No, that’s not true,” than to shout a friendly, ho-hum, reference to bovine fecal matter. Not swearing is not the right thing to do. It’s not the classy thing to do. It makes the truth plainer and that’s rarely society’s view of polite.
There is a downside. Last night I banged the little toe of my right foot hard on the door jam in the middle of the night. I had nothing to say.
By the way, two possibly three of Carlin’s “Seven Words” are no longer on the list. First was “tits” which I first heard un-bleeped on the Johnny Carson show used by two members of Duran Duran as “on my tits”. Then it was “piss”, and eventually “shit.”
What will be the next to fall?
I say fuck often. When I’m playing video games it’s ridiculous, my swearing is closer to Tourette’s that doesn’t make sense.
I don’t think it’s overused on TV and movies. There’s a lot of fuck in real life.
Midnight Run is the pinnacle, the ne plus ultra of swearing in a movie IMHO. And the cast is perfect. In the clip above the worst curse is not “go fuck yourself” but “you slimeball swimming in a sea of pus!” Not an expletive in the sentence, but pretty evocative.
3 decades in construction and you can imagine what the vocabulary becomes. Also, the “book” “Shit My Dad Says” has some excellent swearing by a nuclear medicine research doc with few filters. Well worth a copy in the bathroom.