This is weird. I just used the word “fucking” in a non-Pit thread for the first time ever (not even realizing that it’s a no-no outside the Pit) and then immediately opened this thread. (I asked how much fucking butter the people in the “butter storing” thread use, anyway.) Its purpose is purely as an intensifier. It serves no (fucking) purpose whatsoever, only to ratchet up the level of emotional intensity in the sentence, and for that reason alone changes the meaning of the sentence.
For example, I could have said “How much butter do you people use anyway???” and it would have served ta similar (though less extreme) purpose. Or “HOW MUCH BUTTER DO YOU PEOPLE USE, ANYWAY?” and likewise, or “Holy cow! How much butter etc.”
“Fucking” exists at the limits of polite discourse, or just outside them. If we “allowed” it to be used freely in polite discourse, some other usage would replace it as an outlaw word. Isn’t it funny how the use of the word can mark intimacy levels: when I used the word at work, it signals that I feel great comfort with the person I’m speaking to (that, or I’ve dropped something heavy on my toe.) This is a phenomenon which I can see no fucking way around.
Paul Fussell’s WARTIME (1989, Oxford University Press, pp.92-95) has an extensive discussion of ‘fuck’ and many of its derivatives, as used in wartime.
‘…the use of the term could never be curbed because it was so essential to military meaning:
Once, on a misty Scottish airfield, an airman was changing the magneto on the engine of a Wellington bomber. Suddenly, his wrench slipped and he flung it on the grass and snarled, “Fuck! The fucking fucker’s fucked.” The bystanders were all quite well aware that he had stripped a bolt and skinned his knuckles.
(Hopkins, Songs from the Front and Rear,p.11)’
Once another CO, engaged with Blishen in farm work, noted with surprise how large a load a certain truck could hold. " ‘You’d never fink…that this fucking lorry could carry so much fucking corn.’ ‘Oh quite,’ [answered Blishen] ‘it’s unexpectedly capacious.’ The man collapsed in helpless laughter, shouting, ‘Oh Gawd! . . .Oh Gawd’s truth!’ "
(Edward Blishen, A Cackhanded War (London, 1972), p.155.)
I highly recommend this eye-opening book for all armchair generals who’s motto is ‘let’s you and him fight’.
