Bearing the Swearing

There is bad language here. Now, I'm no Shakespeare and it could be argued that none of the language across this website is so hot; but I think we know what I mean by bad language.

This page contains the word fuck. It will probably contain lots of the word fuck when I finish tapping away at the keyboard (perhaps to the point where the previously standard keyboard becomes a fuck'ing keyboard, so regular is the keying in of the word fuck).

The word fuck appears quite a lot on the Web. Not so much as one might imagine. I doubt even the most teen-angst blog, the diatribes of death metallers, the strangled prose of my favourite Indian amateur porn stories websites have as many instances of the word fuck as, say, three minutes of an old Richard Prior routine (note to Brasynov - new Richard Prior routines will be increasingly scarce). Nonetheless the word fuck makes its appearances on the Web: we know and understand this.

Is it shocking? Well, I think to read the word fuck is now more startling than to hear it, but I doubt it is shocking. When a mother, enjoying some quality time with their child at the computer screen, clicks on a Disney link to be confronted with HOT BLONDE TEEN FUCK! I am quite sure that the word fuck is the least shocking aspect of the whole incident. When it is related to her lover later it will be the inspiring physical fluidity of the models that colours her recounting, not the word fuck. The lover will be marvelling at the skill of the site-hacker of course, or wondering when they can get into the browser's cache to locate the pertinent address. The surprise of seeing the word fuck in writing is that anybody bothers to write it. If somebody were to jam a knife between my shoulder blades as I typed this I wouldn't bother writing AAAAAARRRRGH!! as it would be far too important a message to get over to fret over the grammatics of the exclamation mark and the silent G (though actually it's a legacy G from Ben Johnson's germanic accent of course). Similarly, why write the word fuck? If one has time to boot up and tap the keys, surely the passions that arouse the word fuck from our mouths are somewhat subsided by the time the word appears on the screen? And no, apostophising a missing g don't make it fuckin' right.

Unquestionably, the word fuck has crept out of the bike shed and onto the bus. It thrills the Dad within us to tut at the fucks emitted by the young rabble in the street, but away from public scrutiny we did the same at their age and it belittles us to so abhor their wasted audacity now. The word fuck has lost its shock and replaced it with a dull matte of acceptibility. Old ladies use it in confined groups and with a little pride in still being able to raise an eyebrow or a pulse with its uttering. It is a functional tool of language that Grandmama would not have liked to hear but which has its place in the rusty cantilever box we keep under the verbal sink.

The place the word fuck used to hold has now been replaced by the word cunt WOAH! I DIDN'T WARN YOU THAT WAS COMING, DID I!! The Scottish magician and comedian Gerry Sadowitz used to say that women shouldn't get irate about the word cunt because it clearly has nothing to do with female genitalia (or needn't have; in fact the Web has rather underlined its gender-specific leanings). To Sadowitz, two of the hardest consonants in the English language enclosing a short nasal growl was what made it a powerful and wonderful expletive and expression of pain, anger, or dismay. The word fuck has similarly physical roots: pronounced fully and properly from the gut it begins with the biting of the lower lip to build the pain to just the right level, continues with an explosive cut of vowel and completes itself with the same glottal slam that is used to raise a gob of phlegm bound for an opponent's eye. It's visceral stuff.

So why have I gone on here about the word fuck? Well, it's not to ensure that a bored Google of the word fuck will put the site at the top of the listings. It's because I'm a bit bored of the word fuck. I use it far too easily, far too readily. It has become a shorthand even for the shorthand of "know what I mean?" It has become a club word. Say to yourself "it's a liberty"; now say to yourself "it's a fucking liberty". Did you get those ghostly figures in your peripheral vision? The imagined gang in full agreement that this isn't just a liberty, it's one of the fucking liberties. They know what you mean. So, just to escape the word fuck for a while I will try to discard the word fuck and replace its proper usage (for emphasising of the scale of a phenomenon) with the word sod.

I am fond of the word sod..It retains its power to emphasise.(because the consonants and vowels are only a little less dramatic than those in the word fuck) with a twist of surprise for anybody unfamiliar with this particular noun-turned-adjective. Of course the word sod is softer than the word fuck: its consonants and vowel combination are less dramatic and even the fact of its being a noun-turned-expletive rather than the word fuck's more active verb-turned-expletive reduce the challenge. But know what? That's me - a big soft vowel cushioned in gemtle consonants..And what the sod's wrong with that?