In 1964 and 1965, on the University of California Berkeley campus, a contingent of protesting students began the Free Speech Movement (FSM). There followed a contest between students bored with an academic curriculum and a university that believed it held an invincible, omnipotent power in the circumstances. At the extreme, a small group of the FSM students began to print signs with a word that intentionally offended everyone. Clark Kerr, the President of the University, tagged the movement: “the Filthy Speech Movement.” The event ushered in an addition to the vocabulary of the English language in a single screed: fuck. It is said that the word became popular in the 19th Century – perhaps so: in the armed services, on ocean oil rigs, in rough and tumble bars, in athletes’ shower rooms. But it was exclusively sotto voce for years – beyond the pale of polite conversation.
Vibrant and robust free speech is imperative for democracy for obvious reasons. The founding fathers declared its importance by inscribing it in the First Amendment of the Constitution. The FSM insisted that there was no difference between saying f**k and God Bless America – it is the right of expression, not the content, that is protected. However, there are accepted legal limitations on free speech as in Justice Holmes comment: “You cannot yell fire in a crowded theater.” There is a location and timing limitation such that reviled words in speech are not permitted: for example, during a church service, defamation, “fighting words”, child pornography, and deliberate lying in some contexts.
In time the F-word came close in casual usage to the most familiar word in the English language: “the”. Not immediately, of course. It was almost entirely verbal for years. When it finally tiptoed into the printed media, attempts were made in the press to soften its corrosive, debasing, vulgar meaning by, so-to-speak, the now common pseudo gentrification: f_ _ k or f **k. That emasculation could have ended the full-throated word in verbal speech except for the inconvenience of mouthing underscores or asterisks.
However, the silver screen saved the word for posterity. No one has ever accused Hollywood screen writers as masters of the English language. Easily trading polite prose for a shock-word, there is no Hollywood movie made today that does not pepper the dialogue with the word “fuck.” I recently saw a movie made in Europe, with European actors, in which the star almost apologetically pronounced the word. On the other hand, the reaction to Trump’s win of the presidency in the German media Zeit Online GMBH was shouted in a single headline word: “FUCK”.
For those of us who find entertainment in other venues, extensive use of the word may have been avoidable except for the sexual revolution that required women, typically younger women, in a bizarre attempt to equate the sexes, to prove that they could be as crude as men. They pressed the word to their bosom in a rapturous voice. It reminds me of how clumsy a first time cigarette smoker always looks. Perhaps when words are replaced by explicit videos of couples fucking, we will be relieved of the tedious use of the word. Meanwhile, Hollywood is attempting, in its usually inept manner, to find a more progressive way of demeaning and degrading the act of perfectly natural sexual intercourse.
Linguists assert that intensifier words, like fuck, have a limited lifetime. Their use in anger, disgust, rantings, humor, and other motivations wear out. They lose their power. Today’s social media where one can hide behind anonymity has greatly increased the use of the word fuck; young people who would never use the word in conversations with their parents, relatives, teachers, or in polite society – apparently inhibited by the standards of yesteryear – unabashedly use the word fuck in the darkness of the internet. Astonishingly, the attachment of the word, from its alleged origin, to mean the act of sex, hardly occurs to the users. Indeed, the common use of the phrase “I fucked up” is nonsensical if fuck describes the act of copulation.
There is hardly any usage of the word that cannot be substituted by a less vulgar, crude, tasteless, disrespectful word. It has lost all of its meaning, increasing its usage to the point that its overuse will lead to its extinction once the titillation that has captured the current generation dissolves. The more it is used the less shock and awe it will generate. To that end, and in an attempt to force the word fuck to drain from the common vocabulary, I offer: fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck. R.I.P.