Fuck, yea!
Some time in early 7th grade, I decided to start swearing. Other kids did it, and I didn’t want to be left behind as some goody goody teacher’s son. After having experienced some of those asinine teachers, you’d swear too, trust me.
But as usual, I didn’t use words the old man used. His use of ‘goddamn’ was legendary. He damned so many people and items (tools, fences, lawn mowers, trees) to hell that I used to imagine Satan standing at the gates watching all this crap flowing in the front door (“Why did he damn a milkshake? That won’t stay cold here!”). Cursing in public was no big thing to him. He lived one step removed from foaming at the mouth, so no one ever challenged him.
<He was always big on ‘too much swearing in movies’; He rarely went. So we go to the Atlantic City Steel Pier (he’s wearing a suit (wtf)–into the movie theater, next feature starting soon. The prior feature is just ending. All is quiet, no dialogue. The movie is the first Planet of the Apes. You guessed it–we no sooner sit down and we hear “GODDAMN THEM ALL TO HELL!!!!” I could barely keep from doubling over with laughter. All day we had to hear about too much cursing. I would have thought that he’d love it when somebody used his ‘special’ word.’>
He also favored ‘horseshit’ over ‘bullshit’ which I always found amusing, since he never rode a horse, let alone saw one, in his life.
The one word you never used was fuck. Why? Because n-words used it. White people don’t say that.
So the people who make some of the greatest music I hear every day on WFIL say it, and a racist pig hates the word. Hmmm…….ya think I’m going to develop a long intimate relationship with the word fuck? That sure sounded like a perfect reason to luv the word.
In high school, some guy had Jerry Rubin’s book. I read most of it (God help me, it was full of unreadable inane “horseshit”), and he had one cogent point. White middle America never uttered fuck. Just using it (and shouting it!!) was an act of political protest. Saying it put you on one side, away from the polite old white people who thought the war was just wonderful. It didn’t mean Jerry and I were going to go bowling together, but it did mean I stood on his side of the 60’s moral melee.
Like Warhol’s repeating images (Sickle, Mao, Jackie, Marilyn, etc), the mere repetition of fuck sapped the word of its inherent offensiveness to some people. Our generation’s use forced oldsters to shut up and deal with it. It wasn’t an offense against society, it was now thriving in society–the society we were inheriting. Wow, man, such a heavy concept.
Oh Mick, you’re just so decadent.
I am happy to report that my Catholic school wife of 31+ years now uses the word regularly (not in public). But maybe that’s just cause she loves the Derry Girls.