Serving up the F Word

Are we living in an Age of Profanity?

Nearly three-quarters of Americans questioned last week - 74 percent - said they encounter profanity in public frequently or occasionally, according to an Associated Press-Ipsos poll. Two-thirds said they think people swear more than they did 20 years ago. And as for, well, the gold standard of foul words, a healthy 64 percent said they use the F-word - ranging from several times a day (8 percent) to a few times a year (15 percent).

I tried to summarize the problems with profanity, especially the F-word, in an essay for Vocabula Review, but based on the emails I received, the argument didn't make a f****ing good impression on readers. Nonetheless, here's an excerpt:

Why is the f-word used so frequently these days? Many people find it offensive. Few, if anyone, find it pleasing.

I assume its popularity fuels its use. But even so, I rarely, if ever, feel a need to use it, even when I'm carousing with sailor-types. Even the most vulgar people don't seem to notice when another person simply omits it from their speech.

Maybe people are using it as poetic expression. I hear the beat poets thought it helped their works. Similarly, a friend recently told me, after being expelled from a semiprivate bar for using it, "I didn't mean any offense; when I use it, it's art."

The British writer G. K. Chesterton's said all people incline to poetry: "We should all like to speak poetry at the moment when we truly live, and if we do not speak it, it is because we have an impediment in our speech." Indeed, he said the "whole world talks poetry; it is only we who, with elaborate ingenuity, manage to talk prose." Maybe the f-word is poetry for Everyman.

The f-word might also be used because it is short. Instead of saying, That suggestion is repulsive, one can say, Fuck that, and the ordinary listener gets the gist.

Problem is, although fuck that may be short, it's not concise. All right, fuck that suggestion. But why? Is the suggestion repulsive? Stupid? Impractical? Immoral? Costly? Inappropriate? Worse than an alternative? I understand your emotional state when you say fuck that, but I don't understand your thinking.

Here we come to the traditional objection to slang: it substitutes for thinking and clarity. It's lazy language.

I've known guys who have sworn off using the f-word, only to find themselves using it again. The f-word has become a habit for them, and some have told me it's very hard to kick, which isn't surprising. Habits born of laziness (like watching TV) are some of the hardest to break, second only to addictions.

And I think that's the real reason people are using it so much today: lazy habit, possibly an upshot of a culture that has adopted a lazy attitude toward language in general. The dominant semantic doctrine today is, to quote from Paul W. Lovinger, the "doctrine that whatever emerges from people's lips is the language and that many verbal wrongs make a right." The Penguin Dictionary of American English Usage and Style. In the past forty years, our culture's language has followed its morality, becoming increasingly loose and lazy, leaving its semantics as vulgarly disposed as Justin Timberlake and Janet Jackson during a Superbowl halftime show.