Will the F-word ever mercifully start fizzling out? I’ve been wondering about this for a long time. I share the sentiments of Federalist writer Richard Cromwell, who recently wrote up his thoughts on the overuse of obscenities.
Nevertheless, the F-bomb refuses to die. Who else is as sick of it as we unhappy few? Yes, I get it. It’s 2025 and “everyone” says it, including people you wouldn’t expect.
It’s like a huge permission structure machine came down and opened the F-gates and a great F-dam burst, flooding us all with torrents of F-ness. Suddenly it was every other word on everybody’s lips and devices. An assortment of “fabbreviations” took over social media: WTF, GFY, FAFO, and LFG, for starters.
Well, here’s what I say to all that: Eff the F-word.
A Word Rarely Heard
Let me offer a little personal history. I think I was in fifth grade, about 10 years old, when I unintentionally uttered the F-word. Mind you, I had never even heard it before and was clueless about what it meant (if anything.)
I was at an after-school meeting of my Girl Scout troop in the Year of Our Lord Nineteen Hundred and Sixty-Five or so. We had split up into small groups to decorate little red felt hats to wear at an upcoming jamboree-like campout with other Girl Scout troops. We had permanent markers to draw on them.
Someone in the group suggested we draw pictures of Mickey Mouse or Donald Duck on them. Then another scout got a mischievous grin on her face and suggested that instead of writing Donald Duck, write “Fonald F dot dot dot!” Everyone laughed wide-eyed, except for me because I just didn’t get the joke. So I questioned aloud, “Fonald F-ck?” Before I could ask, “What does that even mean?” they started pointing at me and giggling.
I dug in deeper: “What does f-ck mean?” I asked point blank. That got them into fits of uncontrolled snickering, covering their mouths defensively. It didn’t matter that I begged to know why it was so wrong. Or funny? Or unspeakable? No one would explain.
Somehow the laughter died down, and the troop meeting went on. But I sat through it totally miffed and curious. Finally, upon returning home, I went straight to my mother and asked outright: “Mom, what does f-ck mean?”
I recall her thoughtfully inhaling through a KOOL cigarette and asking why I wanted to know. I described the details of the meeting. Then she explained that it was a bad word and that it had to do with sexual intercourse. Not in a nice way, but a dirty way. (She had explained the mechanics of sex to me when I was five, emphasizing that it was something only married people should do.) Okay, but why couldn’t the girls just tell me that? Well, maybe they didn’t even know.
That was as satisfactory an answer as I suppose I could expect. And I rarely ever heard the word in my youth thereafter. If I did hear it, the sound had an effect like one of those sonic booms that occasionally went off like bombs in the skies of my Southern California childhood.
The F-Word Is Everywhere
Fast-forward to 2025. The F-word is everywhere. For example, I took this picture while browsing in a large bookstore a few years ago:
It sticks to our culture like skunk on a dog. Sure, it still gets bleeped out of radio and TV transmissions here and there, but we all know that’s a half-hearted effort. We hear it constantly from celebrities, from writers, from politicos and pundits. Elon Musk repetitiously deployed it to tell advertisers who threatened a boycott of X that he didn’t care, and “Go f-ck yourself!”
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Such things were not always the case. When Vice President Dick Cheney notoriously dropped the F-bomb in 2004, Senator Patrick Leahy said he was “shocked to hear that kind of language on the [Senate] floor.” I think Leahy might have even meant it, too. Interesting times.
Now the F-word is so devoid of its shock effect that calling it the F-bomb sounds archaic. It’s no longer just a verb but has reinventions and invasions into every conceivable part of speech. And everyone seems to have gotten used to that.
Well, not me.
I chastised my son for saying it when he came home on leave from the Marine Corps with a couple of buddies in tow. After I overheard him relay a story that included the phrase “f-ck you,” I explained then and there that I never wanted to hear it under my roof. I offered that maybe he could just use pig Latin and say something like “uck-fay oo-yay.” His response was, “Mom, that sounds way worse!”
Of course, the common usage of the F-word has been bubbling up since edgy comedians Lenny Bruce and George Carlin specialized in it. It also got a lot of repetition in films such as The Big Lebowski. Unbeknownst to me until I started my little research project on the usage of the F-word, somewhere in the cybersphere there is a 90-minute documentary on it, titled F*CK. Who knew?
I Have a Theory!
I’m not sure where we go from here. But lucky for you, I do have a theory. You’ve probably noticed a resurgence lately of some off-limits terms like “retarded” and “tranny.” No doubt a lot of this recent unloading is due to the massive fatigue of trying to keep up with politically correct language policing for so long. And now that President Trump is confronting wokeness, perhaps people feel freer to speak the formerly unspeakable.
In light of these developments, I wonder: Is it possible the F-word came to be overused simply because it was never really designated as a politically incorrect term? Hmm? Maybe it was the closest people could get to being rebellious while living under the tyranny of political correctness? Maybe we were so starved for freedom of expression that the F-bomb offered people some relief, maybe some defiance in our otherwise strictly policed vocabularies?
Thesis: Since it’s been socially acceptable to use the F-word without great risk of being canceled, people in all walks of life just ate it up like starving dogs. What do you think?
I think it’s time to give Mr. F-word a little F-uneral, don’t you? The F-word might be able to reclaim some of its lost shock effects if we could just lock it back up. Women could start being more ladylike in their language again, and men could at least avoid saying it in female company, especially around their mothers.
By the way, there’s a lot of talk about us entering a “golden age.” I’m hopeful that means a return to beauty and civility that so many seem to be yearning for. Could this also mean moving away from crassness and returning to an appreciation of real elegance in our lives, sans the F-word? Some are excited at the prospect of the graceful First Lady Melania Trump leading the way. One can only hope.
