MacGougan at Large

Notes on Swearing - 3

The Big F

The most notorious swear word in the English language is the F-bomb. The fact that I refer to it by such a name speaks to its taboo nature. You’ll sometimes see it written out with the middle letters replaced by punctuation - the flipside of pious scribes writing “G-D.”

(Words apparently have a visible spectrum. At opposite ends of that spectrum, they can be either too holy or too unholy to be written out in their entirety.)

The F-word was originally a rude term for sex. It can still be used that way, but most often it’s simply an intensifier - a kind of verbal hot sauce that can be used to spice up comments on any subject.

The basic form of the word is the swearing equivalent of a stem cell. It can be adapted into any part of speech, and it can be combined with a wide range of words to make compound epithets.

As with religious swear words, there are milder variations available. “Effin,” friggin,” and “freakin” are fairly popular and notably less scandalous alternatives.

It’s easy to forget now, but just a decade or two ago it was very rare to see the word or its variants in print. It was rarer still to hear it on television. This may have created a backlog of demand, because today our content producers are making up for lost time.

The good news is that gritty dramas can now be more realistic. The crime boss doesn’t have to say, “Dagnabbit, Rico! What the hay? I doggone told you not to stick your doggone nose into my doggone business!”

The modern freedom of language can also be used sometimes to good humorous effect. I wouldn’t wish for a character like Jackson Lamb in the Slow Horses series to be any less profane.

The bad news is that we’ve all become a bit desensitized. As a result, we’re caught in an F-bomb inflationary spiral, where writers and performers have to use ever more repetition and variations on the word to achieve the desired effect.