Quick question: When you read the title of the post, did you pronounce the word “motherfucking” in your mind? If you were to read it aloud, would you just go ahead and say “motherfucking”? Odds are yes, which gets straight to the heart of why the “seven words you can’t say on TV” is such a silly concept. The taboo against certain sounds pronounced in order is top of the list of hard to defend, because you have to argue that such syllables pronounced in that order create a harm so great that the First Amendment to the Constitution needs to be flouted to protect people. In lieu of that, you have to point in various directions, invoke unsubtle arguments against lower class people, and generally make an a$$ of yourself, as Bill Murchinson does in this incoherent article about why the FCC needs to waste taxpayer money keeping the f-word off the TV.
The good news is he reveals the agenda behind promoting taboo words right off the bat.
A federal appeals court panel in New York used President Bush and Vice President Cheney — if you can believe it — as a lever to pry open a little wider the passage to free speech of the no-holds-barred variety. When I say no holds barred, I mean every *$!!#$% word of it — as we used to write in quainter times.
The court told the Federal Communications Commission it couldn’t punish broadcast television for letting fly the same kind of language our leaders use now and then in unguarded moments. One such moment came when Cheney growled to one of the less clubby Senate Democrats, Pat Leahy, Chairman of the Judiciary Committee, that Leahy would do well to … oh, well.
Go fuck himself. So right off the bat, Murchinson assumes that there’s nothing wrong with having arbitrary rules that are selectively enforced, even though this is technically supposed to be a free and equal society. From my vantage, the entire point of arbitrary rules is selective enforcement—i.e., to give the government or some other authority a power to discriminate and confer advantages on one class of people over another. The FCC’s power to censor is basically made with this model; the fear of being shut down for using a naughty word cows people and makes them afraid to address certain issues that uncomfortable to authority lest they come under closer watch by those looking for an excuse to shut them down. Dick Cheney can tell anyone he’d like to fuck off, but rest assured, if you’re on the wrong side of the Bush administration, you sure as hell will be run into bankruptcy if you let the same word fly on TV or the radio.
Many will find the court’s reasoning weird merely on constitutional grounds — e.g., when caught in the act of using non-parlor language, the president and vice president certainly didn’t count on their word choices circling the globe.
I imagine not. I imagine that in Dick Cheney’s ideal world, he would never have to lower himself to communicating in any fashion with the proles. So now you have taboo language being used to establish the idea that not only should the government have the right to arbitrarily decide who gets to say what but also who gets to hear what.
The point is larger still. It is that the coarsening affects of what we used to call bad language, but now, I guess, are coming to see as just plain speech — such affects, I submit, drag down first the speaker, then the audience, then the language itself.
I love how circular the argument against profanity is. You can’t say “fuck” because if people say “fuck” then people will think they can say “fuck” and then next thing you know people will be saying “fuck”, which they were doing anyway.
But I really love this next part, because it really shows how, so very often, Townhall columns are about stringing together a bunch of pompous-sounding words without actually caring too much what they mean. The best part is that he makes a meaningless but important-sounding statement about how words have meaning, except possibly his.
No neutral commodity is language. A word choice signifies, helping to frame an idea, however simple.
In the context of talking about profanity, he’s basically defeating himself. If the issue with naughty words was what they signify, then pray tell, what’s wrong with the word “fuck”? Is it what it signifies? Then what does it signify? I suppose you could say that “fuck” means “to fornicate”, but you’re allowed to say “fornicate” on TV. And more to the point, you’re not allowed to say “fuck” when it signifies other things, which it usually does. For instance, Cheney’s beloved phrase “go fuck yourself” very rarely should be taken literally as an invitation to masturbate.
One of the things that amuses my wee brain pretty endlessly while watching the DVDs of “Battlestar Galactica” is the way they thumb their nose at the FCC and the arbitrary banning of certain words by dropping the word “frack” every time normal human Americans would say fuck. It really shows how censorship of certain words becomes a letter-of-the-law thing. If you ban one word to describe a concept, people will find ways around the ban to express the same concept.
But conservatives love the taboo on dirty words for two reasons. One, of course, is you can selectively enforce it to bully one group of people but not another. The other is that the existence of “bad words” allows people to use euphemisms to express the same concepts but get a pass for being “civil”, even when they are hateful pieces of shit. Murchinson provides an example in this same essay, by dropping the Townhall’s favorite word they use when they really would prefer to be saying “nigger”.
Do rappers know any normal words? is one question.
See? By using a non-taboo word, Murchinson gets to be a giant racist, but he gets away with it by hiding behind the cloak of civility. It’s for this reason, by the way, that I don’t get offended to hear the Jarvis Cocker song “Cunts Are Still Running The World”, but I do get supremely annoyed when our resident troll calls me all the variations on “our esteemed hostess”. I know that the first case means, “upper class assholes are running your life at your expense for their benefit” and the latter means “I believe you are beneath me because you have a cunt”.
110 Responses to “Watch your motherf*cking language”
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For instance, Cheney’s beloved phrase “go fuck yourself� very rarely should be taken literally as an invitation to masturbate
Oops.
I suppose I should have been very confused by the idea that a Bushie would embrace the idea of harmless self pleasure.
This is a great post. I’ve never really understood the taboo against “bad” words. I understand that words can hurt people, but just about *any* word can be used in a way that is meant to be hurtful. And, as you point out, just because one signifyer of a “hurtful”* concept is banned doesn’t mean that the hurtful concept goes away; it just means that someone out there has to invent a new signifyer for that concept, a la Battlestar Galactica or Firefly, when Joss got around the FCC by having the actors curse violently in Mandarin and use “goram” instead of “goddamn”. (On a side not, how superstitious does a society have to be where it’s okay to damn someone, but it’s not okay to god-damn them… because naming him might wake him up, I guess…)
*I put “hurtful” in scare quotes because I’ve not found the usual group of curse words hurtful, but I do know that other words, like racial slurs, etc., are very hurtful.
The FCC’s regulatory power, in this area, only applies to content broadcast across the public airwaves; thus, I am not sure if it is censorship per se - as one can get the content sans ‘beeps’ online or via cable or satellite. Nonetheless, I tend to agree with your overall theme that the FCC and conservatives in general spend way too much time worrying about this.
Several months back there was a study published in Ars Technica showing that almost all the indecency complaints received by the FCC were the product of campaigns by the Parent’s Television council — a right wing christian monitoring group. At the time, I wrote something about the study . . and recall that during PTC campaigns complaints sored nearly 1000%.
What’s relly of greater concern is that the FCC has been pushing the limits on these issues in the past few years, and has recently made noise about getting congress to expand its’ scope to violence and to private carrier services like cable and satellite. The recent court ruling was a major smack down in this effort. However, Chairman Martin has been trying to bully these providers by suggesting that he will mandate ala carte programming if they don’t respect his authority. Most private carriers look at ala carte programming as a big money looser — and christian broadcaster hate the idea, because who would actually pay more to see Pat Robertson?
Overall the court ruling was — surprisingly — a very logical and moderate decision. I have read at least 10 pundits criticize it without understanding either the ruling or the limits of the FCC. I guess, this one makes 11. . . .
From my vantage, the entire point of arbitrary rules is selective enforcement—i.e., to give the government or some other authority a power to discriminate and confer advantages on one class of people over another.
From my point-of-view as well. Well said!
what’s wrong with the word “fuck�? Is it what it signifies? Then what does it signify? I suppose you could say that “fuck� means “to fornicate�, but you’re allowed to say “fornicate� on TV.
Actually, one of my issues with “fuck” as a expletive is this: what’s wrong with fornication?
I wonder (maybe somebody knows) whether “feces” and “coitus” were “bad words” in Rome.
Whenever people invoke civilty or etiquette, it’s usually a good bet they’re desperately trying to cover class/race/gender/etc. prejudices. And anyway, if English can survive and benefit from huge influxes of Latin, French and German, then somehow I think it’ll weather this next little sh*tstorm.
Also, I’ve always loved alternative swear words. Especially Firefly’s “Gorramn,” as well as its vast and highly descriptive Chinese phrases.
I’m offended by the fact that “fuck” is a bad word, and that it’s used as an explitive. It reinforces sex as an act of violence/hate.
I loved how in the censored version of the Big Lebowski, when Walter goes postal on a Vette outside the Larry Sellers kid’s house that turns out the be the neighbor’s car, he talks about “a little pencil stonewalling me” and “meeting a stranger in the Alps.”
And when Dude complains about the cab driver having the Eagles on the radio, the cabbie’s like, “Outta my peaceful cab!!”
I’ve had pompous twits of doctors complain about my language…not any of the 7 words made famous by George Carlin, but the GD word used as an adjective pertaining to the situation that caused the injury…I was enough on the ball to ask the 2nd of these doctors to put up a list of exactly which words were unacceptable in the office, so we would know ahead of time, before he started complaining like that — and besides, as doctors they have already heard everything — and I tell you, you never saw a doctor retreat so fast…
As far as broadcasting goes I have no tv and only listen to the classical station, so haven’t followed the situation you describe. But language police of any sort tick me off.
I think most of the basic cable networks bleep or use the euphemisms as a protection from being inundated by the Xtianists who would most gratuitously complain.
My mother was an “old-fashioned” southern belle with all the connotations of that phrase. She was also the librarian at a private boys military school where the language was not always guarded shall we say. There were many many times when she was out during parades and drill when the language would heat up until the cursers saw her and would get all embarrassed. She laughed as she was a realist and recognized that it was a wasted effort to try to stop the use of cursing in every day life.
For myself I find war to be a vulgar and degrading term. As well as most of the idiots who find sex dirty and violence clean.
Obviously this isn’t a First Amendment issue, since the broadcast channels are on airwaves owned by the people, and thus not simply free speech. So, where’s the beef? The court ruling on the fines is stupid, and doesn’t really signify all that much in terms of a shift in what’s allowable on broadcast TV, since a part of the decision is based on “the commission’s recent reversal on the position of “fleeting expletives” uttered during a live program and said the agency failed to notify networks or explain its decision.” (eWeek.com) Also, this is a Second Circuit ruling only, at the moment.
I suspect Amanda is spot on with her analysis as to why conservatives enjoy the cover provided by having a class of naughty words in which their racism is not included, but other than that, what’s with the fucking polemic about? So, the FCC regulates broadcast speech, in an arbitrary manner. Has it been abusing this politically? Not as far as I can tell. What’s the big fucking deal about the FCC regulating broadcast TV?
Great post but the point most progressive blogs skirt around when talking about where the line is on dirty words on Television is…that’s NOT what should be the real debate…THE FAILURE OF THE FAA TO PROTECT THE OUTLETS OF MEDIA FOR ALL OF US. The FAA’s main job should be protecting the airwaves and cable from the consoladation of all media outlets in the US in the hands of a few large, powerful MEGA-CORPORATIONS to the detriment of the informed populace.
This dirty-words BS is a total and unenecessary diversion.
The shits are still killing us…
FCC, not FAA. The FAA main job is to keep pilots from flying.
“The point is larger still. It is that the coarsening affects of what we used to call bad language, but now, I guess, are coming to see as just plain speech — such affects, I submit, drag down first the speaker, then the audience, then the language itself.”
What kind of illiterate asshole doesn’t know the fucking difference between “effect” and “affect”? Talk about dragging down the fucking language!
I didn’t know the Federal Aviation Administration ruled broadcasting, too.
/dorkiness
(Angiportus, I’ve been seeing a specialist physician in his early 70s. Where another might say “We can do that procedure any time,” his standard phrase is “any damn time.” And when he got to talking about pharmaceutical companies chasing profits with unnecessary products, he said “shit.”)
I’m fine with my kid encountering occasional swearing on TV or in movies (just like at home!), and wouldn’t have flipped out if he’d been watching the Janet Jackson Super Bowl incident. I would like to shield him from violence, but I can do that myself and don’t need the FCC doing my parenting for me.
FUCK!
That is all.
My own children have convinced me, lest I needed any convincing, that drawing distinctions between “bad” words and “good” words is all a bunch of bullshit, save for the usual use of “bad” words to insult and marginalize and otherwise do things you shouldn’t do with either “bad” or “good” words.
As for FAA, well, if you towed a banner that said FUCK BUSH behind a plane, I bet they would have to get involved.
Clever satire think I, this must be. Right I am?
Ms. Kate….checking FARs….nope, nothing in it says that I can’t drag whatever message I want behind my plane.
I haven’t watched late night TV lately. Does Jimmy Kimmel still do his “This Week in Unnecessary Censorship”? It’s one of the best arguments against the silliness of censoring “fuck” and “shit.”
YouTube has lots of other editions of this bit.
Rather: See YouTube for examples. Evidently video embeds by ordinary posters are not permitted, which is probably a wise policy.
My favorite argument is the “other people will be offended” gambit which goes well
with either profanity or walking around barefoot.
“Other authority figures might take that the wrong way, so it’s best not to do it.”
“Are you one of those authority figures then, or just passing helpful advice?”
Amanda, this is so not true: “I imagine that in Dick Cheney’s ideal world, he would never have to lower himself to communicating in any fashion with the proles.” Even in that world, you still have to instruct the servants to do things like: hold the quail up higher. “Over your head, fuckwad. Up. Up!” Things like that. It just isn’t fun to waste buckshot on one of their faces. I mean, he’s the vice president. He has other priorities.
On the other hand, the cost of the wasted shot can be taken out of their salaries.
I love the word “fuck” because of its versatility. It’s just a fun useful word.
Snugglebunnies! Snugglebunnies! Snugglebunnies!
Especially when people use it around children. Because we need to educate them in curse words early. Otherwise, they grow up racists. Is that the logic at use here?
Ms. Kate….checking FARs….nope, nothing in it says that I can’t drag whatever message I want behind my plane.
Antigone, are you saying that we should take up a collection?
And, Sharon, get your clue PLEASE. My kids can figure this out, why can’t you? Maybe your mother wasn’t ever in the Navy?
First things first, I’ve always preferred Firefly’s gorram and ruttin’ to Battlestar’s frack, because they seem simultaneously old and new, and that’s dandy for a sci-fi western.
That said, my fundamental issue with profanity has always been that restrictions on profanity imply that language is static. It isn’t. Words go in and out of acceptability, and occasionally disappear altogether. Don’t words have to exist before a critical mass of people decide they’re bad? Do people honestly believe that people sat around with the intent of creating a profane word, and arbitrarily assigned certain syllables to that end?
I saw David Milch speak once, and he talked about why he made the vocabulary choices he did in Deadwood. (Excerpts of this particular monologue appeared in the film “Fuck,” with some selective edits to make Milch appear less crazy.) He talks about the need to create a lawless space in which language is a weapon, but overplays his hand when he claims that this is, historically, how people of this era and this location spoke, which we know historically isn’t true. Fuck, in particular, has been around for-fucking-ever, but didn’t acquire its marvelous versatility until the world wars. Cowboys, soldiers, criminals, have historically used the most vile language available to them, but words that wouldn’t be heard outside of a barracks two hundred years ago could fit neatly into a children’s television program today were it not for the fact that many of those words have dropped out of common usage entirely.
When I was young, nobody said “bitch” on TV, nobody said “pissed off,” nobody said “sucks.” Judging from current media saturation, our grandkids will probably have “fuck” in their children’s books. The profanity they’ll be using as adults probably either hasn’t been invented yet, or seems perfectly innocuous to us now.
And, Sharon, get your clue PLEASE. My kids can figure this out, why can’t you? Maybe your mother wasn’t ever in the Navy?
Yes, and I guess if your kids figured out to eat crap, you think that’s ok, as well.
To be honest, When I see the term Motherf*cker, I always mentally insert the FCC “Bleep* there. Similarly, the word “$#^$@!” is pronounced like the old Q-Bert arcade game noise whenever he gets conked.
It’s also fun to try and get the keyboard symbols to match the intended word as closely as possible. @$$ and $#!+ are easy ones, but fuck can be a little tricky. Short of calling up a greek or cyrillic font, £µ¢≤ comes close, but might get eaten by web standards elsewhere.
Regarding “Fuck”, I fonder how much the sexual spect really tracks with the usage. Certainly, sometimes it’s absolutely meant to invoke images of intercourse, but in many cases, i think it’s used much the way “like” was back in the 80’s and 90’s. It’s not as if a generation of kids were trying to inject dosens of cimilies into their language, it was just a relatively neutral word that was inserted while the breain was looking for the words, similar to non-verbal pauses like “ummm”, or “er”
sharon - I posted earlier that I didn’t think FCC regulations were a de facto bad thing, in that they are an set up by the people, so parents who want control over the culture their kids make their own are going to make broadcast TV suck by their participation in the system. That said, caring if your kids curse or not is just silly. What’s your justification, so we can mock it?
I’ve started to substitute “copulate” for “fuck” - it lacks the punch, but… eh.
Incidentally, I believe the original root for ‘fuck’ is the Dutch ‘fok’ which means beat or hit. It’s interesting that “I’d hit it” has the same connotation of both violence and sex.
Ms. Kate
Hmm, might not be such a bad idea
But, at 84 dollars an hour, we could probably put it to better use.
Yes, and I guess if your kids figured out to eat crap, you think that’s ok, as well.
Naw, I’ll just let YOU teach by example.
I’d far rather my kids hear a few choice words and logically reject the entire heirarchy of language that chooses them, than have them view extremely violent stuff on TV or in movies before they are old enough to handle it (like, say, turn off the goddamn TV) or have them grow up thinking that hate is okay so long as you don’t say those naughty naughty words!
If that is too complex a thought for Sharon’s narrow mind, so the fuck be it.
That’s because Sharon’s children are special. And when I says special, I’m using a euphemism for fucking retarded like their mom.
I normally prefer to lurk, but I just have to say that this post really gave me one of those lightbulb/click moments like when I first started to read about feminism via MouseWords. Thank you, Amanda.
Oh bother.
That’s not really something we need here…
In my head I pronounced the title of this post as a muttered “motherf’cking”, the apostrophe representing a glottal stop.
The routine use of “fucking” can impoverish discourse just because it is such an endlessly useful adjective and adverb, an all-purpose intensifier. Without it, one has to resort to other words, which is one reason written text tends to be more colorful than colloquial speech. That being said, dialogue purged of obscenities just isn’t realistic.
I mostly avoid the forbidden words around my 82-year-old mother, who rarely uses them herself, and this can be handy when she tries to boss me around when I’m working on something. A loud f-bomb dependably clears her out of the room. When used sparingly it retains its magic.
Note that racial slurs, which are generally forbidden in common discourse, are not the objects of censorship on the airwaves. Nor is blasphemy. (And why don’t we ever say “God Fuck It!”?)
No need to insult the mentally disabled. Sharon is just a willfully obtuse fuckwit.
One of the things that amuses me about one of my favorite TV shows, Dirty Jobs, is the utterly random bleeping and blurring that Discovery does — not to mention the rather creative stuff that the host, Mike Rowe, manages to get on the air.
Thing is, almost nothing is consistent from show to show, or even within shows. So, in some shows, “pissed off” will be bleeped, sometimes not. Same with goddamn, ass and crap — in fact, one of my favorite examples occurred during an episode in which Mike was talking with a 12-year-old kid while trimming cow hooves. Mike asked the kid if he watched the show, and the kid responded that he did, and “I thought it was really funny when you got stuck in bat crap.”
Mike replied, somewhat bemusedly, “You thought it was funny when I got stuck in bat [bleep]?”
The lips were saying “crap,” the kid had just said “crap,” but an adult saying the same thing got bleeped.
Then there’s the animal-parts blurring, which is also amusing. Dog balls=blurred. Horse balls=blurred. Pig balls = not only not blurred, but the subject of a deep-voice joke.
Then there are the assholes and vulvas, usually encountered when he’s going to stick something into them or pull/squeeze something out. Pig vulvas=not blurred; horse vulva = not blurred, though I could swear that Discovery has sinced cropped out the footage of him washing the vulva prior to insemination.
Cow assholes=not blurred, arm inserted. Bull asshole=not even shown when huge steel vibrator inserted. But the best one — dog assholes=blurred. I mean, who hasn’t seen one of those before?
Yes, and I guess if your kids figured out to eat crap, you think that’s ok, as well.
Sharon, you’re an uncultured bore. your metaphor artlessly compares vulgar language to eating feces. And you use a vulgar word for it, albeit a meek one that you think is “ok.”
Swearing is one of the highest demands of a language. It is an ART FORM, in the most literal sense. You take the deepest essense of loathing and disgust and express it with raw, emotional language. Hateful swearing is just as artistic and poetic as John Keats’s attempts to refine beauty into words.
“but” you no doubt object, thinking yourself oh so clever, “If the words are commonplace, they lose their impact. anyone who truly apprciates an “art” in that vulgarity would not want it to be commonplace” and to that I say nay nay. “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’ with the exception of “Ye” (and the line loses little impact changing it to “you”) every one of those words is incredibly common. You see them every day. Advertisements bastardize their meanings, with Fox News refering to truth in their broadcasts, or adverts on buses seeking to sell glorified face paint or expensive, specialized mutilation in the name of “beauty.” neither of those uses reduces the impact. it’s the combination, the meter, the balance, the imagry, that’s what makes poetry impactful, and that’s what makes high swearing so glorious.
this is the part where you get all high and mighty, about how “no, it isn’t an art. it’s just crass.” In much the same way as philistines always have. “That isn’t art! it’s just a bunch of cut up tires! my kid could do better. he’s just trying to make money calling it art” which is rarely the case.
Don’t believe me swearing is an art? Do you speak russian? call a recent immigrant a dirty name, I be you still get the impact of the swearing when they reply. Because it isn’t just words. it’s tone, inflection, pacing, emphasis. It’s emotional content. And why should I have to deny myself means to express depths of anger because you’re not a skilled enough parent to say. “It’s a bad word that means you’re very angry, and you shouldn’t use it. It’s a very mean thing to say, and we aren’t that mean in our family.”
God Fuck It is my new favorite swear.
Ha. This reminds me of when my Russian instructor explained that swearing in Russian is such an artform they have a name for it — which sounds pretty much exactly the same as the Russian word for mother. (This was how she explained the silent miyakeeznak, to transliterate badly.)
I personally do like using genitalia-swears, because transposing c*ck (not bleeped cuz I care, bleeped cuz no on moderation) with something unexpected, like burglar? Always good for a laugh, as are favorite like f*ckweasel.
Can’t the free market decide?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!
karpad:
I took Russian in high school. The best days were when our teacher (a hispanic army reservist from Detroit who also taught Spanish) taught us to swear.
Swearing in Russian is fucking awesome. I’ve got a book of Russian vulgarities lying around somewhere.
“Fuck” doesn’t just mean “fornicate,” it means sex as degradation, sex as a tool of power, sex as oppression. Yeah, I think it’s a dirty word.
I second the swearing in Russian! I can tell you to do bad things to a goat in several languages, but Russian is the most fun.
And Sharon- you giant fuckwit. Some of us prefer to teach our children how the real world works. In my house swear words are earned, a 6 year old doesn’t generally have enough drama to need to use a cuss word, but a 12 year old has a few occasions and a 32 year old has a lot of them.
I personally do like using genitalia-swears, because transposing c*ck (not bleeped cuz I care, bleeped cuz no on moderation) with something unexpected, like burglar? Always good for a laugh, as are favorite like f*ckweasel.
fish. the word itself is fantasic for swearing. I get two major uses out of it:
1) Fishfucker is my candidate for “descriptor of most hateful, vile thing imaginable,” where some more misogynist or homophobic people use “c*nt,” “p*ssy” or “f*ggot” I use fishfucker. it has the desired effect, as the nice, alliterative nature just sounds slippery and vile, and the vividness almost always leads the listener to visualize the act, which produces a secondary revulsion at the fishfucker.
2) fishguts. ending a prolonged vile string of vulgarities with an exclamitory “fishguts!” jolts the listener back to the point: instead of just tuning out “string of epithets, must be angry” they get jolted back and that immediately makes them replay the entire list in their heads on a more literal level. where “shit” is no longer an exclamation, but a literal cry of “feces.” fantastic punctuation piece has worked well for me over time. I seem to recall reading a modern lit play where a couple is having an argument in a diner, full of all kinds of swearing, and the scene ends with the woman calling her boyfriend a “jerk” and storming out, and it’s the most hurtful word in the scene. it’s sort of a zen thing, not just the use of the form, but the use of the empty space too, when to swear, when not to, a great balance. Negative Space has always been a pleasing aesthetic to me, so it’s the same thing here.
Like I said. It’s a fucking art.
Togolosh, as a Dutchie, I’ve never heard of the word ‘fok’ meaning to beat or to hit. There are two current usages for the word in Dutch, namely one (probably unrelated to ‘fuck’) meaning ‘foresail or jib.’ The other, more relevant meaning, is ‘to breed animals.’
Probably, waaaay back in the Middle Ages or so, there was another meaning to ‘fok,’ namely ‘to push or bump into,’ which comes closer to your definition, but still seems a lot less violent. Modern day English equivalent would probable be ‘bumping uglies,’ which seems wholly consensual to me. (Also: bump&grind, cushion for the pushin’, etc.)
Anyway, we in Holland don’t need no stinkin’ originally Dutch swear words! We’re all too happy to use yours, as in ‘je moet niet met me fokken!’ (Literal/phonetic translation of ‘don’t fuck with me!’ The literal Dutch meaning of ‘you should not use me as an ancestor to your livestock’ rings a bit hollow there.)
Related: Bill Maher has some great bits on the stupidity of the “doing for the children” defense, and the movie “This Film Is Not Yet Rated” reveals the horrifying truth behind the FCC.
It is sweet, delicious irony that Bork-ish conservatives are the ones talking about the necessity of clean, dopey, (nuclear!) family-fun culture, and the same ones who use the term “nanny state” when socialism comes up.
Ask yourself, what is more “nanny state?” Cradle-to-grave healthcare ensuring that all citizens have a healthy life, or keeping the bad words far far away (and giving no-bid contracts to the VP’s company, etc.. different topic)?
It also strikes me as a huge inconsistency that even ultraconservatives don’t speak of censoring literature. Are music, television and film somehow lesser arts, without as much importance or prestige or whatever, acceptable to pervert and twist for your comfort? Answer: no. Man, censorship makes me furious.
Doesn’t the feeling that conservatives get from bad words remind you of children talking about cooties? Like how unsettled they become, considering the reality of their new feelings?
One of the things that amuses my wee brain pretty endlessly while watching the DVDs of “Battlestar Galactica� is the way they thumb their nose at the FCC and the arbitrary banning of certain words by dropping the word “frack� every time normal human Americans would say fuck. It really shows how censorship of certain words becomes a letter-of-the-law thing. If you ban one word to describe a concept, people will find ways around the ban to express the same concept.
Dating back to the Communications Decency Act, An Extremely Immodest Proposal.
You might want to compare the situation with that of an ad a few years back on NZ TV which got temporarily banned, and then reinstated when it was ruled that it was within acceptable discourse. I suspect the censors were too busy laughing to actually uphold the complaint.
What the smeg?
I’m not convinced that’s right. Fuck has been around since Early Modern English, and fuken since Middle English, but OED doesn’t make any Dutch connection.
Andrew - you’re right - I phrased it badly. I think they go back to the same common root.
If the FCC strain at “fuck” but swallow megamergers and hateful swill masquerading as news and/or commentary, well FuCC’em. Buncha melonfarmers.
In the late ’80s, during the heyday of Jesse Helms, the punk rappers Yeastie Girls did a great PSA, played calling bullshit on the FCC.
Dutch cussing mostly involves diseases, with severity of the disease corresponding more or less to the severity of the curse.
Using so-called “foul” language just connotes laziness, IMNSHO.
(that was snark, btw)
The real issue, for me, is the selective enforcement that was going on. The FCC was being used as a stick against those broadcast networks unfriendly to (or even questioning of) the admin controling the FCC (via appointments, exec suggestions, whatever). This is not just a free speech issue, but a degradation of the 4th estate via financial intimidation issue.
Fines for live broadcast of a news worthy occurance were someone, not employed in any way by the network, uses one of the forbidden words was fined, but only if the news worthy even was something the admin wanted suppressed. (Embedded reporters and a sudden firefight anyone? Does anyone really think Army soldiers or Marines don’t often swear under such conditions?)
The best swear I ever heard to connote complete, utter disgust was “gutterf*cker.” It sounds so strong to me that I have actually never had occasion to use it yet.
I don’t swear in places where it would be inappropriate for me to show strong emotion. This means I ordinarily don’t swear at work. (Of course, when the experiment is failing for the tenth time that day, and everything is all messed up, and we’re all frustrated beyond belief, even my boss has been known to drop the F-bomb. He apologized to me, thinking I’d be offended, but I told him I’d used worse.)
At home though — especially when discussing politics….
Let’s just say that “Get Your War On” is a favorite in my house, with many dramatic readings.
I put “hurtful� in scare quotes because I’ve not found the usual group of curse words hurtful, but I do know that other words, like racial slurs, etc., are very hurtful.
I’d argue again that taboo racial slurs are mostly hurtful in context. The flinch factor is due to the taboo, sure, but they sting because they’re wielded to hurt, not because of anything inherent to them.
…and I forgot to make my point, which was that swearing on television or televised movies is perfectly acceptable to me when it’s true to the dialogue. Would that character swear in that situation? All right then.
A TV show in which “fuck” was every other word, like it was among some people at college, would just grate on my nerves. Same way as if “like” was every other word. It would be less about the word itself, and more about the bad dialogue writing.
(Although one of my friends, who claimed to barely speak Spanish, was once on the phone with a Mexican friend of his, speaking Spanish as fast as anyone but every other word was “pinche.” I don’t know if I spelled that right. But I thought that was hilarious, just because he’d claimed to be unable to speak Spanish.)
I’ve got to watch Firefly, by the way.
This, at least to me, is just something else on the fire that allows really bad people to feel good about themselves without actually doing anything worthwhile. I’ll always stand that this sort of thing IS important, as once we strip away all this faux morality, then people will have to deal with the real fucking thing. And that’s good. But it’ll take a long time. And it might not be possible…..
Belgium man…BELGIUM.
If you want to see a perfect example of a conservative fishwit getting absolutely tangled up in her own logic: Sharon praising Cheney for saying “Go fuck yourself!”.
Especially when people use it around children. Because we need to educate them in curse words early. Otherwise, they grow up racists. Is that the logic at use here?
No, but if you need to believe that in order to keep swallowing the sweet rhetorical Valium of wingnuttery, go for it.
The reason for the polemic is I’m sick of people swallowing the “civility” crap that conservatives dish out when they only like it for cheap point-scoring, usually hypocritical in the extreme. Look at all the wingnuts in high moral dudgeon over joking about taking bumper stickers off cars—by god, that’s private property! I can’t think of anything more hypocritical than getting on your high horse about a bumper sticker while advocating for a war on false pretenses and a ban on abortion, both of which are serious assaults on basic property rights. Finding your bumper sticker mutilated vs. having your house bombed to smithereens? Which one is “uncivil”?
Also, I like talking about language.
I use “Jesus fuck” a lot (in roughly the same situations as “Goddamn,” and with approximately the same meaning). So you can combine God and fucking and have it turn out okay.
As far as creative alternatives to “motherfucker,” I worked in a place where “muppetfucker” was used quite a bit. It’s about one notch worse than “motherfucker.”
In the same place, we rated our nightly workload by referring to it as a buttload, crapload, assload, shitload, or fuckload, depending on how close to capacity we were running. This was all, obviously, kind of unofficial, and not in the employee handbook.
I personally think it’s stupid that the FCC believes it owns a portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. I have no problem with FCC regulating who can use frequencies in different areas in order to promote fairness. But regulation of content is fucking censorship. If you don’t like a program, then turn the channel.
We should say that those of Sharon’s reckoning are heartily encouraged, nay, entreated to enthusiastically engage in corporphagia and, subsequently, expire.
By way of alternative, they are hereby compelled to restrict the diameter of that copulative sphincter utilized to consume fruit pastry.
Probably, waaaay back in the Middle Ages or so, there was another meaning to ‘fok,’ namely ‘to push or bump into,’ which comes closer to your definition, but still seems a lot less violent. - Maartje
Interestingly, the Yiddish shtup also literally/originally means “push”.
Anyway, I like “you should not use me as an ancestor to your livestock”. As an Ashkenazic Jew, it really irks me that English seems to lack true curses of the sort Yiddish has (or Argentinian Spanish, for that matter): it’s a sign of linguistic laziness that we say “fuck you” instead of “may you fall into an outhouse just before a regiment of Cossacks, that has just finished a meal of prune stew, arrives”.
I don’t mind “bad words” so long as they don’t get overused … but we definitely need more real, actual cursing!
Someone should make a sci-fi show where “God” is an offensive word.
One character can say “Oh, thank God!” and the other can reply, “Um…could you please not use that word…it really bothers me…”
!
We usually say “metric fuckload” or “metric fuckton” when we want to denote a lot of work. It’s the “metric” that gives it the emphasis though.
Funny though, most of the people I know haven’t heard “Jesus fuck” until I say it, I’ve had one or two friends burst out laughing. Usually I say “Jesus motherfucking Christ” when things have really gone to Shit City. My friends and I will occasionally blurt out “goatfucker”, but generally not in relation to anything but as an inside joke. We’re still trying to teach a Furby to say it.
I swear more when I’m in a good mood. “Hi, how the fuck have you been? You bastard, why don’t you ever call? You’re not going to believe the shit I picked up at that convention, come take a look!”
When I’m in a bad mood, I’ll insult everything I can think of about you, then start in on your whole family. I can go on for an hour or more without ever swearing and say some of the vilest and most hurtful shit you’ll ever hear. I’m a firm believer that you can hurt someone with words, but also that the individual words aren’t usually the culprits.
The only problem with too liberal a use of, shall we say anglo-saxonisms, is that they lose their punch and thus perhaps are best reserved for “special” occasions.
Onomatopoeia aside, can you give an example of a word or class of words that have “inherent” properties of some sort, to contrast with racial slurs in your argument?
When does language lack context? Why do you think that you get to construct arguments about the contexts in which people of colour can be validly hurt by taboo racial slurs?
“Um…could you please not use that word…it really bothers me…�
Belgium!
By the by, from my on-line dictionary
Etymology: akin to Dutch fokken to breed (cattle), Swedish dialect fókka to copulate
intransitive verb
It probably has the common Indo-European root as “to strike” or “fist;” original Latin Pugil which was also a name for a kind of knife.
Cruising for trouble, Laurel? There are no words that are not context dependent, and trying to read my comment otherwise to unearth some residual racism in me is the height of bad faith. My point was that there’s a reason the word “nigger” being dropped in a rap song doesn’t have the same sting as Don Imus saying “nappy-headed ho”, and that reason is context. We’ve been conditioned to have a visceral reaction to the word, sure, but to invest the power of racism into a word is to give conservatives a tool to avoid the slam of racism so long as they avoid “naughty” words.
And no, I’m not arguing that I should “get” to call anyone anything. There’s basically no context a white person can label another person “nigger” without it being racist by the context of my own race. I can’t even imagine there’d be a reason I’d want to, anyway. So if you’re thinking of asking me if I’m angling for that, I’m not. I’m angling for a world where people can’t use euphemism to conceal racism.
CJS - The idea behind the censorship is that if TV channels are limited, and there can only be a few of them, then content regulation is necessary. This is still true, mostly, if you don’t have cable. And I’d rather have the FCC not only apportion channels to the highest bidder but also be involved with what content I get out of the deal as one of the owners of the airwaves. Yes, big media in this country sucks, but do you really think that without FCC regs the channels would interrupt ordinary programming for a presidential speech, or have a whole hour of news during primetime?
Magis, et al - on the etymology issue, check out wikipedia. There are a lot of possible etymologies, none of which really matter at all, because etymology is not destiny, and if you have to go look it up then obviously it is not a subtext of your communication.
Broadly, yes, although, as in English, the real naughty words were a bit more specific. Check out Catullus for a good example. Personally, my favorite Latin insult will always be “irrumator,” which literally means “one who compels others to fellate him.” I once had an interesting discussion with a friend about active and passive sexual verbs because of that word. We were standing in line for a cab at the Vegas airport at the time, and pretty well horrified the guy next to us. Language geeks should not travel together.
One of the things I don’t like about the court’s decision is the way it rests on the notion of the “fleeting expletive” — something that makes sense in the context of live or semi-live news and event coverage, or even interviews, but doesn’t really make sense in the context of scripted shows. For a show, that “fleeting expletive” gets written by someone, approved by an editor, approved again by a bunch of producers and lawyers, and then rehearsed and reshot time after time until it’s just right. It’s no more fleeting than that “wardrobe malfunction”.
I have mixed feeling about premeditated expletives on the airwaves, not so much because I think the words are evil as because I think they’re a cheap thrill. As soon as it becomes legal, what’s left of decently-written dialog will be gone, at least for a while.
I think that’s the first time I have ever seen “clintonize” used as a translation for irrumatio.
MAJeff wrote:
Given how many “uses” it has, just what is it that makes it useful?
That word gets used rather frequently around a concrete plant, where the population is almost exclusively male and where some profanity is simply required when a discharge gate hangs open or cement hose clogs up or a contractor who ordered just 4 yd³ of concrete needs another 2 yd³ to finish, and we waste a trip on a truck.
But what utility is served by using it in written debate? How often is it that that is really the only word that fits?
Amanda (trying not to annoy her here) wrote:
Were you to visit some of the conservative sites on which I comment, such as Patterico and Sister Toldjah, you’d see that I usually quote the hosts as some variation of “our esteemed host.” It is meant as a sign of respect, as is my use of the honorific “Miss Marcotte” or “Mr Frey” when the choice is available to me. What you believe you know about my intentions may have been what you inferred, but that was not what I implied. If I say “our esteemed hostess,” it means exactly that, and nothing more.
The television profanity/ let’s get around the FCC things that pop into my head are:
1) The before mentioned Battlestar Galactica use of the word “frak� in place of standard obscenity. You know they are saying a bad word, but it isn’t on the “list�.
2) The episode of the X-Files “Jose Chung’s: From Outer Space�, where they are all retelling the event Rashamon-style, and none of them want to quote the sheriff’s profanity directly, so he wades through the episode saying stuff like, “As far as I am concerned their bleeping stories couldn’t be any more bleeping different�.
3) And the “Whomps� episode of the children’s television show “Recess�. The hero does not want to get in trouble for saying a bad word, so makes one up to use when appropriate. School administrators try to crush it before it can spread. It is kind of interesting, because the child is not technically breaking any rules, but it is a challenge to authority that the school feels it cannot tolerate.
Did you miss the “fun” part. I enjoy the fucking word. And I enjoy using it to tell misogyinist homophobic fucks like yourself to fuck off.
“Yes, big media in this country sucks, but do you really think that without FCC regs the channels would interrupt ordinary programming for a presidential speech, or have a whole hour of news during primetime?”
Wow! You are so completely right! No one would EVER bother to show news if there was no FCC. In fact the I’ve heard tell that somebody was thinking of having a WHOLE channel of nothing but news! What a load of crap!
Nobody ever would bother to show news, or even watch it if it wasn’t for the FCC…
BTW, while I’m on my soapbox: Government regulation is DESTROYING THIS COUNTRY!!!…
I thought the Chinese swearing in Firefly was a brilliant idea. Gorram doesn’t actually end up being a particularly satisfying swear word; it hasn’t got enough edge to it. This is why frack makes such a good substitute–it’s the sound of the word, the hard k at the end.
Jessica: Did it ever reach metric fuckton?
And as far as creative cussowrds…. if I’m sufficiently pissed not to care who might hear and be offended (almost anyone), my mind will produce, “Holy fuckjesus!”
Well, that and “What the frelling smeg?”
In a fantasy-football group I was in for a long time, one member made a bit of an issue over the language we used in our communications, which were mostly online. Both to keep things at a slightly higher level and to ensure that certain searches would come up dry, we came up with a new verb/adjective/participial: “firetruck” and its derivatives.
— Firetruck you.
— If Delhomme had just firetrucking seen the firetrucking open receiver, the firetrucking Panthers would have won the firetrucking Super Bowl.
And so on.
Not the best solution in the world — my then-4-year-old son wanted to know why I was yelling about firetrucks when there were football players on TV but not firetrucks — but it gave us a bit of entertainment.
I’ve always been intrigued by the mental gymnastics of this whole topic.
The theory is that is we never use such words around the innocent (children, ladies, etc), then they will never be offended.
But you have to know the word in the first place, and what it means, in order to find it offensive, don’t you?
That’s why I side completely with the folks on the “racial, ethnic, homophobic, or otherwise hateful or belittling words, regardless of which ones are chosen” side.
The humor in working people working themselves up to be offended by one of the “fake” words like “frak” even though the word cannot possibly carry any inherent meaning. Why would “frak” be offensive if “oh pooh” isn’t?
And the one that always amazes and amuses me - people who are offended by “adult speech” when it is only adults present.
On a tangent, has technology changed or is it the enforcement or some other issue, with TV bleeps? When I was younger, they bleeped the entire word (or often, phrase), with the inevitable result, of course, of making it that much more intriguing to figure out what was said — but now, I swear, they have the bleep down to a microsecond, and they don’t even bleep and entire VOWEL, much less a word. Strikes me as the aural equivalent of a nipple-sized pastie counting as “not nudity.”
I remember being in eighth grade, and one member of our cool back-of-the-bus gang used “fag” as an insult, all the time. And I remember thinking to myself, and absolutely knowing that there is no negative connotation to being gay. But sometimes it hurt, and deeply. Why?
Thing is, he was a young wingnut (full-grown one, now). So I knew where it was coming from; in his mind there was nothing more loathsome and dispicable than a “fucking fag.” This is why rappers saying [insert whatever] is different. It comes from a different platform, with different intentions.
Eh, we all know that context is the only thing that matters. I just thought it was a good example. Not to say that anything is worth censoring, though.
Can anyone give a good reason why censorship is good for:
(1) Me and, if I were to have children, my children, or (2) society at large?
Like, what is the utility? What does it do for human beings?
“3) And the “Whompsâ€? episode of the children’s television show “Recessâ€?. The hero does not want to get in trouble for saying a bad word, so makes one up to use when appropriate. School administrators try to crush it before it can spread. It is kind of interesting, because the child is not technically breaking any rules, but it is a challenge to authority that the school feels it cannot tolerate. ”
I used to work at summer camps where the kids routinely informed me that they aren’t allowed to say “That sucks!” in school. Their teachers taught them it’s a “bad word.”
How does this make sense? Is it merely because “sucks” rhymes with ducks, clucks, bucks and fucks? I think a more likely explaination is that the teachers don’t want the kids expressing their negative feelings. Or what BunBun vonWhiskers said above.
Always, though, it’s an issue of who gets to dictate what is and isn’t appropriate language.
We never got to metric fuckton. “Loads” only. Given enough time it might have progressed to “muppetfuckload,” but there was personnel turnover, and not everybody finds that sort of thing amusing.
Zora wrote:
In this instance, it’s the Congress. The FCC regulates the airwaves, which are regarded as public property, at the direction of the Congress. And it was the FCC which established the “seven dirty words” which may not be used over the public airwaves.
If people think that such a restriction is a real harm to our society, they may petition the Congress to change it; the FCC certainly will not, on its own. My guess is that there aren’t going to be a lot of congressmen lining up to support a bill to change the regulations and allow broadcasters to use the seven words.
I think a more likely explaination is that the teachers don’t want the kids expressing their negative feelings.
Pretty much. Swearing, and having strong feelings in general, is a threat to people who want to control you and feel insecure in their ability to do so. Uppity kids are a huge threat to teachers whose job security probably depends on their skill at keeping the brats in line.
Zora,
Although this meaning is now completely lost on most people, the original objection to “this sucks” was the implied object of the verb.
…and the horse you rode in on, Bill Murchinson.
Yes, Zora —
I was actually shocked the first time I heard a character say someone or something “sucks” on TV, because I remember well that it’s just a shortened version of “sucks dick.”
Also, in the category of amusing obscenity alternatives, I’ve always liked Bill Murray’s expletive from Ghostbusters: “Mother Pus Bucket!”
Why can Captain Picard say “Merde!” when Will Riker isn’t allowed to say “Shit!”
because Picard is a sexy bald man and Riker never knows what’s happening around him.
this was my ex’s theory about why Riker would never be captain - his job is to storm into the room, pose, and declare, “What the hell is going on here?!”, and if you never know what the hell is going on here, how could you run a starship?
my personal favorite (after “Mother Pussbucket,” yay, Dr. Shrinker!) is “goddamnshitpissandfuck”. The louder and faster you say it, the more satisfying it is–and the less people understand what you actually said.
And from Mark Twain:
The idea that no gentleman ever swears is all wrong. He can swear and still be a gentleman if he does it in a nice and benevolent and affectionate way.
- Private and Public Morals speech, 1906
When angry count four; when very angry, swear.
- Pudd’nhead Wilson’s Calendar
There ought to be a room in every house to swear in. It’s dangerous to have to repress an emotion like that.
- Mark Twain, a Biography
Under certain circumstances, urgent circumstances, desperate circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer.
- Mark Twain, a Biography
J asked:
Because most Americans don’t understand French. Still, I don’t recall Captain Picard using “Merde!” in the series; maybe I missed it.
The philosophizer wrote:
In the last movie, it was announced that Commander Riker was being promoted to captain, and was going to be the next CO of the USS Titan. Next time you are in Barnes & Noble, in the Star Trek paperback section (it’s a big one) you’ll find the Titan series of books.
Avedon suggests we use “Unfuck you” when we’re pissed off at somebody because, hey, fucking is fun.
MKK
I am very fond of “alternative swearing”, that is, creating my own profanities.
For instance, I will say “Ratzinger!” where others might say “damn!” And instead of “fuck”, I say “Cheney”.
Because really, those are dirtier words, all around.
I forgot to mention, the post title made me think of my mom.
Still, I don’t recall Captain Picard using “Merde!� in the series; maybe I missed it.
At least twice:
“The Last Outpost”
Picard: Countdown to three. Stand by on phasers. One. Set warp to nine. Two. Divert shield power to main engines… Three!
And then, according to the script: “With the massive jolt of power let go from the combined forcefield energy-synergy of the Enterprise, all the bridge lights FLARE wildly! But other than a momentary tremble, Starfleet’s finest remains in place… the Ferengi vessel still on the viewer, the planet above.”
Picard: Merde. Shields up.
“Elementary, Dear Data”
Geordi: Oh, my God. I asked for a Sherlock Holmes-type mystery with an opponent capable of defeating Data. That must be it.
Picard: Merde.
And in Buffy, Giles gets to call Angelus a “pillock”, thus proving most Americans don’t understand British, either…