Why does seemingly everybody have to be using the F-word these days? You hear it almost everywhere. It pours from television, movies, music, podcasts, social media, sporting events, workplaces, restaurants, and everyday conversations. People who would once have been embarrassed to say it in public now use it repeatedly, sometimes almost unconsciously. It is, in my estimation, the foulest and most vulgar word in the English language.
Yet what was once considered almost unspeakable has become a conversational commonplace. The word itself is quite old. Its precise origin is uncertain, though etymologists generally link it to Germanic words associated with sexual intercourse or breeding. Despite popular legends, it did not originate as an acronym such as “Fornication Under Consent of the King.” For centuries, however, the word remained socially taboo. Respectable writers, publishers, broadcasters, and ordinary people generally avoided it.
Samuel Johnson omitted it from his famous dictionary, and from 1795 until 1965, the word did not appear in a single English-language dictionary. Profanity of this degree certainly has its shock value. But when such obscenity is repeated constantly, something curious happens — eventually, it loses its ability to rattle us. Once primarily a crude term for sexual intercourse, it is now an all-purpose expression.
People use it when they are angry, happy, surprised, frightened, impressed, disgusted, excited, or frustrated. It can function as a verb, noun, insult, exclamation, intensifier, or even little more than a verbal filler. Perhaps the history of the F-word is not simply the story of how a sexual word became vulgar. It is the story of how a vulgar word became ordinary.
This raises a more important question: What happens to a culture when vulgarity no longer embarrasses it?