The hypocritical history of the F-word: North American edition

“We train young men to drop fire on people, but their commanders won’t allow them to write ‘fuck’ on their airplanes, because it’s obscene.” — Col. Kurtz, Apocalypse Now

America has a long tortured relationship with the word ‘fuck’. Just this month, a federal appeals court struck down a 2004 statute that imposed severe penalties on broadcasters who allowed even inadvertent utterances of the word ‘fuck’ to go out over the airwaves. The judges took issue with the order’s vague definition of what constituted ‘patently offensive’ speech. (Sorta like how the UIGEA defines ‘illegal’ gambling.) The Federal Communications Commission’s original implementation of this edict was in part prompted by certain people that tend to get under conservatives’ thin skins (Bono, Cher, etc.) saying ‘fuck’ on live awards show broadcasts. Cue much gnashing of teeth and cries of ‘think of the children’, and the executive order went out shortly thereafter.

But the FCC hasn’t always been consistent in their zeal to eradicate ‘fuck’ from the public airwaves. For instance, it allowed Saving Private Ryan to be broadcast on network TV completely unedited, with all 100 or so utterances of the F-word and its various derivations intact, but it banned those exact same derivations when they appeared in a prominent documentary on America’s blues musicians. We’d REALLY like to believe that this was done out of some misguided sense of patriotism, and had nothing to do with the fact that all the U.S. Army soldiers in Ryan were white, while those blues musicians were, er, not. Then again, it’s not like race-based hypocrisy is a new phenomenon — it was, after all, a bunch of slaveholders who unironically inserted the phrase “all men are created equal” into the country’s founding document. But we digress…

And it’s not like America is the only country that puts free speech on a shiny marble pedestal, then banishes the F-word to the gutter. In Canada, the mayor of Vancouver just had to issue a formal apology following a city council meeting in which an open microphone caught him using the word ‘fuck’ with some enthusiasm. Never mind that this was after the meeting was over, that no citizens were within earshot, and even those whose delicate sensibilities might have been offended had to actively choose to go to a website and click on a video in order to be offended. For those such people, we’d like to alert them to this latest scandal – it seems that the mayor occasionally goes into a room in his house and/or office, drops his pants and deposits some excrement into a porcelain bowl full of water. Ewww… And we elected this sicko?

Anyway, these two developments got us thinking about the word ‘fuck’, how it came into being and how it earned such a nasty reputation. (It can’t simply be because Calvin Ayre enjoys dropping the F-bomb as much as Harry Truman enjoyed dropping the A-bomb.) For a serious analytical discussion of everything F-word, watch the video at the bottom of this article.

Then, when you’re done, enjoy this slightly less academic take.

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