So When Is It OK to Use the F Word?

[salonghorn70]

I never use the word so I'm a little confused.

:shrug:

I was listening to a right wing radio guy the other day. He said that it was just terrible that Kerry had used the F word in a Rolling Stone interview. He said that this represented all that was wrong with those immoral Democrats. But so help me he said it was OK for Cheney to use the F word because he really meant what he said.

So I'm still confused.:)

[BlueCollar]

1. preceeding

Republican...


e.g. F**K republicans

[Warren DeMontague]

2. It's Okay

on my blog!

[Selwynn]

3. It was also "ok" when Bush said "Fuck Saddam, we're taking him out"

[Blue-Jay]

4. Fuck. I don't fuckin' know.

I always figured it was OK whenever my Mom wasn't in the room.

[progressivebydesign]

5. It's always okay in a private conversation..

.. refrain from public utterings, i.e. grocery store, church, Little League Games, PTA meetings.

[salonghorn70]

15. I Agree About Church

That probably isn't a cool place to use it.:)

[Solly Mack]

6. if people using the word fuck was the gravest of concerns America had

then I could understand all the bullshit outrage over it's use...as it is...it's downright laughable.

[DemWitch]

7. January 2001

as in "we're fucked"

Then again in January 2005
as in "get the fuck out"

[jdonaldball]

8. You must say "Go Freedom Yourself"

[jeff30997]

9. When ? What about...

Right fucking now?:evilgrin:

[Cleita]

10. Okay, one more time.

Fuck is the Anglo-Saxon word that means fornicate. It's actually in the original Middle English version of Canterbury Tales. It turns out that when the French speaking Normans invaded England becoming the upper class, their language morphed into what was elegant upper class English and the Anglo-Saxon language became the vernacular or vulgar language of the lower classes. Fuck or fornicate? It means the same thing. However, now you don't have to use that word anymore. Just say Cheney. It means the same thing today because it has entered common usage and everyone now knows what it means.

[jeff30997]

16. Interesting...

Who needs History Chanel after that?:)

[Cleita]

20. Since I have your attention.

try it with other "dirty words". Shit or feces? Pork or pig? Hell or Hades?

[charlyvi]

11. On the Senate floor

if you are a vicious, inarticulate VP?

[TransitJohn]

12. any fucking time you feel like it

FUCK!!

;)

[Mikimouse]

13. Pwahahahaha...T-sips don't know how to cuss!

:evilgrin: I say, use the word, embrace the word, LOVE the word!! It is one of my staples, and can be used in a million different and creative ways.

[salonghorn70]

22. Well, Many Do

But I don't. I looked up your profile. I should have known.:hi:

[Mikimouse]

23. I am at A&M just for a graduate degree...

got my Master's at Texas Tech. and my undergraduate degree at U. Mass., so I am told that I am not a 'real' aggie.:hi:

[merh]

14. Any cheneyin' time you want to!

Who the cheney cares!

[jeff30997]

17. Not cheneing me!

I don't give a cheneyin cheney !!!:evilgrin:

[merh]

21. The cheney you say!

cheney off!

[MichiganVote]

18. F-U-C-K

stands for, For Use of Carnal Knowledge.

That's it. Now what the neocon's object to is
1. any carnal knowledge and
2. the use thereof that "spawned"(Ann Coulter, USA News)Democrats.

So, it is legitimate to use the word in accepting company about any Republican you like. Just don't use the carnal knowledge with them.

[Lexingtonian]

19. Well, Cheney is our English Usage God

- not just our President.
(ooh, that sentence scores triple points with semioticians!)

The F Word is an intensifier. It signifies an activity that has no actual formal name in just about any language, and one that little children know too little about and most adults all they care to.

Your radio guy is an idiot. This is redundant to say on this website, but it explains something that is happening to American English. Basically, American English started as a set of different English dialects that were internally substantially different- and reflect the mess of Norse, Danish, Scottish, Angle, Saxon, Welsh, Norman, French, and residual Celtic (e.g. Cornwall) language usages- even though the vocabulary had become pretty conventionalized and simplified. E.g. the Boston accent is derivative of the Kentish dialect of the settlers of 1630 (the lost and extra 'r's) then somewhat modified by Irish immigrants of the Potato Famine to fit their vowels and consonants.

The point is that the South was settled by people who spoke a more strongly Germanic variant of English than the North and border states. Because the South had few immigrants and treated African American dialects as second class, it retained an English that is more "oratory" or "sounds better". If you know e.g. German and read Southern writings written during the Civil War, in my opinion the syntax and semiotics (the way meanings are inferred to things and the word order) are much closer to British English and German than Northern variants of American English.

In the present there is a language bifurcation of sorts- the conservative side speaks an American English that is emphatically Old British (and British English has changed greatly in the past 400 years) and the liberal side speaks a more amorphous English that is less precise but has much greater range in describing reality. The political conservatives notice this and what you heard on that radio station is part of an uncoordinated and not entirely deliberate Language Police exercise. It's probably sincere at bottom- it's the descendents of the Anglo-Saxons that conquered and settled this country complaining that American English is, like American culture as a whole, becoming distinctively American and moving out of the upper tier British way of thinking and talking (itself heavily constructed from a very categorical, absolute way of thinking also seen on the Dutch side of the Channel, but in Britain intellectually buttressed by a tradition of interpreting Plato in a certain way).