The F-Word Took Over the English Language: We Have Hundreds of Thousands of Words — So Why Keep Using the Same F*ing One?**
shepwayvox
There is a bus.
You know the one.
Every town has one.
At roughly the same time every weekday afternoon, its doors wheeze open and several dozen teenagers pile aboard carrying rucksacks, phones, half-eaten packets of crisps and enough collective deodorant to stun a badger at forty paces.
Recently, one member of The Shepway Vox Team found themselves on that bus.
This wasn’t an investigation.
There’d been no tip-off, no leaked document, no Freedom of Information request and nobody had whispered, “You might want to have a look at this.”
It was simply a bus journey.
Or so we thought.
Within three stops, our team member became aware of something extraordinary.
The English language had apparently been abolished.
In its place stood one word.
Four letters. Begins with F.
It was doing everything.
It was a noun.
It was a verb.
It was an adjective.
It was an adverb.
It was punctuation.
It appeared occasionally to be functioning as a comma, an exclamation mark and, during one particularly animated conversation, possibly a semicolon.
One teenager managed to deploy it five times in a sentence containing approximately seven words.
Our team member couldn’t decide whether they were witnessing the death of English or an impressive feat of grammatical engineering.
The f-word is certainly versatile. Nobody can deny it that.
You can f*** something.
You can f*** something up.
You can tell someone to f*** off.
You can wonder what the f*** is happening.
You can declare something fing brilliant, fing dreadful, fing expensive or, in the case of public transport, fing late.
It can express anger, delight, disbelief, affection, astonishment, disappointment, encouragement and the discovery that somebody has eaten the last chocolate biscuit.
There are Swiss Army knives with fewer functions.
But that’s rather the problem.
English has spent about 1,500 years accumulating an enormous vocabulary, borrowing shamelessly from Latin, French, German, Norse, Greek, Hindi, Arabic, Italian and anyone else who happened to leave a useful noun lying unattended.
Then, having acquired all this linguistic treasure, we’ve apparently decided:
“Nah. F*** will do.”
Consider the simple noun.
Instead of calling somebody a f***er, English provides an almost magnificent cupboard of insults.
There is buffoon, jackass, blockhead, nincompoop, oaf, boor, scoundrel, rascal, cad, bounder, rotter, reprobate, blunderhead, clot, gormless twit and the gloriously economical pillock.
Britain once ran an empire partly by calling people “absolute bounders”.
Surely we can manage it again.
“F*** off” presents an even greater lost opportunity.
Why tell somebody simply to f*** off when you can tell them to clear off, naff off, sling their hook, scarper, hop it, get lost, take a hike, push off, go boil their head, go jump in a lake, or — one of Britain’s great contributions to civilisation — get knotted?
“Get knotted” has dignity.
It suggests that while you thoroughly disapprove of someone, you aren’t going to let them ruin your afternoon tea.
And if somebody has made a complete mess of something, must we always say they’ve f***ed it up?
They might have botched it, bungled it, mucked it up, made a pig’s ear of it, made a dog’s breakfast of it, dropped a clanger, lost the plot, gone off the rails, or simply made an almighty balls-up of the whole shooting match.
That last one tells a story.
“F***ed it up” merely files a report.
Then we have the adjectival f-word.
“That was f***ing awful.”
Why?
Was it ghastly?
Abysmal?
Dreadful?
Atrocious?
Diabolical?
Appalling?
Execrable?
Catastrophic?
Pestilential?
Pestilential is criminally underused.
Imagine restaurant reviews.
“The soup was pleasant enough, but the risotto was pestilential.”
A video of a Labrador falling into a paddling pool: f***ing amazing.
English offers splendid, cracking, magnificent, superb, glorious, tremendous, marvellous, smashing, corking, brilliant, first-rate and, when circumstances demand it, the dog’s bollocks.
We have options.
Even the exclamation has suffered.
Stub your toe and out it comes.
Drop your phone and out it comes.
Discover the price of a pint and out it comes twice.
But generations before us possessed a magnificent armoury:
Blimey!
Gordon Bennett!
Good grief!
Stone the crows!
Bloody hell!
Good Lord!
For crying out loud!
What in the name of all that’s holy…?
We at The Shepway Vox Team would particularly like to see “Gordon Bennett!” restored to common usage.
It has weight.
It has theatre.
You don’t merely discover something alarming and say “Gordon Bennett”.
You announce it to the room.
Preferably while lowering a newspaper.
There is also the curious habit of inserting the f-word somewhere it has absolutely no grammatical business being.
“Abso-f***ing-lutely.”
“Un-f***ing-believable.”
“Fan-f***ing-tastic.”
The technical term for putting a word inside another word is infixation.
English speakers are particularly fond of something called expletive infixation.
Which means somebody somewhere managed to spend part of their academic career studying precisely where we put the swear word in “unbelievable”.
Civilisation may yet survive.
Of course, teenagers didn’t invent any of this.
Adults swear magnificently.
Builders swear.
Journalists swear.
Yes, journalists.
We can confirm that one from direct observation.
Politicians undoubtedly swear as well, although ordinarily only once they believe the microphone has been switched off.
Drivers possess an especially sophisticated vocabulary known only to people who have just encountered somebody doing 38mph in the outside lane.
And anyone who has attempted to assemble flat-pack furniture knows there comes a point around Step 17 when Shakespeare himself would have abandoned metaphor.
Nor are we suggesting the f-word should disappear.
Absolutely not.
Sometimes nothing else will do.
If you hit your thumb with a hammer, nobody seriously expects you to clutch it and cry:
“Pestilential circumstances!”
There are moments when four letters carry the emotional weight perfectly.
But that’s precisely why the word works.
Profanity derives some of its power from being exceptional.
Use it occasionally and it’s a firework.
Use it every sixth word and it becomes wallpaper.
That was what struck our Shepway Vox Team member on that bus.
Not that the teenagers were swearing.
Teenagers have always sworn, usually several years before their parents discover they know how.
It was that one extraordinarily adaptable word appeared to have been given responsibility for almost the entire language.
So our team member began mentally translating the conversation.
One boy wasn’t “f***ing annoyed”.
He was incandescent.
His friend hadn’t “f***ed up”.
He’d made a monumental pig’s ear of things.
The person they were discussing wasn’t “a f***ing idiot”.
He was clearly a weapons-grade pillock of the first order.
Suddenly the conversation improved enormously.
By the time our team member reached their stop, a fairly ordinary teenage dispute had been transformed into something resembling P. G. Wodehouse after three pints of lager and a parking dispute.
And perhaps that’s the point.
English is ridiculous.
It’s sprawling, contradictory, kleptomaniacal and stuffed with magnificent words nobody has used properly since about 1897.
That’s exactly why it’s fun.
So swear.
By all means swear.
We certainly aren’t going to pretend nobody at The Shepway Vox Team ever does.
But every now and again, give the poor f-word a day off.
Call somebody a nincompoop.
Tell a nuisance to sling their hook.
Describe an appalling situation as pestilential.
And if someone asks why you’re suddenly talking like a retired colonel who’s just discovered a goat in his vegetable garden, explain that you’re merely doing your bit for the English language.
Because we’ve spent centuries collecting hundreds of thousands of words.
It seems a terrible waste to use only one of the f***ers.
