Detroit Free Press article

Thu Oct 9 18:54:57 UTC 2003

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Our own Jesse S. made it to the Free Press (the 'Freep') this morning.  Of course the word in question is more than half a millennium old, but who's counting?

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Published October  9, 2003
http://www.freep.com/features/living/ager9_20031009.htm

SUSAN AGER: Overuse robs shock word of its power

BY SUSAN AGER
FREE PRESS COLUMNIST

Now that California has chosen as its leader a man who admits to having groped women, it's time to lift the flimsy veil off the F-word and let it stand proudly. It's half a millennium old, a synonym for nookie that has matured into an all-purpose adjective and exclamation for our times.

It's been mainstreamed, by you and me.

This week, the Federal Communications Commission merely shrugged over complaints that U2 singer Bono had violated TV obscenity standards by uttering these words on a music awards show: "This is really, really
(F-word)ing brilliant."

Apart from 200-some complaints from an organized lobby to clean up TV, only 17 average Joes and Janes complained to the FCC. It concluded the word was OK because Bono used a variant that had nothing to do with sex.

Between the bleeps

On CNN, the darling young anchor Anderson Cooper explained the ruling this way: "Bono didn't violate the law because what he said, quote, 'does not describe sexual or excretory organs,' or for that matter the filthy, disgusting things people do with them. In other words he meant (bleep)ing, the merely crude adjective, not (bleep), the reprehensible verb.

"The FCC also says it's OK to use such words as an insult. In other words, I can call you a (bleep)er, but not because you (bleep)ed my sister.

"If it gets too confusing for you, well, (bleep) you."

Anderson Cooper, who is young, droll and cute, used the F-word nine times on the world's most popular TV network. The bleeps were so brief you could hear every F and K.

I wonder when these silly games will end. We all know what he said. A 6-year-old knows! These tricks only amuse and titillate, the way a woman's skimpy swimsuit provokes more leering than she might if she took it all off.

A few days ago, this newspaper printed an article about a British fashion company whose logo -- FCUK -- is upsetting oldsters while sucking the money from youngsters' wallets.

We printed this non-word, and we're printing it again. But we cannot print the F-word spelled correctly.

The venerable New York Times has broken its own rules and printed the F-word only once, in a transcript of the Starr Report. Monica Lewinsky complained that Bill Clinton "helped (F-word) up my life."

Ask the expert

I learned that sweet bit of trivia from the world's foremost authority on the F-word. His name is Jesse Sheidlower. He is a 35-year-old linguist. He is the principal North American editor of the esteemed Oxford English Dictionary.

And he is the author of "The F Word" (Random House, out of print).

"There's no question," he told me from his office in Manhattan, "that in the last 10 to 15 years, it's been increasingly acceptable and appearing in places it never appeared in the past." Such as the New Yorker magazine. Such as HBO. Such as Canadian and British newspapers, where columnists use it in their very first paragraphs.

The FCC ruled correctly, he says, because the F-word is rarely used anymore in sexual references, but most often as what he called "a general intensifier."

For example, That hulking groper is now the (F-word)ing governor!

We'll never lose obscenities, Sheidlower says, "because we'll always need vocabulary that shocks." New words will creep up. Old words will be recast. But the F-word?

It's common, passe and, in most circumstances, impotent.