Among The Intellectualoids / F-Word March
Chapman, Stephen
F-Word March by Stephen Chapman T he F-word is hard to avoid these days, and if you really want to avoid it, stop reading now. It came out of the mouths of a prosecutor and a defense lawyer in a...
...Here, too, though, there is evidence of generational change...
...That particular word is so commonly used in all the criminal courthouses I've ever pracStephen Chapman is a columnist and editorial writer for the Chicago Tribune...
...N or in much of the rest of the country...
...Bob Woodward reported in The Agenda that, upon hearing his advisers say he had to reduce the deficit to reassure Wall Street, Bill Clinton was incredulous: "You mean to tell me that the success of the program and my reelection hinges on the Federal Reserve and a bunch of f---ing bond traders...
...You cannot get where I got without luck...
...Clinton's words were reported in all their glory, and nobody cared...
...In a session with Movieline, she repeatedly indulged in her favorite modifier "No f--- ing way...
...Indiana University basketball coach and perpetual sorehead Bobby Knight carpet-bombs his players' ears with every bad word known to English-speaking man...
...Then we will be forced to develop novel forms of expression to let people know when we are nearing the end of our rope...
...I would not dream of suggesting there is anything wrong with the word itself...
...Conn's lawyer elicited testimony that the district attorney himself employs the word frequently...
...I was like a f---ing snake that grew a new tail...
...It's used like punctuation...
...A four-letter synonym for fellatio used to be reserved for extreme circumstances and banned from polite company...
...ticed in that you don't even notice it when a person says it," said a local attorney who testified in her behalf...
...A deputy sheriff took offense and arrested her for disorderly conduct through the use of vulgar language, which is a misdemeanor in Texas...
...You can hear it just about anywhere, in places where it never surfaced before—on the bus, in the checkout line, at the dinner table...
...Nowadays, he could hold court in plenty of upscale brasseries without attracting notice from his fellow patrons...
...A nd then we might as well not have it...
...Richard Nixon got in trouble for swearing on the White House tapes even though all his expletives were deleted...
...0 The American Spectator September 1995 59...
...But the risk in the prevailing overuse is that this most forceful of obscenities will be drained of its historic power...
...But when John Feinstein recorded his pronouncements faithfully in, A Season on the Brink, Knight was angry that the author had not troubled to do some discreet bowdlerizing...
...It showed up in the novel that won Britain's Booker Prize last year, James Kelman' s How Late It Was, How Late, which uses myriad forms of the term in such profusion that even ordinarily benumbed critics complained...
...If you use this term whenever a "hell" or "damn" would do the job of emphasizing irritation or exasperation, what do you turn to on those occasions when you want to escalate your rhetoric...
...Personally, I've gotten results with "dag nab it...
...The defendant, a Houston attorney, lost her composure one day when her wire-rimmed nursing bra set off a metal detector in the county courthouse, not for the first time...
...A certain utility infielder of a cuss word shows up, oh, every sentence or two...
...But most of the uses of the term are greatly deficient in creativity and passion...
...No sentient adult would expect chaste language from anyone playing or coaching big-time sports...
...It may be only a matter of time before the f-word also becomes mainstream...
...I want the goddamn f---ing flag up every f---ing morning at f---ing sunrise...
...Harrison Ford, the modern version of the all-American male, sprinkled the term through an interview last year with Vanity Fair: "You don't have to f--- with me...
...Philadelphia Phillies slugger Lenny Dykstra, on the other hand, published an autobiographical work, Nails, which reads just about like most ballplayers talk...
...So it is official: In Texas, youknow-what and its derivatives do not constitute vulgar language...
...Her modesty, however, ends at her mouth...
...Now newspapers will quote someone saying that this or that sucks...
...F---ing bags of it . . . I came into a business that was completely f---ed...
...Bags of it...
...This from an actor who in his films, the magazine noted, "has shied away from gratuitous sex...
...Hollywood, which used to take special care to safeguard our morals, now reflects and amplifies any declining standards in the populace at large...
...p erhaps the First Couple's longstanding infatuation with the movie crowd explains its own fondness for the word...
...Might as well have the hat on my f---ing head...
...At the end of a lengthy phone conversation in which he tried in vain to persuade Senator Bob Kerrey to vote 58 The American Spectator September 1995 for his first budget reconciliation plans, the president finally ran out of patience, not to mention eloquence...
...Half the dialogue in Scarface consisted of one rough-and-ready Anglo-Saxon expletive...
...Even wholesome stars feel no obligation to act wholesome off-screen...
...So we will no longer be able to deploy it to get someone's attention...
...Where is the goddamn f---ing flag...
...It made up nearly all of Hugh Grant's first dozen lines in Four Weddings and a Funeral—you remember, when he woke up, realized he had overslept and had to rush to the church...
...The average professional athlete, if he were barred from using expletives, would find it impossible to construct a sentence...
...When I was in high school, just a brief generation ago, one of my classmates was notorious for his inability to complete a sentence without deploying a certain obscenity, sometimes three or four times, in noun, verb, adjective, and adverb form...
...I treasure a good emphatic vulgarity as much as anyone—well, maybe not as much as the First Lady...
...she demanded...
...Simpson's trial as they read from transcripts of testimony, and CNN didn't even bother to bleep it...
...It's like trying to settle a trade dispute by dropping an H-bomb: If it doesn't work, you're out of options...
...A former Arkansas state trooper told this magazine that when Clinton was governor, his wife once threw a fit when the American flag was not raised at a sufficiently early point in the day...
...But he may not be the real trash-mouth in the family...
...She responded with "a whole string of bad words," reported the New York Times, "most of them six-and seven-letter variants of a four-letter emphatic vulgarity...
...F---you !" he bellowed...
...Now that sort of rigorous profanity, wedded to fervent patriotism, could be said to achieve something transcendent...
...It was also at the center of People of Texas v. Mary E. Conn...
...She herself asserted under oath that a judge had used it from the bench...
...It is f---ing fun...
...It came out of the mouths of a prosecutor and a defense lawyer in a hearing leading up to O.J...
...He has a great f---ing sense of humor . . . people who are so f---ing brilliant...
...Her defense was that this "emphatic vulgarity" is part of the background noise of the halls of justice...
...The jury took 20 minutes to acquit...
...It may have even crept into church by now...
...As the word becomes more and more commonplace, people eventually cease to notice it—as they have in the Houston County Courthouse...
...So has Marisa Tomei, who played ahot number in My Cousin Vinnie without baring anything more than a thigh...
Vol. 28 • September 1995 • No. 9
