Sunday, September 18, 2005

The power of fuck.

So, this past weekend, some of my friends back home were discussing how some curse words have started to lose their power. See, in the golden days, if someone said "fuck," the world kind of stood still for a moment. It couldn't be uttered on tv, including on premium channels like HBO, which, during the 1980s, actually edited films for content. Now, fuck is pretty fucking common. It can easily be used as an adjective, an adverb, a verb, a subject, a gerund, and an interjection, and that's all off the top of my fucking head. Fuck! That fucking fucker is fucking good at fucking. See, four uses of the same term, and I didn't even flinch while typing it. Why the fuck is fuck not a bad fucking word anymore? Just plain fucking overfuckinguse. That makes sense to me. You can't go anywhere without hearing someone yell out the word. Dick Cheney got it yelled at him a couple of weeks ago, to much hilarity. I've heard young kids use that one a time or two, which is really odd. See, back when I was, I don't know, 10, I started cursing. I used shit, damn, bitch, bastard, and a couple of others, but I never once dropped the f-bomb, or as grown-ups say, fuck. That was just a line that I didn't cross. I'm pretty sure I'd heard it, I just never used it. So that's what confuses me about today's world: in order for the term to get overused, it had to start getting used regularly somewhere along the line, and it was all downhill from there.
One friend of mine (who is a police officer) pointed out that there are some power words that he pulls out very rarely, but when he does use them, you know he means business. For example, cunt. See, you probably flinched or laughed a little when you read that. That's because the word still has power. I might write "That fucking fucker is fucking good at fucking," but you won't see me try and write an equivalent with the c-word. As my friend said, "You know that word has power because Hollywood won't even touch that one." Oddly enough, the only movies that really came to mind that used that word were Kevin Smith movies or British films. I've heard horror stories about the Vagina Monologues and its use of the c-word, but that's really the extint to which I've heard it talked about. So, fuck definitely falls short of the c-word in power. I hope it stays that way, personally. I can call somebody a fucker and the oomph just doesn't hit them anymore. However, if I call a woman a cunt, man, I think her options are limited to either killing me or trying to rip my balls off then and there. See, now that's motherfucking power.

4 comments:

d-wain said...

i'm speechless

Final Jump said...

Is that a good thing, or a bad thing?

d-wain said...

i'm not sure, which is why i'm speechless.

remind me to tell you what Omlor said. or, why don't i just tell you now... he's very interested in having you come student teach at LHS, though he didn't say whether or not it would be with him. it was quite funny, really, to hear him reason out why: "Ms. J. and I like to compose a list of people we would like to cultivate to become teachers here when vacancies come open." you, my friend, are a Chia pet, fodder for a system that will trim you until you fit perfectly into the sterile walls that enclose the bubble of "education."

anyway, thought you might like to hear the encouragement! Omlor's, that is, because my bit wasn't all that optimistic...

Final Jump said...

Bah, you can ask Helen and Megan just how "cultivated" they felt after their time there. Hell, from the sound of things, Helen is having serious issues despite having been in that system for the past six months.
Besides, how "cultivated" do you think I can be. I have serious issues with "the canon," dislike some of the major works of Shakespeare, and lean more toward the idea of a student's individual potential and interests than what a state puts down as benchmarks. Yeah, I'll lose my job and maybe not even make it out of my internship with that attitude, but I think students would perform far better under that sort of a situation than under a system where everything has to fit bullshit guidelines.