No Speako Di Lingo......

[Mr T.]

In defence of the F-word

by Brian Sewell

Read Brian Sewell's column every Tuesday, and on art every Friday in the Evening Standard

The F-word slips easily, it seems, from the lips of the modern mandarin. Sir Richard Mottram, in all other aspects as infinitely forgettable as a manager of the Bradford and Bingley in West Wittering, has carved for himself a niche in history, not for his pusillanimous part in the disgrace of Stephen Byers, but for a sentence that will surely be discovered in the next edition of the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations.

It was a cry of despair. It expressed the dark night of his soul, the anguish of a man irrevocably excluded from celestial bliss, the misery of a man who has done with hope and honour. The prophet Isaiah, thumping his breast like a circumcised gorilla, put it very well in the elegant English of his Jacobean translators with: "Woe is me! for I am undone; because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips." Mottram, however, put it thus:

"We're all fucked. I'm fucked. You're fucked. The whole department's fucked. It's been the biggest cock-up ever and we're all completely fucked..." - lines of such Gilbertian scansion that they will quite certainly appear in a revised version of Sullivan's Mikado at the English National Opera.

I have some sympathy with Mottram. Fuck has the energy, explosiveness and brevity to be the unsurpassable expletive. The bottom lip is bitten by the upper teeth with just a hint of pain, air at higher pressure trapped within the mouth is suddenly released, and the brief procedure concludes with the sharp kick of the final consonant.

As a letting-loose of tension it is very physical and it is an infinitely satisfying sound with which to assuage a bate of rage. I use it daily on the Underground. Damn and blast simply will not do; Heavens to Betsy and Lawks 'a Mercy went out of fashion with the parlour maid; and the Shit and Molasses favoured by my first sergeant-major was too surreal and often too resigned to have quite the same affect as the crescendo of F-words shouted in my ear by his minion corporal. There is, I fear, for those who deplore them, no substitute for F-words, nor for their derivatives, some of them gentle and affectionate.

I witnessed its affectionate use in hospital some years ago - fuck and fucking used by a dying man for his wife as what were, in the circumstances, expressions of love not matched in tenderness by any words put by Shakespeare into the mouths of Romeo and Antony - even Gielgud could not have matched the manner of their saying. They were his natural language, the only language at his command, and on his lips they were the purest poetry. I doubt if on my deathbed I shall conjure feeling quite so eloquent, even for a dog.

It is all very well for righteous columnists to deplore the range of F-words as, on the one hand, the yob chic of the elite, and on the other as evidence of the breakdown of society, the unmarried mother, the irresponsible father, the broken home and the delinquent adolescent, but those of us who have the advantage of more than Winston Churchill's 600 words of Basic English must allow the uneducated to use what words they have. Would we rather have them mute? If our education system is so impoverished that it does not extend the vocabulary of children, if it gives them no alternative to the language of the street, if it leaves them hampered with illiteracy and a patois unintelligible beyond the county boundary, we have only our politicians and our educationalists to blame, not them, when we hear an F-word alternating with every noun and verb. At that level it is not the F-word that offends, it is that after so many years of state-regulated and mismanaged education, we are a nation that can barely speak its native tongue.

Education or no education, however, we need expletives. There may be men so calm in temperament that they never need to swear, but I do not necessarily respect them for being so strait-laced. I prefer an honest show of emotion. Christ came nearest to humanity when he drove the traders from the temple, and if he then used whatever was the Jewish equivalent of the F-word 2,000 years ago, it would not one whit have diminished his purpose or his argument; a niminypiminy Christ is no man for the Day of Judgment. I fancy angry saints, not willing martyrs.

If nothing else, the word should be respected for its age and originally dignified status. It has an ancient Greek parent, a Latin one too, futuere, from which come the Italian and French fottere and foutre; we got it from the German ficken. It is both noun and verb, transitive and intransitive.

Strictly it is a term for sexual connection and has been a vulgarism only since the 16th century-It has subsidiary meanings as prefix to beggar, finger, fist and hole, and in the 1960s an American lexicon listed no fewer than 82 variations on the theme. In the interest of scholarship I must record that the insult fuck-face, absent from this lexicon, was common in my school throughout my unhappy years there in the 1940s. And we must not forget the adjectival form described half a century ago by the great Eric Partridge as "a qualification of extreme contumely".

All this suggests that F-words are so established in our language that they deserve recognition as more than obscenity and slang. I am inclined, like DH Lawrence and James Joyce, to give the simple unadorned noun and verb respectability, to use it at least instead of the coy euphemisms to go to bed and sleep with that are so contrary to the sweating, gasping, grunting, draining and exquisite activity of the real thing. Even to have sex is in some contexts a misleading lessening of the fact.

Fuck is a fine, no-nonsense word, precise, even nice, for it is quite unmistakable in meaning; it has spawned some remarkably amusing imagery and metaphor, even a saying, that neatly encapsulates a moral message - "Fuck you, Jack, I'm all right" is a bitter reproach, laden with meaning and much more likely to change a man's mind than a lecture on moral philosophy.

Let us use the word without fear of Mrs Grundy. Let us use it in a translation of the Bible instead of all those carnal knowings and begats. Let us use it in law and literature. Let us use it unselfconsciously as the one accurate word for what it is. And let me use it as an expletive too, for I know no other that so immediately acts as a release and restores the normal sweetness of my temperament. In bringing F-words into the open, Mottram has done us all a great good turn.

[Jay]

Certainly one of my favourite expletives (I occasionally wonder if I suffer from a mild case of Tourette Syndrome).

I remember a few years ago seeing a regional rendition of 'Romeo and Juliet' on opening night. In scene 2, Capulet wandered on stage, said nothing for a second, looked at the audience and declared:

"The fucking fuckers' fucked!!" before exiting stage left. Surely one of the greatest improvisations in English Theatre and one that would leave Shakespeare rolling in the aisle.

[Seadart Mark]

Sometimes you just can't help yourself.

Examples:

Full steam ahead and fu#k the ice-bergs. - Captain RMS Titanic

What the fu#k was that? - Mayor of Hiroshima

You wanna watch that Archer, he'll have some fu#kers eye out. - King Harold

Where the fu#k did that lot come from. - General Custer

Ah fu#k it, just let the Girl drive. - NASA Mission Control

Anymore

Cheers

Mark

[Rob Evans]

On a dive at Scapa last year, skipper dropped us in on a nice easy drift dive along a wall at around 14m, telling us to take care to stick close to the wall cos the current can whip you away if you're not careful.
40 mins later. Boat full of shell-shocked divers.  Most had been hoicked off the wall by the current and had a berserk time roaring round the Flow for miles at a serious rate of knots, being alternatively yanked down to 40m by down-currents, then hurled back up again by up-currents.  One guy got so entangled by his DSMB line he looked like a spider's victim.
Me and bud avoided current and had a pleasant dive, but on surfacing found ourselves spinning round and round in a whirlpool on a madly-roiled surface, frantically inflating everything. Everybody got out safely, but it was a bit of a drama at the time.
Skipper's comment while all this was going on?
"Well that's me fucked"

[Jay]

"He's hit the fucking crossbar" - forgot the commentators name but I'm sure someone will remind me.

[Gavin Yates]

Heads,

Can't remember the crossbar commentator but there was a fantastic true sory of an expert summariser for Swedish TV who was working on the World Cup/Euro Champs.

The was a point in the game when one of the Swedish players tried to pass back to the goalie and really misjudged. The opposing attacker easily picked up the ball and drilled it past the despairing keeper.

Now consider if this had been say Ron Atkinson - Big Ron would have said something like "The boy's gonna be a bit disappointed with himself there." Even Alan Hansen would have only said that it was "Shocking defending and would never had happened when I was at Liverpool."

But our hero didn't hold back as the ball crossed the line the guy said live on TV.

"What a c*nt, what a f*cking c*nt..."

I take my hat of to him. :)

[Andrew]

just one to add

"I need this parade like I need a fu*king hole in the head..."
- President Kennedy

[Hobby]

Tis true, at times, such expletives when applied correctly and with sensitivity do not even seem coarse.

I remember being on my Dad's boat (IT'S STILL GOT TO BE SOLD YOU BUGGERS AND IT'S CHEAP!!!)

Anyway, I'm sat there watching him putting in these over-priced starter motors on the diesels. Making idle conversation I remarked that I'd got a 'sailors dictionary' and that it was really interesting to see just how many terms there were relating to boats etc.

He looked up, oily hands gripping a spanner and blinked through the cloud that escaped the end of his Dunhill International and said to me:

"Son, there's only two words you need to know when you own a boat: Bastard and Fucked."

With that he went back to work.

I've never forgot it, just summed it all up really.
Hobby.

[angleseydiver]

I saw that Melvyn Bragg programme on history of English language and, apparently, an olde-English word for fucking is "swiven"; I immediately drew the conclusion that this is probably the root of the word "wife", as in - "this is my fuck"

What do my fellow YDs think of my theory?

[peter k]

I know a lot of naughty words, being in Glasgow we're a little, ahem, coarser up here.

There is lots of things you can say, for example, "go away", "shoo", "leave me alone". But at the end of the day none of them have the same effect as a simple "Fu*k off". Short, sweet(ish) and it gets the message across without wasting too much energy.

As a little English lesson. The word came from women who were caught having affairs and were put in prison, (personally I'd have had their balls cut off) above their cell was the word fu*k. It stood for For Unclean Carnal Knowledge. So the story goes anyway.

Peter