…two, count to three before you say it.,,,,,oh, f-f-f-f-fudge. Fudge is an odd substitution for the infinitely more potent f word which is fuck by name but not by nature….any more. Fuck has left the bedroom and is in the street effing and blinding at any effing thing or abusing old ladies for not giving up their seats, or because it’s fucking raining or just being fucking angry….it’s left the slick genitals and joined the base ball bat generals. It’s bloody angry is what it is and you can fuck off if …if you…if ..oh,fuck off. It’s been kidnapped…. it’s been taken…… hi-jacked by script writers……very few stand up comedians will utter less than a score of fucks in a set and neither goodies nor baddies would get a laugh without a plethora of well placed fucks; that’s what has happened to a much valued word in my vocabulary which I have become more and more loathe to use.
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Yet how rich is this word and how insidiously it creeps into your vocabulary. Flying fucks, fuck a duck, what the fucking fuck? I’m fucked if I can explain why but the little fucker is well and truly locked in this (otherwise, perfectly civil) woman’s head!
It’s so much part our language until I hear it in a wrong tone, a wrong way and suddenly it’s a punch in the face. Language is so powerful
I hear you! Context is everything…
👌👌
Well I’ll be buggered!
…then buggered you shall be😀🇫🇷
Ha ha – no thanks!
I remember that being a very popular expression used by people who didn’t approve of swearing. I often wondered if they really knew what it meant!
You’re right… it was all right for a “decent chap” to say bugger and yet buggers faced a lengthy term behind bars probably being buggered rather a lot
I think that worked for Jean Genet!
I saw a photograph of Jean Genet on Instagram recently… apparently taken just after he’d left the Légion Étrangère… he looked a hard man
I worked with an Englishman in Paris, who’d been in the Légion – they definitely come out tough!
I was five or six the first time I ever heard that fascinating word from my best friend who had landed the child’s part in a production of our town’s Little Theatre group’s production of I forget what. She said she knew a word I didn’t & I said what? And she said beg me & we went through please, pretty please & please with sugar on it & then she said with a theatrical flourish “fuckaduck!” She had seen it scribbled on the wall back stage at our old Opera House where the Little Theatre put on its plays. It was our secret funny word which tickled us to death, till I heard part of it 3 or 4 yrs. later when a certain horrid boy named George Br—- who always tried to kiss me walking home from school & told on him & he was kept late in the classroom till I could get home without assaults — told me to go fuck myself on the playground. When I got home I asked Mama who was taking a nap what that curious word meant. She mumbled what she always said, Look it up in the dictionary, dear. So I did right away but couldn’t find it. So I asked Daddy when he got home. He said it was not a nice word, in fact it was a swear word & children shouldn’t swear. I asked just when I’d be old enough to swear as I needed to say something to George Br—-. Daddy said I could swear when I was 12. 12??!! That was forever. Then Daddy said for now I could say Well! I’ll swear! which I did emphatically till I was 12. But fuck never rolled off my tongue trippingly till much later. Throughout my teens the air was quite blue with Well! I’ll be damned! & Hellfire! And merde! merde encore! when I studied French. Daddy died when I was 11, so he never got to hear swearing like a — well, probably not a drunken sailor – or a Légionnaire.
That’s a tale of our times. Swearing just didn’t appear in my life until I was about 14 or 15 although my first words as a baby were “bugger, bugger, bugger” so someone quite near to me was certainly not as pure as they made out:)
Swearing words didn’t come up in my early childhood, at least I don’t remember, later on Scheisse in German, merde in French or shit in English was more commonly used, yet still a very bad word better not to be used. Until I came over to the USA, there was fuck on every corner.
Brilliantly described…Cornelia…”fuck on every corner”….:)
Oh Roger, what recollections you manage to bring forth ! Am laughing at Cornelia’s comment Both my birth- and marital families were nearly ‘foul’ language free but since I grew up speaking German and not Estonian at home ‘Scheisse’ was a term I did learn early ! And then I just happened to spend six years in medical school . . . well, 20 girls v 200 guys in my year ! It was later and married that I knew I had, quite unconsciously, let a ‘oh shit’ or ‘fuck it’ escape again in frustration when ‘that look’ appeared in my darling husband’s eyes across some conference table . . . must have brought some relief to me . . . 🙂 !!
It undoubtedly brings relief or, more accurately, used to bring relief: a frisson of something shocking. But now, like so many things, it’s lost its savour…..although I still use it as an interjection on a regular basis:)
Great fucking rant.
Glad you enjoyed it, Conor🙏🇫🇷🍷
Or should that be “Fucking great rant”?
That’s a tricky area of syntax… probably deserves another fuck rant