Salient

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
—Philip Larkin, 1971.

I’m quite lucky, I think, in that my parents’ most major fuck-up was sorted out pretty much as soon as I hit nursery school. I was a cute little kid—before my chubby stage hit I was blonde, pigtailed and blue-eyed. Detracting slightly from my angelic appearance, however, was the fact that by the time I was four, I was expertly using just about every mummy-effing swear word in the book.

My parents forgot, somewhere along the way, to tell us kids that it’s not socially acceptable to mutter “fuck it” if you hit a snake during a game of Snakes and Ladders. So, after four years of living in a profane household, I was (not literally, of course) “fuck”-ing and “shit”-ting all over the place.

They were smart, those Bermudian nursery school teachers. Every time I swore, a cake of soap would be held out in front of me until I poked my tongue out and gave it a tiny, reluctant lick. This technique seems a little dated, unkind even, but I swear that every time I “fuck” or “shit” these days I get a faint taste of soap in the back of my mouth. Again, please do not take me literally here.

I’m no longer confronted with a bar of soap when I curse, but I have noticed that a few students seem to have taken offence to the occasional coarseness of the writing in this magazine. I swear as naturally, and almost as frequently, as I breathe, so I’ve decided it’s about time I sit down and have a good think about what I’m actually saying when I use the word ‘fuck’.

‘Fuck’ has always been my favourite profanity, mainly because of its versatility.

“Fuckety fuck! The fucking fucker’s fucked!” is a kick-ass way of saying ‘Oh dear, the bloody idiot is in big trouble’. The word ‘fuck’ literally means, according to the OED, ‘an act of sexual intercourse’. There’s no reason that us new-age kids should be offended or affronted by someone exclaiming the word “sex”, even those who think it’s sacred (like me, Dad).

Of course, there’s more to it than that. Whilst when we say “I fucked John Smith last night” it means “I had sex with John Smith last night”, ‘fucked’ is also used to imply that something is destroyed or defiled; “My computer is fucked”. As Wiki-too-lazy-to-actually-research-pedia points out, linking sex and destruction is bad. Bad and ridiculous. But now we enter that age-old debate about whether the prolific usage of the word ‘fuck’ is enough for us to justifiably say that its meaning is no longer offensive. I am absolutely in the ‘don’t use the word gay as an insult’ boat, but I am a keen advocate of the word ‘fuck’. It is less offensive to me because our society does not so overtly objectify people who have sex; in fact, most of us are pretty fond of it.

Some people don’t like words like ‘fuck’ for religious reasons, but for you guys, I’ve found a loophole. Sure, the Bible makes it quite obvious that cursing is wrong—Peter 3:10 declares, “For, whoever would love life and see good days must keep his tongue from evil and his lips from deceitful speech”. Everyone in cyberspace, however, seems to agree that the word ‘fuck’ officially appeared first in a poem written around 1500, way before the Bible was written. So it totally doesn’t count.

Offensiveness and literal meanings aside, boy does a good ‘fuck’ feel great. The harsh ‘k’ sound at the end has a kick to it that ‘golly’ will never have, and the naughty feeling it gives me when I use it in a public place reminds me of the days when I would sneak out at night to meet my friends at the local park.

Fuck it. ‘Fuck’ is a fucking great word. And shitting fuck, ‘shit’ is too. Urgh. Soap. I have to stop—my saliva is starting to lather.

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