I live next door to a K-8 school. As I was about to go out on this beautiful spring day, several 11 or 12 year olds streamed by. A boy in the lead yelled, “Fuck!” Three girls right behind him saw me standing in the doorway, old enough to be their grandmother, and their faces flashed laughter and shock at the same time. I wanted to say, “Do you think I’ve never heard or said that word myself?”
It occurred to me, it’s one of those words that’s not intergenerationally shared. Parents aren’t supposed to say it front of their kids—so their kids won’t think it’s a word they can say any time. And kids don’t want to say it in front of their parents—for fear of punishment.
But it’s an all-purpose word. We all say it and for a variety of reasons: anger, annoyance, surprise, distress, extreme emotion, and more. And it’s transcending language.
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I like that you give validity to the word. Parents dont say it in front of their kids, and kids dont say it in front of their parents, but relatively, everyone says it!
ReplyDeleteI admit to loving the f-bomb, especially these days. The word gets lots of use around my house, mostly by my husband as he reads the latest dystopian news. I had a professor once who used the word in class, and a student, a proper southern pearl-clutching belle, clutched her pearls. She earned a lecture about the utilitarian value of a well-placed fuck.
ReplyDeleteI love how this post is making me think about our language usage. --I especially loved your observation "it’s one of those words that’s not intergenerationally shared." Your first paragraph also made me chuckle, imagining the girls' looks of shock and your amused reaction. I'm going to be thinking about language that is intergenerationally shared vs. only spoken among peers for a long time now.
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