When I was growing up, the rudest and most unacceptable word you could say was the f-word.
That’s what we called it, too — the “f” word — and even using that initialism was dangerous. We didn’t call it the “f-bomb” back then. That would come later, when the word had acquired a certain raffish popularity. If we absolutely had to, if there was no way around it — something like, Mom, some kids were using the f-word at the park — you had to say it with as much aghast disapproval as you could muster at 7 years old.
Recommended Stories
The first time I heard the word was in the back seat of a Ford station wagon, and my best friend’s father was trying to pull out of a parking lot when another car cut him off. He pulled up alongside the offending vehicle, extended his middle finger, and delivered the word with considerable force and feeling, followed by a thunderous You! Then he added: two times!
I didn’t know what two times meant. I was 7. But I assumed, with the logic of a 7-year-old, that two times was simply part of the act to which the word referred — that everyone knew it was something that happened two times. It was only years later that I realized this was just wishful thinking.
But the word rattled around in my head for years as a kind of forbidden thing, a grown-up thing, evidence that the adult world contained a huge reservoir of volcanic anger that could be tapped into at any moment. One minute I’m sitting with my best friend, and we’re eating ice cream cones, and the next his father is erupting at an old lady in the next car.
About 15 years after that afternoon in the parking lot, I read The Bonfire of the Vanities, and author Tom Wolfe gave me a new way to think about it. His protagonist, Sherman McCoy, uses the word at a dinner party — but carefully, quietly, in a near-whisper, with the full understanding that he is crossing a line and that the crossing is the point. The word, deployed that way, is a class signal. It says, I know this is forbidden. I am using it anyway. It denoted gentmanliness, with a heavy emphasis on the manly part.
It’s tempting to inveigh against the coarsening of the culture and the general lousiness of things and to use that word, and its near ubiquity on the street and in otherwise polite conversation as a signpost. Things are worse now, and here’s how you know. That sort of thing.
Except: I use the word. Frequently. It appears in my vocabulary as an intensifier, an invective, an all-purpose expression of frustration, and yes, occasionally, as something I shout at the driver who cuts me off — a habit I appear to have absorbed at the age of 7 and never fully unlearned. I do make rapid calculations about appropriateness before deployment. My checklist: Who is within earshot? What is the approximate age of my audience? Am I within a thousand feet of a school or house of worship? This checklist, I want to be clear, has served me reasonably well over the decades, in the sense that I have not yet been arrested or had my lights punched out.
But I would have deserved that, I think. Because even the checklist, I’ve come to understand, is asking the wrong question.
The right question isn’t who can hear me. It’s what the word is actually doing. And the answer, almost without exception, is the same: It is amplifying my anger. Whatever I’m feeling in the moment — frustration, outrage, the specific irritation of being cut off in a parking lot — the word is there to turn up the volume. To make the feeling bigger, louder, more present.
WHEN VINTAGE FASHION SITS IN YOUR CLOSET
Anger is the one human emotion that does not benefit from intensification. It is already plenty intense on its own. It does not need help. And I say this not as someone who has achieved any particular serenity on the subject — I say it as someone who has noticed, with some regularity, that using the word does not make me feel better. It just makes me feel angrier.
So I’m giving it up. Not for Lent — Lent is a whole f***ing year away, and this particular resolution won’t keep that long. Clearly.
Rob Long is a television writer and producer, including as a screenwriter and executive producer on Cheers, and the co-founder of Ricochet.com.
