A Big Fucking Deal

The Awesome Column

The Great Curse Shift™ Has Changed Which Words We Can’t Say

Ask anyone under 15 what the “f-word” is. Then slap them for saying it. This is not only a fun game, but an instructive one.

Because if you’re over 50, you’ll expect them to say that the “f-word” is “fuck.” They will not.

They will say, “fag.” Which is a word that in my high school in the 1980s was used so often that it became the New Jersey equivalent of “shalom.” Things were either “cool” or “faggy.” A mean person was a “faggot.” I’m pretty sure my rabbi told me that he hoped there “will be fag in Israel this year.” Though he might have thought I was gay.

Slurs were still awful back then. Calling a gay person the new f-word was unacceptable in the 1980s. No one I knew in high school would have done that, and one kid regularly walked around with his zipper down and his pinky finger sticking out of it. No one would have used the n-word or other slurs to attack a person either.

But that’s not quite what a curse word is.

A curse word is magic. Unlike other words, it doesn’t require context to have meaning. A curse, after all, is a spell. And like a spell, it summons action simply by saying it aloud. Sure, unlike wizard spells it has to be said in front of people, but wizard spells require wands and eyes of newt and most people don’t even know what a newt is, no less how to procure their eyeballs, which is why most people prefer cursing.

When I was a teenager quoting Huckleberry Finn or a rap song, I could type the n-word or say it out loud and nothing would happen. It wouldn’t mean that I was racist. But if the New York Times or Congress was quoting what someone said and it included “fuck,” they would allude to it with a euphemism. The word itself would taint them.

“Fuck” won’t get my 13-year-old sent home from school. “Fag” will. It was not, for instance, a good idea at all for me to type that word here.

The words George Carlin listed as the seven dirty words you couldn’t say on television in 1972 are now not only on television but are used in the titles of TV shows: Don’t Fuck with The Cats, Kevin Can Fuck Himself, Schitt’s Creek. Some…

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