The synonym for copulation, if more acceptable, would be less fun to brandish, writes DONALD CLARKE
STATION DEAF Auntie Maureen at a safe distance from the newspaper. Today's subject is the satanic word that, for fear of inducing spasms of fury in sheltered psyches, must be rendered in The Irish Timesas "f**k". Every week brings some minor kerfuffle involving the Germanic expletive. Bono uses it at the Golden Globes. Joan Rivers spits it out on Loose Women. Dana spreads it around liberally while out drinking with Ray Winstone. (One of these may have been made up.)
The latest semi-controversy concerns last week's episode of Dr Who. Some deranged viewers – from that tragic cadre that lives for such outrages – imagined they heard a Nazi guard utter the word during the niftily titled Let's Kill Hitler. They did not. The BBC, still quaking from the aftermath of the Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand affair, hurriedly explained that the complainants had misheard a snatch of German.
Meanwhile, the film version of The Inbetweeners, a hugely amusing E4 sitcom, was powering its way to a string of box-office records. Both the series and the movie invite four home-counties youths to season every sentence with that word and its spicy variations. Despite being devised with older teenagers in mind, the show has received few condemnations from recreational whingers. It's all good, clean dirty fun, you see.
"F**k" now finds itself in a peculiar place. Until 1980 or so, you would have had as much chance of encountering the word on television as you would have had locating a cup of coffee that did not taste of cheap diesel. Whereas actual sex (or, rather, actual representations of sex) gradually crept on to screen over the following decade, the supposedly crude synonym for copulation remained strictly forbidden. Consider all the orgies in I, Claudius. Remember all that lipstick on nipples and all those gyrating buttocks in Dennis Potter plays. You could simulate as many murders as you liked. But the notion of uttering two particular consonantal sounds either side of the fifth vowel was still regarded as (literally) an unspeakable enormity.
When the children of the 1960s finally took over the means of creative production the word began to creep out of unholy darkness. Travel past television’s 9pm watershed and you will encounter any number of robust swear words. The French Connection clothing line feels able to abbreviate itself as “fcuk”. Remembering a notorious incident from the 1970s, one suspects that, if a minister felt minded to call the president a “f***ing disgrace”, nobody would feel the need to replace the demonic adjective with some cosy euphemism.
It is true that if, after accidentally stapling my thumb, I uttered a terse “f**k” before my mother, she would still point towards the naughty step. If, however, I said “toilet” when I meant “lavatory”, she would (quite rightly) immediately make alterations to her will.
The relaxation in attitudes has allowed smart writers to demonstrate that there are few things so invigorating as creative profanity.
The stock response of prudes – particularly those pretending not to be prudes – to the use of “f**k” in films and on television is that such excesses are “quite unnecessary”. True enough.
Then again, it's "unnecessary" to make a film or devise a television series at all. The question is whether the dialogue would be less effective if scrubbed clean of impurities. In the case of, say, The Thick of It, the peerless Westminster satire, any sterilisation would render the deliciously filthy verbiage meaningless. The writers have set themselves the challenge of fashioning ever more ornate vulgarities from the standard building blocks of playground abuse. Their consistent success makes the series outrageously compulsive viewing.
Of course, for those who enjoy such filthy chatter, there remains an unavoidable conundrum.
Sure, the continuing abhorrence of the word “f**k” makes no sense. In contrast, the moral argument against one use of (ahem) the c-word is easily stated: it reeks of misogyny to declare a euphemism for the female pudenda the worst of all personal insults. It hardly needs to be explained why racial epithets or homophobic slurs do not belong in respectable publications. But the continuing bourgeois discomfort at the use of “f**k” makes no more sense than an insistence that “scone” be pronounced to rhyme with “lawn”.
And yet. If the word lost all its power to shock then it would become a great deal less fun to brandish. The convoluted paragraphs of filth that litter The Thick of Itwould be rendered no more juicy than excerpts from A Treasury of Bunny Storiesby Beatrix Potter. Whole swathes of Quentin Tarantino's dialogue would suddenly seem hopelessly neutered. Reading the back of public lavatory doors would lose all its transgressive appeal.
What we filthy-minded hypocrites want, in short, is for other people to maintain their shuddering disapproval of what they probably still call blue language. Then we can all swear ourselves silly while congratulating ourselves on our sophistication. F**k, yeah!