THIS ONE WORD TITLE HAS BEEN CENSORED

When I first moved to Australia, I was introduced by my good friend Tony Duncan to a large group of people. Someone asked me if I was an American football fan. I enthusiastically replied, “I root for the Cowboys.” The tone in the room changed in the drop of a hat. As I was leaving, the good Rev. Duncan grabbed me, pulled me to the side, and in the measured words that you would use with a five-year-old (and not for the last time) began to explain that in the future I should refrain from using one of the words I spoke in the sentence above. It seems in Australian society I had played Nostradamus and predicted the future plot of Brokeback Mountain. I love words, all words. They are my joy and my playthings, and that is why swear words tickle me sometimes. What is a swear word in one culture or time period is perfectly acceptable in another culture or at another era. In the 19th century, you would never ask for a breast or thigh of chicken at the dinner table.  Announcer Phil Rizzuto might have risen to fame shouting “Holy Cow” after a home run, but something tells me that his catch phrase might not be too popular in a Hindu society. Much of early rock-n-roll created ways of getting dirty phrases past your parents. Like it or not, 72 percent of American men and 58 percent of American women swear in public. This group includes patrons of family values like George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. It has been a long-standing tradition for our newspapers and history books to cover up some of our nation’s most colorful moments. If he had not taped his conversations, Americans would have never realized what a potty mouth Richard Nixon had. Famous last words have been changed and even great catch phrases have been invented out of whole cloth. Who could forget when Lyndon Johnson said about Gerald Ford, “He couldn’t walk and chew gum at the same time.” Well, he didn’t say that. He used an expression for passing gas instead of walking. While everyone remembers Neil Armstrong’s “One small step for man” phrase, I doubt that many Americans got to hear Buzz Aldrin colorfully express the dismay about the accident he just had in his spacesuit. When media cannot get around blue language, newspapers use colorful symbols like $%#@ to express profanity and television uses the “beep” button, which for some unknown reason makes everything so much dirtier.

    Yet, for the last few centuries there has been that one word, swimming like a shark in our language, that word that got your great-great-grandfather’s mouth washed out with soap, the swear word, the atomic bomb of profanity, the king, the big kahuna.  Spat the title of this documentary in China and they might point you to a flowered bridge. In Portugal, they might think you are referring to a knife. In Sweden, a union. Go to any major US city with a large Vietnamese population, look in the phone book, and you quickly realize that there is a whole bunch of kids who on the first day of school change their last name to Smith or Jones.  You know the word. It is one of George Carlin’s seven dirty words. In Ian Fleming’s James Bond novel, You Only Live Twice, he replaced the word with the euphemism “Freddie Uncle Charlie Katie.” In Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead, the word fug was paraded out in its place. In the sci-fi show Battlestar Galactica, they used the word “frac” and in Farscape, “frell.” In The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, it is “zark” and Red Dwarf, “smeg.” In the television show Scrubs, hottie Sarah Chalke has said “frik.” Fudge, fark, feth, tanj, frick, play with the spelling, but everyone knows what you mean. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC), the agency in charge of policing the airwaves, levees the lion share of its fines for the use of this word, but where does it come from and how did gain so much power?

Over the years several old wise tales have grown up around the word.  Some trace it to the development of the long bow.  The long bow was the machine gun of its era and enemies of the English feared their archers.  The act of drawing back the string  was called “plucking the yew” because bow was made from the wood of the yew tree.  The French developed the habit of cutting off these bowman’s middle finger, the finger used to pull the string back, thus making sure their prisoners could never come back to haunt them.  In 1415, the English scored a surprise victory at the Battle of Agincourt.  After the battle was over, the English archers extended their middle fingers and chanted, "See, we can still pluck yew! "PLUCK YEW!"  Probably not true.  It has also been claimed that people put into the stocks for adultery were forced to wear a sign announcing, "found under carnal knowledge."  It is also noted that the expression comes from houses of prostitution that let gentlemen know that they were licensed by the state with a sign over the door with the words "fornication under the consent of the king."   Both are inventions of the 1960s and clearly not true.  So where does the word come from?  Steve Anderson’s documentary looks at the history of this word and its amazing staying power. It has long been claimed that it comes from the acronym for either fornication under consent of the king or for unlawful carnal knowledge (since there is no reference to this origin before the 1960s, it is highly doubtful, but like most swear words, its origins are not very clear and probably came from mispronouncing a foreign word or phrase used by someone from another culture. It could come from the German word “ficken,” to strike, or it could be connected to the Latin “futuere” or even several other Indo-European words. The first written reference we have to it, its ancestor really, is a poem written in 1500. Three years later, its ancestor popped up again in another poem. "Yit be his feiris he wald haif fukkit:/ Ye brek my hairt, my bony ane." A century later, a common European bird, the kestrel, was saddled with the name and it was a common greeting heard in the streets of London. William Shakespeare playfully hinted to the word in his plays The Merry Wives of Windsor and Henry V. Yet, it was D. H. Lawrence in his novel Lady Chatterley's Lover that brought it out of the shadows and used it frequently. Due to the writings of Henry Miller and James Joyce, and the humor of Lenny Bruce, Dictionaries could no longer ignore it. Sixties bands like The Beatles and The Doors dropped it into their songs. Kurt Vonnegut got one of his books of short stories banned for placing it in the title of a sci-fi story of a polluted and overpopulated Earth that shoots a missile called the Arthur C. Clarke filled with 800 pounds of “baby batter” at the Andromeda Galaxy. Comedian George Carlin attracted the public’s attention with his routines on the word. By 1971, the U.S. Supreme Court decided that its usage was protected under the first and fourteenth amendments. Drawing on a diverse range of people, including Hunter S. Thompson, Alanis Morissette, Ron Jeremy, Ben Bradlee, Sam Donaldson, Bill Maher, Bill Connolly, Ice-T. Michael Medved, Steven Bochco, Kevin Smith, Alan Keyes, Janeane Garofalo, and Pat Boone, the film mainly focuses on the recent history of the word and its use in different contexts. It is a jammed packed documentary that uses a very controversial word to sneak a history and etymological lesson past the audience. It allows every side to express its opinion on the subject matter. It is not going to get a wide release, especially because I doubt many theaters would want their marquee proudly showing the F bomb, but it is a must see for anyone who cares about the English language and anyone who cares about free speech.

Verdict: This year’s Aristocrats