{"id":49,"date":"2016-05-07T06:48:41","date_gmt":"2016-05-07T06:48:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/13.201.39.237\/?p=49"},"modified":"2016-05-07T06:48:41","modified_gmt":"2016-05-07T06:48:41","slug":"dropping-the-f-bomb-with-aplomb","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/13.207.105.184\/?p=49","title":{"rendered":"Dropping the F-bomb with Aplomb"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p><span class=\"dropcap\">I<\/span>t may not have the supersonic agility of a Boeing 747, but my MH 7474 has been known to break a barrier of another kind. Like any professional pilot, I have a moral obligation to get my passengers to their destination on time. And right now, it\u2019s 15 seconds to the death knell, errr\u2026 school bell.\n\nI gun the engine and the trusty Honda City is about to lift off, when a suicidal pedestrian steps into the flight path. Brakes screech and a loud \u201cfuck!\u201d resonates in the backseat. Hell yeah, I think, without really thinking. A second later, I spin around to glare at my passengers, none old enough to blaspheme my piloting skills. My teenage daughter is shuddering with suppressed mirth, while her eight-year-old brother is radiating awe at the perpetrator, the Buddhaesque toddler beside him.\n\nThe feisty fruit of my sister\u2019s loins babbles, \u201cWhy <\/p><em>you<\/em> no say fuck, maasi?\u201d Checkmated by a wee Zen master.\n\nThe tyke knows me well. He knows about that primal connection between the motion of my foot hitting the brake pedal and the unleashing of expletives. It\u2019s no secret that this particular profanity is hard wired from an automobile\u2019s brake pad to the human limbic system: Foot hits brake, mouth says \u201cfuck\u201d.\n\nLanguage, situations, and subjects are just variables. Every sound I utter morphs into white noise before it hits the tympanic membranes of my indifferent offspring. Unfortunately, my superpower doesn\u2019t seem to shield nieces and nephews, or me, from the wrath of an apoplectic sibling. My defence \u2013 it\u2019s a harmless word, coined by 16th<span style=\"font-size: 13.3333px; line-height: 20px;\">&#8211;<\/span>century monks, and used abundantly by literary stalwarts such as Miller and Joyce \u2014 is feeble. Basically, I am royally foot-hits-brake padded. I\u2019m looking at either a restraining order that exiles me from said nephew, or hardcore rehab.\n\nDid not see this coming from my own flesh and blood, the woman whose baby shower keepsakes were hardbacks of parenting bestseller <em>Go the Fuck to Sleep<\/em>. The lowest blow \u2013 she tattles to mother. Next up, a full-blown family intervention, \u201cSave the Fuckhead\u201d, is launched. \u201cCold turkey,\u201d orders the mob. \u201cNo expletive for a whole month.\u201d Did I mention my clan is big on tough love?\n\nBut I can do this. I\u2019m only expected to abstain from the articulation of the verb, not the verb itself. Easy-peasy.\n\nThe family rallies around. A \u201cfuck jar\u201d is installed by grandma, waiting to accept one hundred rupees for every \u201cfuck\u201d that escapes my lips. The little sods I\u2019ve procreated, supposedly sworn enemies, form a coalition tighter than my daughter\u2019s jeggings. Their strategy: to chant \u201cpotty mouth\u201d at miscreant mother until she zips her potty mouth.\n\nSo I reach for the surrogates, but they suck. Flip, frick, eff just don\u2019t hit the spot. The F-jar begins to overflow. The family debates how to splurge their ill-gotten gains, while I plot a multiple homicide.\n\nI don\u2019t even notice when one of the billion Fs I\u2019ve bitten back, manages to give me the slip. \u201cTime out,\u201d shrieks the family. I pick my self-respect off the floor and do what every self-respecting junkie should \u2013 go into retreat.\n\nI sit in solitude and reflect on this sumptuous four-letter word that has me by my short and curlies. How has this crass little word wormed itself into my very core and made itself comfy? Why does spitting it out at every chance I get, elicit the kind of oral gratification no other word in the English language can? Is it the guttural sound, or is it about the pleasure association? How, for fuck\u2019s sake, has a synonym for copulation, reproduced a hundred meanings, all unrelated to sex? The sheer linguistic flexibility of the word makes it the nimblest acrobat in the English lexicon.\n<blockquote class=\"quote--center\">The word also comes with its own meme, the ever-popular finger flip. It\u2019s no surprise then that someone, somewhere is dropping the F-bomb practically every second.<\/blockquote>\nIn these four innocuous letters exists a whole universe of emotions, even contradicting ones: anger, fear, triumph, admiration, respect, hostility, camaraderie, ennui, and of course, pleasure. This little shape-shifter defies grammar and takes any form it pleases: noun, pronoun, verb, adverb, affix and, sometimes, even an infix. As in, \u201cunfuckingbelievable!\u201d\n\nTo emphasise the sheer versatility of the word, I quote from the 1986 film <em>Blue Velvet<\/em>, \u201cFuck you, you fucking fuck!\u201d\n\nThe word also comes with its own meme, the ever-popular finger flip. It\u2019s no surprise then that someone, somewhere is dropping the F-bomb practically every second. Film maestro Scorsese, is personally responsible for killing the flinch factor by repeating \u201cfuck\u201d a record-breaking 506 times in 108 minutes in <em>The Wolf of Wall Street<\/em>.\n\nSis, you listening?\n\nIn 2009, science journal NeuroReport published a study establishing a direct link between profanity and increased pain tolerance. Researchers in Britain\u2019s Keele University asked 67 participants to submerge their hands in ice water for as long as they could. They were then asked to pick a curse word and keep repeating it. Most people picked\u2026 you guessed it. Round two followed, this time without any curse words. The fuckers not only endured more pain, they endured it for almost 40 seconds longer than the non-fuckers.\n\nThere\u2019s more. Turns out, \u201cfuck\u201d isn\u2019t just a champion in the grammar arena, it also wears the timeless cloak of history. While its origins are unclear, and the printed word got legal sanction only very recently, it hasn\u2019t stopped every culture and tribe from staking a claim to intellectual property rights &#8212; Celts to Vikings, Slavs to Goths.\n\nOne interesting story dates back to the Middle Ages, in plague-ridden Europe. With scarce uncontaminated resources, the rulers struggled to keep their population under control. Babies could only be conceived with the king\u2019s consent, after posting the sign \u201cFornicating Under Consent of King\u201d on the door. Imagine needing a DND license to get down and dirty. Maybe this was really what kicked off the human rights commissions, way before the nasty world wars.\n\nThankfully, the word \u201cfuck\u201d has left behind its squalid beginnings and evolved into a hip semantic hybrid. It has grown much larger than the sum of its naughty parts. The purists grumble that it may have lost its sexual bite. They worry that censorship has forced the word to abdicate its power to the prudish asterisk or bleep.\n\nBut has that stopped you and me and the rest of the consenting adult world from giving a flying fuck? Not fucking likely.\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Has the word \u201cfuck\u201d lost its bite or has it finally come of age? Sin or syntax? Arr\u00e9 decodes the nimblest contortionist in the English lexicon.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":50,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-49","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-vice"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v28.0 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Dropping the F-bomb with Aplomb<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Has the word \u201cfuck\u201d lost its bite or has it finally come of age? Sin or syntax? 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