Strange to our ears, but what would the Victorian cusser make of our "fuckface," "fuckbrain," and "fucked up"?
Still, the F-word remained virtually banished from print for centuries. On the rare occasions it did appear in books, as in the Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1785), the author was compelled to present the awful word in masquerade as "f**k," a tradition that persists in some journals to this day.
"And even that disguise was considered scandalous. When Samuel Johnson published the first true English lexicography, Dictionary of the English Language, 30 years earlier, he left out the F-word. And it was omitted from most major English dictionaries until 1969, when it was at last included in the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. The Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary followed suit three years later.
Moving toward the mainstream
By the 20th century, the F-word had begun to creep into literature, and the boldness of some authors eventually broke down barriers.
"The efforts of James Joyce and D.H. Lawrence have not restored it to original dignified status," reports Eric Partridge, in his Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, published in 1936. But Partridge couldn't have known at the time that the publication of the unexpurgated edition of Lawrence's Lady Chatterly's Lover in 1959 would force a debate and several legal battles in the US and England over whether fuck should be permitted to appear in print. The publishing industry won; the print world has never looked back.
Indeed, attitudes gradually began to soften on both shores during the tumultuous '60s. Kenneth Tynan, director of England's National Theatre, said fuck early and often during an interview with BBC television in 1965. "It was a brave thing to do," reports Montagu in The Anatomy of Swearing. Brits were shocked, but Tynan emerged from the experience with his reputation intact. In fact, remarked Montagu, writing three years later, "As becomes a great pioneer, his stock has considerably risen in the word."
Philip Larkin probably meant to shock, too, when he wrote his irony-soaked poem "This Be the Verse" in 1971. It begins "They fuck you up, your mum and dad./They may not mean to, but they do." It's not your parents' fault, though, Larkin told the Beatles generation; after all, "they were fucked up in their turn/By fools in old-style hats and coats&ldots;"
At about the same time, Hollywood discovered graphic language. As the American public grew accustomed to seeing the horrors of war and urban strife shown on the nightly news in the '60s, our cinema took on a new level of realism. Movies began to sound more true to life. Timothy Jay, author of Cursing in America, says the earliest utterance of fuck in a mainstream American film occurred in a documentary, 1970's Woodstock, when Country Joe and the Fish led audiences in the infamous "Fish Cheer" ("Give me an F&ldots;").
Jay, who teaches psychology at North Adams State College, studies the use of swears in culture, including film. His surveys of contemporary cinema show what a staple the F-word has become. In GoodFellas, for instance, Robert DeNiro and his co-thugs used it more than 200 times.
But even though the TV news helped inure America to graphic imagery, broadcast media still more or less try to pretend that fuck, along with other common curses, doesn't exist.
That hardly means Bono's indiscretion was an aberration, although TV historians are hard-pressed to say who uttered the dread word first. One notorious instance came in 1981, on Saturday Night Live. At the culmination of a running skit based on the "Who Shot J.R.?" episode on Dallas, SNL troupe member Charles Rocket--who was supposed to have been gunned down by an unknown assailant--blurted out, "I'd like to know who the fuck did it."
According to the book Saturday Night, by Doug Hill and Jeff Weingrad, Rocket's expletive led to the firing of SNL's then-producer Jean Doumanian (it certainly did little for Rocket's career). As a footnote to the story, Hill and Wingrad add that Rocket wasn't the first SNLer to let the F-word slip; of all the mercurial personalities who've appeared on the show, it was mild-mannered bandleader and sometimes-actor Paul Shaffer (now with David Letterman's Late Show) who mumbled a "fuckin'" in a skit several years earlier.
Local sports fans may recall the 1984 Boston College-versus-Miami football game for more than just Doug Flutie's famed "Hail Mary" pass. Late in the contest, a camera captured Miami quarterback Bernie Kosar on the sideline snapping, "Let's just ram the ball down their fucking throats."
But such transgressions are more or less limited to sporting events (especially boxing matches) and other real-time broadcasts, which are rare these days, since many "live" shows (like Saturday Night Live) are broadcast with a seven-second delay.
The hypocrisy of banning any single word from a TV or radio show has been exaggerated recently by the news media's willingness--make that eagerness--to report on the most heinous and sensational stories of the day. Priests sodomize little boys, wives lop off their husbands' penises, and the dead victims of terrorist attacks are dragged through the streets. And at 7 p.m. the network anchors tell every disgusting detail, with the help of videotape and anatomical diagrams.
