For the love of fuck

          People who know me know that I have a problem. A friend of mine refers to me as a “Vocab Nazi,” referencing my ridiculously vast working vocabulary (which includes words such as sesquipedalian, verisimilitude, and pulchritudinous). Basically, I’m a pretentious know-it-all.
          I love the taste of some words, the feel of them between my teeth, words that snap (alacrity), words that swagger (insolence, somnambulate), words that growl (scoundrel, rapacious), words that stutter (gawky, lugubrious, maladroit). But, I have to say, when I take a step back and really look at the words I know, the one I like best … is fuck.
          A good friend’s first encounter with the word went something like this. She was six years old, on the playground, waiting for her turn on the slide. The fifth grader in front of her turned around and asked, “Wanna know the worst word in the world? Like, it’s badder than all the other cuss words put together.” In awe, my friend could only nod in wide-eyed silence. The older girl tossed her pigtails over her shoulders and said in a dramatic and all-knowing whisper, “It’s like ‘duck,’ but it starts with an F.”
          My friend thought about this for a moment and then tentatively tried it out. “Fa-duck?” she said.
          Another friend of mine told me about her thoughts on the word. “Visceral and a little bit delicate” is how she described it. Delicate is not normally a word I’d associate with fuck, which is pretty harsh and Anglo-Saxon-y. You know. But, it does have this sort of delicacy when you listen to it. Fuck. It’s simple. Elegant, no frills, just straight up and unabashed, heck yes I’m a swearword, all uncomplicated and brief and intense, like a spark striking the thin skin on the inside of your wrist.
          Fuck. Now that’s a multitasking word. It punctuates anything – anger, joy, frustration, satisfaction – slap a “fuck” on a sentence and you’re really saying something. “Fuck, that soup was tasty.” And nothing expresses incredulity like a hearty “What the fuck!” To saunter dangerously close to vulgarity (but necessarily so, I think, given the word that’s being discussed), I’m also a fan of the word not just as an adjective, but also as a verb – none of this messing about with tepid, watery euphemisms, this sad and silly “making love” or, as I’ve heard it upsettingly put before, “touching bits.” I’m of the school of thought that, if “having sex” is too Health Class for you, “fuck” is a good alternative. Might as well be bold and honest, here, folks.
          A side note here: I’m not a fan of those individuals who try to dodge having a vocabulary by substituting in various swears, so sentences end up cobbled together with the same tired words, endlessly recycled until they’re colorless and drab. No good. Swears should be used for emphasis – they’re the spice, as it were. Doesn’t matter how much pepper you throw onto your plate if there’s nothing else there to begin with – it remains an unappetizing mess.
          In the end, the polemic against “fuck” is an unfortunate one. You’d have to trawl through the English language word by word for a good long while before you came across one with as much punch, grit, and unadulterated candor. Fuck yeah.