F-words
In the 10/14/06 issue of
The Economist, the report from Russia
(p. 55) is titled "The hardest word", with the summary:
A murder, a grudge, deportations and
what they say about Russia's worrying political direction. Is it
time to use the f-word?
And which f-word would that be?
The word is revealed in the last paragraph (p. 56) of the story:
History also offers a term to describe
the direction in which Russia sometimes seeems to be heading: a word
that captures the paranoia and self-confidence, lawlessness and
authoritarianism, populism and intolerance, and economic and political
nationalism that now characterise Mr Putin's administration. It
is an over-used word, and a controversial one, especially in
Russia. It is not there yet, but Russia sometimes seems to be
heading towards fascism.
"F-word" (or "F word" or "f-word" or several other variants) has been
in play for a while as an allusion to the word
fascism -- in discussions of the
use of "Islamic fascism" or "Islamofascism" to characterize terrorism
associated with Islam (see Geoff Pullum's 8/11/06 take on this
here)
and in references to the Bush administration's policies, as in this
5/8/03 rant
from Ben Tripp:
For a long time I couldn't quite slap
the 'F' word, as fascism is coyly known among lefties, on Bush and his
minions. No matter how naughty the Man Who Would be President might be,
for my tastes he never hit that perfect Kafka note-- until recently.
Him and his people weren't really fascists. Just execrable excrudescent
assholes. But 2003 has changed all that.
These people are fascists, and they make Mussolini look like a
mezzafinook. There is no component of American liberty of which they
are unwilling to relieve us, and no aspect of American life upon which
they are unwilling to relieve themselves.
"F-word" is designed to capture the status of
fascism (and
fascist) as a "bad word",
specifically a word intended as, or perceived as, a slur -- a word some
might be reluctant to say, a word like the pre-eminent F-word
fuck, or its little brother
faggot/
fag.
Also very common is "F-word" used to stand in for
feminism (or
feminist), largely, as far as I can
see, by feminists defiantly confronting scornful uses of
feminism, as on the British
feminist site "the f-word".
Then we get small numbers of occurrences of "F-word" for other words
(some) people might want to avoid:
fat,
for instance, or in specific contexts,
finesse (in football, reported on
by Ben Zimmer
here),
fossils (with regard to NASA's
reluctance to talk about the possibility of fossils on Mars, noted
here),
forgiveness (in an exhibition
mounted by the
Forgiveness
Project), even
folk
[music] (in an internet
radio station
devoted to folksy artists). At some point it begins to look
like "F-word" has been chosen simply for its value as an eye-catcher.
That point has certainly been reached when we get to "The F-Word", a
U.K.
television show about
cooking and eating hosted by Gordon Ramsay. Yes, the F-word in
question is
food.
[Update. David Denison supplies more context: "I've never watched his TV programmes, but Gordon Ramsay is famous for his foul-mouthed invective in the kitchen, unleashed routinely and lavishly on any hapless apprentice or fellow-chef (or even diner, I believe) who displeases him. So it sounds to me as if the programme title is a perfectly appropriate piece of euphemism-play."]
zwicky at-sign csli period stanford period edu
Posted by Arnold Zwicky at October 22, 2006 01:21 PM