a dictionary of curse words, on f*ck

If you can't say "fuck", you can't say "fuck the government.”

i.

The first time I said the word fuck, it was whispered into an empty bedroom. And it was immediately met with a wave of terrible guilt, like a religious shame kind of guilt, like a I-had-just-murdered-somebody-and-in-two-minutes-I-will-hear-the-police-siren kind of guilt. Comparable to the one time I cheated in my academic life, when I corrected one word in my spelling test in Primary 1. My mother found out, and had a stern talk with me, which was just about the only instance I have ever seen her cry. That made me feel awful, and I never cheated again.

Such is the product of living in a this-is-a-christian-minecraft-server household (despite not, in fact, being Christian). If my parents found out how I talked to my friends, they would have disowned me yesterday. I know some families are much more open-minded than mine, where maybe your mother doesn’t care what you say, or maybe your father doesn’t mind his language when watching football. I could never imagine living under such a parental regime, although I was frequently jealous of friends who had parents like that.

Frankly, I don’t even remember why I said fuck the first time I said it. The only thing left of that memory is the distinctly feverish sensation of burgeoning frustration and resentment. Probably got told off for being on my phone too much or forgetting to return my plate to the sink.

Anyway, it started like this, softly shouting ‘fuck’ into my room, until it got less tangled in my throat, and it rolled off my tongue more smoothly, and it sounded less clunky to my ears. Now, if you search my WhatsApp for the word ‘fuck’, you will literally never finish scrolling. ‘fuck u’, ‘WHAT THE FUCK’, ‘im fucked lol’, ‘nah u fucked up’, ‘HAHAHAHAH FUCK’, ‘shut the fuck up’, ‘fucking populist’.

ii.

Even if you exclude ‘fuck’ from your working lexicon, you have to respect the word for its unparalleled versatility. I once read a post that argued, if you could only use three English words to communicate, you should pick you, me, and fuck. Angry? ‘Fuck you.’ Sad? ‘Fuck me.’ Horny? ‘Me fuck you?’ Accusing someone of rape? ‘You fuck me!’

In its modern usage, I think ‘fuck’ is perhaps less of a word, and more of an intensity. An amalgamation of exclamation, verb, noun, adjective and adverb. Imprecise, yet immediately understandable. So much so that the context and the tone are infinitely more important for discerning meaning than the word itself.

If there is a through line in all the definitions of fuck, I think it is this: it’s so primal. The sex, obviously. But also the rage, the frustration, the excitement—all very emotional, in a very instinctive way. Consider other curse words: ‘hell’, for example, is almost sophisticated, being entangled with moral desert and religious truth. On the other end of the spectrum, ‘shit’ is scatalogical and entirely biological. ‘Fuck’ strikes somewhere in the middle: not quite intellectually profound, but also not physical, instead an expression of feelings and urges.¹

Let’s fuck, fuck you, fuck the goverment, fuck it all. To make love and to hate, to rebel and to lose hope: emotions like these are the inspiration of all great art. ‘Fuck’ encapsulates our deepest desires and compulsions.

Isn’t that essential to the human condition?

iii.

When we talk about versatility, we also need to make a quick note about the derivations of ‘fuck’, which vary vastly in quality.

Motherfucker? I love this, not just because of Nick Fury. Such a funny insult, because in 99% of use cases, it doesn’t even make sense. The guy who cut your queue did not have sex with his mom, or your mom, or anyone’s mom for that matter. Kind of Oedipal. Bonus: every time we use it as an insult, it is a repudiation of the biblical sin of incest.

Mindfuck? 10/10. It erases the vulgarity of the word, and instead it imbues it with the purity of confusion and perplexity. Like a 3 year old beholding a Rubik’s Cube, or someone opening Ulysses.

On the other hand, fuckface? It’s crude, shoddily constructed and uncreative. Poorly executed alliteration. If someone is ugly, just tell them that.

iv.

Arguably, ‘fuck’ is one of the more taboo swear words out there. But once I got comfortable with it, I struggled to find anything principally wrong with using it.

Caveat: obviously, it is rude and appropriate in a multitude of contexts. For better or for worse, I totally understand that I cannot say that in a job interview, or when meeting my boyfriend’s parents. It is offensive and unprofessional.

I suppose my issue is that I can’t find a particular moral or ethical qualm with the particular word ‘fuck’. For example, ‘n***a’ or ‘f****t’ are pejorative terms aimed at particular marginalised communities, so they are—rightfully—off limits. But terms like ‘fucker’ and ‘motherfucker’ are generic insults, and in my opinion, they are is fair game. (And if you are a literal motherfucker, you are a criminal and you probably deserve censure for that.)

What I mean is that I don’t think that calling someone a ‘fucker’ is significantly ethically different from calling them a ‘poopyface’. They are both rude and mean, and you will not catch me calling my boss either, but I don’t think ‘fuck’ is any more potent or immoral. Just like ‘poopyface’, ‘fucker’ is also a schoolyard insult, just maybe at slightly higher levels of education.

Maybe it’s just that I’ve listened to so much expletive-dense hip hop that I’ve become desensitised to the f-word. Oh well.

v.

My junior once told me, you swear so much more than I thought you would. Still not sure if I should receive that as a compliment or an insult. I must say, ‘fuck’ is a very useful word to have in my arsenal of vocabulary.

Interestingly, one of the reasons why I decided to give up on student government and the prefectorial board was precisely because of swearing. Not because I couldn’t swear in speeches or formal meetings, or in front of the principal—that was reasonable. Rather, I found it suffocating to have to constantly self-censor during breaks or when I was travelling around school corridors. It was an unacceptable suppression of my personal identity.

Isn’t that food for thought. That whether I could say ‘fuck’ became my non-negotiable bottom line for self expression. A word so all-purposed and all-powerful that I could not give it up.

1. Another way of conceptualising this, based on Ms Lye’s Renaissance literature teachings: in most contexts when you say the word ‘fuck’, you are probably operating somewhere above the vegetative soul, but maybe somewhere around the level of the Platonic charioteer’s ignoble horse. The Tempest’s Caliban, if you will. Caliban would love the word ‘fuck’: ‘fuck you Prospero’, ‘I want to fuck Miranda’, ‘fuck yeah! celestial liquor!’, ‘Stephano you are stupid as fuck’.