WTF?

I hope that at least one person out there is as amazed by how fucking quickly the English language is changing. I mean, really!

It’s been ten days now---that’s sixty straight hours with my students---and they are almost defucked.

UGH! Sounds awful or painful, doesn’t it? Actually, it’s just the process of removing the legendary “f bomb” from their language, and I’m convinced that the procedure is probably even more difficult than painting a fine straight line with a thin brush after three cups of coffee on an empty stomach. It demands constant vigilance on both their part and mine. The word is so ingrained in their culture that they are barely able to communicate without it. Without "fuck," it’s almost as though someone’s been shooting their tongue up with lots of Novocaine.

I deal with this every year as a teacher of high school students whose vocabulary consists of the verb “to fuck” and every variation on it. These inventive students can turn the word into an adjective, an adverb, with abundant ease as an interjection (of course!) as well as a noun, and even exquisitely as an infix, where it becomes abso-fuckin’-lutely perfect! But in spite of its many creative uses, it really has to go.

So I spend the first couple weeks banishing fuck from the classroom, and it’s not even that I personally dislike it. I always let my students know that if, in the garage, a bowling ball were to fall directly upon my bare toe, it would be the first word out of my mouth, the very best word to exclaim, and loudly, in expressing the surprise of sudden and excruciating pain. But in the classroom, it just doesn’t work. We’re practicing daily how to survive in the real world, so I always use the term inappropriate rather than bad when referring to the word. I remind my students every day---sometimes many MANY times a day, depending on how stubbornly entrenched the word might be in anyone’s personal lexicon---that fuck is an excellent word to use with friends, but in public settings, especially where propriety and maturity are highly valued, it’s just never the best choice.

Somehow, in the last twenty years or so, fuck has wiggled its way beneath the tongue of almost every individual under thirty, and it springs out like an insanely exuberant jack-in-the-box at the very least provocation. When my children were young and they would still actually ride the ski lift with me without pulling their hoods down to hide their face, my head would swivel around to give young snowboarders---discussing the “fucking awesome air” they had just gotten---a peek at my very best “teacher” face, the one used to express severe disapproval. These days on Facebook, it’s one of the “tells” when I read status updates and comments. I can pretty much guess that if fuck is thrown around a couple times, the writer has only been alive since the merciful death of disco.

I went to Greece this past July and I rarely heard English, unless it was used in a very elementary fashion, and this made for an experience that was both exotic and full of adventure. There’s nothing like not knowing a damn thing about what is going on around you to make you feel free! For all those wonderful summer days, I heard language everywhere, but it was almost never English. Through pure proximity, I was privy to several heated conversations, but I couldn’t decode them. I was just an innocent, giddy eavesdropper, wondering what all the fuss was about, without any of the “valence” which automatically accompanies a working knowledge of the language at hand---or ear. This ignorance was indeed bliss! If there was a foreign “fuck you!” lurking out there, I never heard it.

The last day in Athens, we struggled through a convoluted boarding process at the airport, and I was hungry and grouchy as we finally reached our gate. The airplane was headed for Atlanta, Georgia, and I was further irritated when I could tell from the socks and shoes of those around me that we were in the presence of many, many Americans. But it really hit home on the jet way. A man behind me entered the steaming tube connecting the terminal to the waiting plane, and he was, well, just so extraordinarily expressive!

“Fuckin’ A, Man! This place is fuckin’ hot! Fuck ME!”

My first thought was, Oh, well said, Sir! and immediately afterward, my shoulders slumped and I sagged sadly and knew that I was, indeed, on my way home. Vacation was really and truly over.

Well...fuck!