Word: worde
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
With disenchantment and a little pride I eventually learned that kids and adults everywhere use the word among themselves. I read it in books, too, usually the kind we bought at the bus station. I heard later that even Presidents use it. That was okay, though, because it was still the coveted property of all us men. Men have used "fuck" at least since Elizabethan times, passing it from mouth to mouth through the generations as the last word in verbal virility. So what if a woman or prude challenged one's masculinity? A man could always take refuge...
...however, all that has changed. Liberated chicks began slipping the word into conversations during this past decade but we didn't really mind, because it was still private and full of meaning. When good novels could no longer sell without it well, that was all right, too; it was passed strictly between the author (ess) and the reader...
...recently "fuck" has been thrown around publicly in all kinds of ways, and it has suffered accordingly. As Eldridge Cleaver and many others, including lots of young girls, openly exhorted us to fuck such undesirables as Reagan, Daley, and the Chicago police, the word began to lose both its masculinity and whatever juicy meaning it had left. It became, in effect, an extremely derogatory form of "damn." And now even that meaning is being diminished. People use "fuck" so freely, and so many respectable magazines have decided to print it wherever necessary, that at least one writer in Esquire...
...fault, fellows. We've let our King of the Four Letter Words out into the open, and now the news media and everybody's sister have pounced on it and stripped it of its power. The Movement, as a matter of fact, is the main culprit. It crippled the word by allowing it to become a public symbol of rebellion. I'd bet that if Lyndon Johnson had another year in office, he would destroy "fuck" on national television, just as he destroyed "We Shall Overcome" and "the Ballot or the Bullet...
...that makes no differences; as a shocker, the word is dying. I haven't yet run across it in the Ladies' Home Journal, but then I don't read that magazine every month either. We may as well face reality. "Fuck," like "Agnew," is becoming a household word...