You know that feeling when your shoe slides in some fresh dog poop and you smear the stuff across the pavement? I'm beginning to feel that way about the word fuck.
I turned on a new Netflix series and might have found it interesting except for one of the characters whose every sentence was larded with fuckin' this and fuckin' that. After a few moments, that's all I could hear. I turned it off.
I signed in to listen to a guest lecturer who looked to be mid-forties. Perhaps to convince his college-aged audience that he was one of them, he, too, used the f-word and others in every sentence. It was hard to believe he had any knowledge to impart when he sounded like one of the students. I stopped listening.
We expect vulgar language during the teenage and college years as children struggle to find a place in the adult world. In general, however (and depending very much on one's profession), the expletives gradually drop out of regular rotation to be used only when one is angry, injured, or drunk.
As a student in Germany, I met a young man training to be a doctor. He was learning English because he wanted to work in the US, and he practiced his English with me. I was appalled at the language he used. I tried to imagine how I would feel sitting in an examining room if the doctor entered and said, "How the f*** are you today?"
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The F-Smear
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