Social media (Looking at you, Facebook) has allowed us to practice incivility in ways that were social taboos at an earlier age. A whole lot of people can now toss around insults, freely proselytize our ideologies in ways that would have been offensive to earlier listeners, and practice assholery on unprecedented levels. Chief among the new standards is the use of the F-word.
We not only feel free to use the word now, but we also use it as if it had been dammed up inside us for lifetimes, and Facebook has broken the dam and pent-up vocabularies spill out in a gush, a tidal wave, a tsunami. We roll the word around in our mouths to get the feel of it, to relish it, to savor its newly found freedom.
The use of the word in a social setting is not without its consequences, though. A few of my real-world friends deal with the trauma of sexual abuse, including rape and pedophilia and at least one Facebook friend suffers from the after-effects of sexual slavery. A casual “Fuck” dropped on social media can trigger the memory and the raw emotions that accompanied the trauma. Out of respect for others, some of us Facebookers now watch our language, not out of any puritanical motive, but out of respect for others.
In part, I learned English from a great-grandfather who emigrated from Germany and learned English in his migratory trail from New York to Pennsylvania and down the Ohio River where river rats and hillbillies taught him an English that mastered the art of the expletive. The man had a vocabulary that could make a sailor blush.
When my mother visited him and his wife- my step-great-grandmother- he grew bored with the women’s talk and invited me to tour his basement workshop where, out of the earshot of the women, he was free to tell me about his brass-work machinery in the broken and guttural English of the immigrant- an English peppered with every word in two languages that were considered inappropriate in polite conversation. I was a teenager before I learned that a lathe is a lathe and not a fucking lathe. On my mid-life return to college, I took every English course offered, but continue to use the F-word as a common adjective. Seriously, how would one address a bigot without reference to “fucking bigot” or a racist without the use of "fucking Nazi"?
So, on Facebook posts, I restrain myself from using a language that comes as naturally as walking. But comments in other people’s posts, I’ll use whatever language is appropriate to the fucking OP.
