F**king Off for a Day

Yesterday the media delighted in reporting that Vice President Biden was caught on a mike using the "f" word to express his elation about the signing of the health care bill. Most everyone chuckled about it. The word, which used to hold such power over us as teenage boomers, has now become part of our everyday language. In the good old days the "f" word was used only to describe doing the deed, as we used to say. I remember my grandmother literally washing out my brother's mouth with soap when he cursed. Now many grandmothers are using the "f" word.

I admit that I use it more than I should in my daily speech and yet sometimes when I hear it on the street, I am truly bugged. I was walking up the subway stairs at Fifth Ave. and 60th Street when a well-dressed woman in front of me stopped short and started saying in a very loud voice "f**king this and f**king that" with no regard who was around her. It could have been some impressionable little kid or maybe a nun. Since most aren't dressed in their habits, who can tell a nun from any other woman in sturdy shoes?

Most of us are lamenting the downfall of civility in our political discourse. The vile words tea partiers hurled at black and gay lawmakers outside Congress are a prime example. And words like that can give license to many people's uglier thoughts and feelings. The nutcases think that If you can shout hideous epithets at someone you disagree with, why not urge disgruntled people to throw bricks through Democratic congress people's office windows? In the Broadway musical Memphis, set in the 1950's, a brick is hurled through the window of the white deejay and his mother 's ramshackle home to warn the deejay to stop playing black music on white radio stations. The ultra right wing crazies haven't gotten beyond that shameful era of American history.

I also see how this common use of the "f" word and other bad language has made some young comedians very sloppy. It's so much easier to swear a blue streak than to craft witty language. And younger audiences who don't know any better eat it up and think that's comedy. And they really love it coming from a woman's mouth even more than a man's. Real humor hasn't a chance for a comeback if the audience cannot tell the difference between spouting a mouthful of dirty words and images and well-crafted humor.

So perhaps it's time to have a national f**k off day. Just as people have advocated cell phone free days, how about a day where no one, not even the Vice President, can use the "f" word. Instead of saying f**k so many times a day, let's try to come up with a list of words to substitute and save f**k for what it was originally intended.