I mean 'taint' and 'pollution' in a literal way - dirty words are magic spells that conjure up their references. Why would these uses of the word be considered 'dirty' if they weren't polluted by its primary literal use? And what could be the original source of that taint if not the word's literal denotation (or at least, of its denotation relative to the attitudes that obscene words presuppose about sex and the body)? In fact if fuck and fucking weren't connected to sex in all their secondary uses, they would serve no purpose at all. Emphatic fucking may not depict or refer to sex, and may not even bring it explicitly to mind. So it's simply wrong to claim that these emphatic, expletive, and figurative uses of the word (e.g., as in fuck up etc.) fall afoul of the FCC's rules, which define indecency as language that “depicts or describes… sexual or excretory activities or organs.”īut hang on. People have had a lot of fun with FCC chairman Kevin Martin's claim that 'the F-word 'inherently has a sexual connotation' whenever it's used. Daniel Drezner asked, 'If I say 'F#$% Kevin Martin and the horse he rode in on,' am I obviously encouraging rape and bestiality?' And as Chris Potts makes clear, if you measure a word's connotations by the items it co-occurs with, fucking doesn't seem to keep particularly salacious company.
