An entry in which we learn that the Canadian vocabulary is going to H-E-double hockey sticks in a hand basket, and I don't give a fuck

The following entry is periodically interrupted to answer questions from American readers.

The CBC reports today that for the first time ever, the Canadian Press Caps and Spelling guide has seen fit to determine how Canadians are allowed to see the word "fuck" in print. 

(Yes, just now.  2005, why?  What do you mean what year is this?  Hell-lo, Canadian.  We don't allow caffeine in our Mountain Dew, remember?  No Sunday shopping in Halifax? Right. Canada.)

It seems that until today, the editors of Press Caps have seen fit to ignore this obscenity, preferring instead to supply the media with detailed instructions on how to spell "Fudgsicle" (with a capital 'F') and the abbreviation for "son of a bitch" (lower case, with periods, don't count the 'a'). 

According to the editors, "fuck," that glorious catch-all shockword used equally frequently as a noun ("I don't give a fuck"), verb ("We fucked it up"), modifying adjective ("fucking awesome"), intensifier ("what the fuck did you do that for?"), and even as a punctuation mark ("Fuck this fucking fucker, I'm going to fuck him up") has received so little of their attention because up until recently it was hardly used.

(Yes, apparently Canadians use the word "Fudgsicle" more than we use the word "fuck".  I don't know.  Maybe the Prairies.)

Anyway, "fuck" has found its way into the press guide because the term in its various incarnations has found its way into the popular vernacular:

"We found the word was creeping into our news stories on a fairly regular basis, probably because people are saying it more and more in public, and various media pick it up on their microphones and recorders," said Patti Tasko, editor of Caps and Spelling.

And if people say it, the media's supposed to report it.  No editorializing, no censorship. No "effin' " this, or "f*&$" that.  No, no.  Not for Canadians any more - we now we get to see "fucking" in black and white with no metaphors whatsoever.

(Yes, seriously. What do your media do?  Really? And yet you still watch CNN?  FoxNews? Whoa. You people must have really great media literacy programmes that let you filter all that spin out, huh?  What?  Oh, like the WMD stuff.  No they didn't.  They didn't. No. That was made up.  Rove. ROVE. Oh, forget it.)

And of course, it wouldn't be a real article about modern language usage unless it had a tragic "we're fucking up our Anglo heritage!" element attached to it, pace Mrs. Reverend Lovejoy ("would somebody please think of the children!"):

"It's much more socially acceptable than it used to be," says Katherine Barber, the editor-in-chief of the Canadian Oxford Dictionary. "I hear children using it a lot. I hear them walking down the street saying it, and I mean young children who are only nine or 10 years old. Maybe children that age have always been running around yelling it, but I don't think so."

Thank you Ms. Barber. 

Anyway, check out the coyness of the CBC article, which manages to write a whole 300 words on the word "fuck" without actually printing it, choosing instead such trite euphemisms as "the word that rhymes with 'duck' "and "the most infamous four-letter word."

*
Postings will be light this week, as Philoillogica attempts to write a long-overdue paper on the care and feeding of editorial apparatus in the case of radiating texts of indeterminate authorship.  I don't know what any of those words mean, but they sound pretty good, and I have to string about 4,000 or so more together and couple them all with wit and charm that give the impression that I am, in Clayton J Delery's terms: "a subject presumed to know". 

Comments

[Steph]

Fuck, why the hell can't fucking editors just get with it and use the fucking work fuck already?

It's a fucking word for fuck's sake and I've used it in fucking public for quite some time now.

In fact, my fucking first fucking brazen act of using the fucking word fuck in polite company was a fucking OAC presentation on the fucking lovely novel Lady Chatterley's Lover where I fucking discussed the use of fucking natural language to describe, well fucking in the fucking novel. I just got the fuck out of my chair and said the word fuck right in front of the whole class and my fucking teacher.

You should have seen the look on their fucking faces. And I got a an A--Fuckin' A.