This battle was lost long ago.
“Wheel of Fortune” has launched a new “What the Fun?” category because it implies “fuck.” The One Million Moms group is disgusted and outraged. “The once family-friendly ‘Wheel of Fortune’ game show is no more,” its site declared on October 30. “Unfortunately, the recently added puzzle category ‘What the Fun’ aims at a mature, modern audience with insinuated profanity making it no longer suitable for family viewing.”
“It is not the show it was with this implication of the f-word,” it continued. “Parents will have to explain to their children that the primetime program they were once allowed to watch is no longer a clean show.” The page included a link for a petition on which to pledge never to watch the show again unless the category is eliminated. More than 12,500 have signed.
Imagine a life so devoid of meaning and so full of discretionary time that one can organize a campaign to change a “Wheel of Fortune” category.
I have news for the conservative group, and by now it is old news. “Fuck” is now just acceptable naughtiness, and not the taboo obscenity it once was. Ditto “shit.” There are lots of reason why this has happened, and things like “What the Fun” are a big one.
Ethics Alarms has followed this devolution in manners and speech for a long time, in essays like this one in 2015, about then-President Obama using “bucket” to suggest “fuck it” with a wink and a grin. Not long after, I wrote about how the habitually vulgar Donald Trump becoming President would coarsen our manners, rhetoric and conduct and it has done that, though not without a lot of help from “the resistance” and Democrats.
Madison Ave. also did its part, with a wave of such “cute” coded vulgarities as the Frank’s Red Hot “I put that @#$! on everything” slogan and the Booking.com “Book yeah!” ads. Then, of course, we had the “Let’s go Brandon” code for “Fuck Joe Biden.” The anti-fuck battle was decisively over when this year, no surprise, President Trump became the first President to use “fuck” in a public utterance (“They don’t know what the fuck they’re doing…”), though Joe Biden had been caught on a live mic as Vice President telling Obama, “This is a big fucking deal!”
But the battle was already lost, I now realize, long before Trump, Jasmine Crockett and other vulgarians entered the fray.
In 2013, Red Sox star David Ortiz, representing the team in a pre-game ceremony at Fenway Park honoring the city of my birth in the wake of the terrorist bombing of the Boston Marathon the week before, shouted in his emotional remarks over the public address system, “This is our fucking city!” as the crowd cheered. In Boston, once the center of Puritan stuffiness! I wrote a clueless essay designating “Big Papi’s” outburst as an “Unethical Quote,” but Papi knew best. His line made the famed clutch hitter even more of a Boston icon than he already was. The moment was featured in the Mark Walberg film about the tragedy. “Fuck” had reached the point where it could be an appropriate expression of intensity and emotion that, say, “Mama mia!” or “Cowabunga!” could not achieve.
Meanwhile, I had established a policy on Ethics Alarms, announced here, that coded versions of “fuck” and, yes, “nigger” would not be honored on the blog, because the euphemisms substituted for them in the news media communicated the same words while pretending they did not. If the issue involves those words, I’ll use those words in discussing it. In fact, I find it amusing that the “Wheel of Fortune” boycott announcement used one of those euphemisms in explaining how it was unacceptable to use a phrase that suggests “fuck”…you know, like “f-word.”
I remember, as a young teen, my father becoming furious at me for using the term “suck” in a conversation at the dinner table, as he declared that it was a disgusting obscenity referencing oral sex. That episode seems quaint today. The Red Sox also alerted the culture that “suck” had crossed over from being taboo to just rude: “Yankees suck” has been a routine chant in Fenway when the Pinstripes visit for decades. (Aside: Google’s AI bot claims that the chant originated in the Nineties. That’s wrong: it started in the late Seventies when the Sox and Yankees were in annual death matches to win the AL East, with both teams stuffed with stars and combative personalities.)
Nor can it be ignored that the characters, including children, in cable and streamed movies and series use “fuck” as virtual punctuation. “Wheel of Fortune” is reflecting the culture, not corrupting it.
Leave the stupid TV game show the fuck alone.
Ethics Alarms 
Here is an ode to the F-word as the most versatile word in the English language.
I’ve always been amazed that “suck” was so completely allowed into the lexicon. It was somehow completely detached from its oral sex meaning. It seemed to become nothing more than “you stink” or “I stink at that” immediately. Kids use it blithely now.
Holy Cow! I’d never seen that Pima County Democratic Party posting! Breathtaking. I guess that was for this past Fourth of July? Trump! indeed.
Some background via local reporting at the time, which was 2022 and evidently related to Roe v. Wade having been overturned, not Trump!
‘After the tweet was posted, the Pima County Democratic Party added a note on the message, explaining that it was shared in “haste,” and was not even their graphic, but that they’d shared it carelessly.
The “PCDP posted a graphic advertising a women’s march which, we agree, was in poor taste. We were eager to share the event, and in our haste we used the graphic provided by the event organizer. That was a mistake, and we will do better,” they wrote, invoking the term of the progressive left to improve one’s message and outlook.
“Make no mistake, however,” they continued. “We support the event which will be on July 4 at 7 pm at Reid Park. The event was organized to help women in our community grieve for the loss of their bodily autonomy, which we consider an elemental right.”
“Our posting of the graphic upset some people. We urge you to save your outrage for the women in this state who will die of botched abortions. Arizona is not a good place to be a woman right now,” they concluded.’
How’s that for an apology! So condescending and morally superior.
I love, “Bring comfortable shoes.”
Also love the reference error here: “PCDP posted a graphic advertising a women’s march which, we agree, was in poor taste.”
The reason I use “coded” obscenities when posting is that, while typing, I feel the presence of my Dear late Mother (whom I never heard utter a discouraging word) with her hand on my shoulder saying: “Now Paulie; do you really want to use that language?“
She always wins.
PWS
As a youngster, I thought the pertinent lyrics of “Home on the Range” scanned as
“Where ‘seldom’ is heard,
[which is] a discouraging word”
I pictured a bunch of demoralized cowboys hanging around the corral, kicking up little clouds of dust with their boots as someone said “Seldom!”
Hmm; inspiration for Stories From Way Out West…?
PWS
I could use an agent! But hey, a copy sold last month. Must have been an EA commenter.
Wrong. Obscenity is still obscenity regardless of its mainstreaming. It’s a sign of degradation more than it is the taming of the word.
In Victorian England, the term “bloody” was regarded as vulgar and obscene. When Gilbert and Sullivan opened “Ruddygore,” its successor to “The Mikado,” the title was attacked as code for “bloody,” and thus in wretched taste. Gilbert capitulated and changed the spelling to “Ruddigore.” But “bloody” is no longer regarded as taboo. These things do diminish with use.
Britain has existed in a kind of degraded hospice since WW2….
“Everyone does it”
The f bomb like all other examples of profanity is and always will be profane. And the commonality of its use is and always will be a measure of the society not a measure of the word.
Well, but in regards to words and language, when “everybody does it” that literally changes the standards. Should we still censor “damn” in Rhett’s kiss-off in GWTW like they used to do on television? Is it really profane to use the word, “Hell”?
Damn isn’t profanity but is a serious word with serious meaning that should be thoughtfully used.
Words are profaned when used frivolously and outside of meaning. The use of damn in some frivolous way is what profanes it.
Some words only mean such things that there is almost never a time to use them that isn’t frivolous. The f bomb is one of those words.
Expressing shock, anger, frustration, outrage and horror isn’t frivolous. It’s communication. Using “fuckin'” as an all-purpose adjective meaning nothing is, yes, useless and trivial. Custer riding into a death trap and saying, “FUCK!” is both eloquent and appropriate.
To the contrary- the use of profanity as expletive is an understandable consequence of our imperfection. It is, however, not aspirational.
The ideal to which we aspire is control over our emotions and subsequent outbursts regardless of what may come. The goal of our emotional maturity is that regardless of what befalls us, from the midnight stubbed toe to the overwhelming of our position by the Cheyenne, is that we have the most calm, collected and thoughtful response to improve our situation.
But we aren’t perfect. And the occasional profanity that we let fly from our mouths is only a *symptom* of our emotional and rational immaturity. And a healthy society with an upward trajectory tolerates it to a degree.
We, however, have indicated our incapacity to handle even the most trivial of set backs or instances in life so much so, that we blast the f-bomb when our credit card isn’t read on the first swipe or the light turns red 1 second too soon.
No. No.
As it has always been and always will be, normalizing the profaning our language isn’t a proof that the word has changed. It’s an indication that the civilization had changed. And not for the good.
Nope. We are a society in a downward trajectory and we’ll be replaced just as soon as possible if we don’t recognize and rectify the sickness.
You’re making two mistakes: Confusing the emotion, which should be controlled, with the accurate expression of it, which simply needs to be accurate, and equating abuse of vivid language with justifiable employment of vivid language. I don’t use “fuck” often, but when I do, it’s meaningful.
I don’t use “fuck” often, but when I do, it’s meaningful.
That isn’t the mainstream societal use of the word that you are now extolling as “ok” or “good”.
You’re proving my point here.
equating abuse of vivid language with justifiable employment of vivid language
Then I guess I’m not sure why, if you just differentiated justifiable use of vivid language, from what must then be “unjustifiable” use of vivid language after spending an entire post rationalizing what then must be entirely “unjustifiable” use of vivid language.
Not entirely inappropriate in today’s culture: that was the point. Using a playful coded reference to “fucK” is by definition now acceptable, because it draws attention to the product, starts discussions, and meets a utilitarian standard.I happen to think its juvenile, unfunny, vulgar, insulting and stupid as well as culturally coarsening, but I’m now like my father and “suck.” Stuck in a culture that no longer exists.
One reason why profanity has almost always been seen as the art of the sailor and the vice of the soldier is that it was always relegated to the most exceptional of emotionally stressful contexts. One of Audie Murphy’s fellow soldiers, who I got to meet because my dad was an ardent Audie Murphy fan – a *FRONT LINE* infantryman, after seeing the HBO Series “Band of Brothers”, commented quite specifically – “We never cussed that much. In the heat of battle, certainly. But in casual conversation? Not likely at all.” I see that as pretty confirming of my position.
I’d imagine if Custer had let fly in the modern era with a “We’re F-ed”, his soldiers would have responded with far less energetic attempts to save their lives if he’d also let fly on a regular basis with “We’re F-ed” just because the menu at the mess hall changed.
(To be clear I don’t need a real life confirmation of my position because it makes rational sense on its own.)
I should do a deep dive in the use of language and what “profanity” really means.
We’ve created “profanity” as a category into which certain words fall, but forget that “profanity” is a process by which certain words are profane through their misuse. And so the “category” is a shortcut for informing people we’re trying to acculturate while forgetting the “why”.
Sometimes, just no other word will do ….
“Sometimes, just no other word will do ….“
Heh!
PWS