Words Can Put You On The Run

Russians were here, quinn.anya, 2007

I've been making my way through the Battlestar Galactica series boxsets recently, and coincidentally there's a moral panic over the film Kick-Ass. What the two have in common is bad language, if there is such a thing.

The quote the BBFC's
rating of Kick-Ass (link may contain spoilers):

The film contains multiple uses of strong language. [...] KICK-ASS contains one use of very strong language. The word is spoken by a young girl who, like Kick-Ass, has become a makeshift superhero. Although some people might be offended by a child using this type of language, the predominant effect is comic. [...] The remark is delivered in a throwaway fashion rather than aggressively directed and the unexpectedness and incongruity of the use provides a comic justification for its inclusion.

The concept of different grades of 'strong language' is entirely subjective. I knew a girl in school who frequently used the "C-word" as her curse of choice. Maybe I am desensitised, and maybe the world is not as innocent as some would believe. After all, I wrote the euphemism "C-word" without any ambiguity on your part, demonstrating how utterly pointless it was to censor myself. And if you are a child and didn't understand it, you're probably already asking someone, and I'll soon be receiving a indignant e-mail.

Which brings me to Battlestar Galactica, or indeed one of a number of sci-fi shows. Farscape had 'frell', Red Dwarf had 'smeg', and BSG had 'frakk' - the closest to 'fuck'. Indeed, in the show it is used in every context the word 'fuck' would be used - that is to say it means the exact same thing. The reason a naughty word like that is replaced with a similar sounding word is because we absolutely must protect the innocents from words they most likely already know and use in the playground.

When I was a kid Are You Being Served? was often broadcast around tea-time on BBC1 on a Saturday. At the time I found it a baffling sitcom where the slightest thing had the audience in hysterics. I mean, what's funny about her cat? Adult audiences on the other hand were pissing themselves over the double-entendres. The character was talking about her cat, but the fact she called it 'pussy' meant the show could get away with simply saying something risqué for a laugh before the watershed. That is a homonym - a word with one meaning being spelt and pronounced the same as another which has a different meaning.

With 'frakk' we have a made-up word that sounds and is spelt differently from 'fuck' but means the same thing (a synonym). A lexeme like fuck can be used in pretty much any grammatical role: to fuck (verb), fucking (participle), fucker (agent noun) and innumerable compound nouns. Precisely because it means nothing. Yes, it has a general meaning of 'fornicate', but that makes no sense in phrases like 'fuck it up' or 'Fight Club fucked with my mind'. All that remains in those phrases is the bluntness and/or vulgarity from the word's original/core use - delexified (?) into a empty word that conveys emotional intensity. So the real issue people have is the foremost sense of a word in their mind, and 'frakk' has no prior connection despite being obvious plain and simple suppletion. F*ckity bye!

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