F for victory

It's only four letters but it's one of our most powerful words and even helped us win the war. Yet as Channel 4 prepares to devote a whole programme to it, Willy Maley finds f-ings ain't what they used to be

YOU read it here first. Anarchy in the UK is due to break out on the box tomorrow night, and it's got nothing to do with Jack Straw facing the female contingency of the Scottish parliament. Boldly going where no television show has gone before, those foolhardy commissioning editors at Channel Four are bringing us A Brief History Of The F-Word. Written and directed by David Jeffcock (no comment), the programme will go out after the 9pm watershed but turning the air blue will still have many seeing red.

Leon Trotsky described swearing as "a legacy of slavery, humiliation and disrespect for human dignity - one's own and that of other people", but this view has been tempered in recent years by Scottish writers who have pioneered a new form of fiction called "fu**tion". In the foreword to his Lars Porsena - or The Future Of Swearing And Improper Language - Robert Graves lamented the passing of creative literary swearing, but Tom Leonard, James Kelman and Irvine Welsh have brought it back with a bang. Their literary pyrotechnics and figurative fireworks draw inventively and wittily on the f-word. Creative cursing is now a feature of much contemporary writing, a fricassee of fricatives. It captures the flux of life. It is hard to separate form from content, so there's no use asking authors to clean up their act. Dirty realism is here to stay.

For form's sake, and in the name of all that's decent and holy, we have to keep "f***" off the page, particularly in a family newspaper (and on a f***ing Sunday too!) We live in a swearing society, but a two-faced one too. We like to speak with forked tongues. It's all a question of context and focus. The new Encarta dictionary defines "f***" as an offensive term, but goes on to offer "f***wit", "f***- up" and "f***face" as variations on a theme. "F***" may be frowned upon in official circles, but linguistically speaking - and I wouldn't have it any other way - it's a flexible four-lettered friend, fulfilling a number of functions. The fickle finger of fate has plucked the f-word out of obscurity, making it mean, moody and magnificent; fecund, fluid and fruitful. All language is sacred, even when it's in scare quotes.

Swearing can be a creative act as well as a destructive one. I remember as a child asking for a "fork and knife" and wondering why I was belted round the lug even though I'd said "please". Unbeknown to me I'd been stung by Matt McGinn's Effen Bee. Swallowing the urge to list things alphabetically, I've since learned to bite my tongue and ask for a "knife and fork", in that order, and to fork with saying please. My sister could stick a swear word in anywhere without breaking stride. I remember being told that I was giving her "indi- bastarding-gestion". She'd eaten a slanguage sandwich.

Most countries have a favourite swear word - but the term that captured the global market is nasty, British, and short, universally acknowledged as the number one expletive. The word itself is a bit of a bastard, etymologically speaking, in that it is of uncertain origin, but linguists do their best to blame it on those nasty foreigners, so the usual suspects are rounded up. John Ayto, editor of the Oxford Dictionary Of Slang and one of the Channel 4 programme's key contributors, says it is a Germanic word, from "fock", meaning to hit. Another source says it is Scandinavian (those f***ing Vikings again!), dating from the early 16th century, with the underlying sense of "to beat or bang".

Of course, "f***" has been used on TV many times before, but usually in a filtered form. It's in the nature of foul language that words of a feather flock together, and fans of Father Ted will be familiar with feckless Father Jack, who likes to say "feck". Fashionistas, meanwhile, know it as "fcuk".

To effen bee or not to effen bee, that's the question. Aye, there's the rub, the friction. Shakespeare knew a thing or two about cursing - Hamlet is essentially a play about swearing and oaths, and in The Tempest Caliban was taught language but learned to curse his master. It's a word full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

But let's not beat about the bush or f*** around the fuchsia. We have to face facts, and the fact is that one of the first occurrences of the word was in a work by Scots poet William Dunbar in 1503, where it appeared as "fukkit". With the arrival of print, the f-word spread like wildfire. Surely it was all done bar the shouting. How could it be kept in its place now? Well, Samuel Johnson wouldn't let it into his dictionary. When a woman commended him on his act of exclusion, he said: "So you've been looking for it, ma'am."

Other evidence suggests Johnson may have objected to the word but not the deed. Do as I do but not as I say. Later lexicographers were less coy than Johnson. Early recorded variations include "f***ish" and "f***ster", now sadly obsolete. In 1994, a Polish linguist, Maciej Widawski, produced a dictionary of Polish and English slang entitled The F***tionary, for those wishing to be understood in the shipyards of both Gdansk and Govan.

"F***", we are told by Channel 4, "was for centuries one of the most taboo words in the English language". Now, according to author Kathy Lette, it's "just punctuation". The f-word has become the world's best-known expletive, "our gift to the planet", an internationally renowned intercurse. The French call us the "f***- offs", if you'll pardon my French.

It was in the trenches of the first world war that swearing came into its own. From being a working-class pursuit looked down on by the officers it became more fluid after our two wars. Mary Wesley says that Battle of Britain pilots would use it when they were "frightfully tense". (Look at the fokkers they were up against!) They would f*** them on the beaches. As Wesley puts it, "f*** got liberated" after D-Day.

THE next big breakthrough came with the publication of Lady Chatterley's Lover in 1960. The publishers were prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act but the Old Bailey threw out the case and the word was henceforth a permanent fixture in print. Newspapers still asterisk a word that's common currency in newsrooms up and down the country, but in literature the Chatterley classes started taking it as read.

The issue having been forced in fiction, next up was television. Kenneth Tynan uttered the f-word on footage that no longer survives. The term caught on as an expression of political agitation after Country Joe McDonald made it a chant against the Vietnam War at Woodstock, and it became a rallying cry for anti-war protesters. The f-word became funky and found itself on vinyl. Musically, it's funk and punk - the Sex Pistols famously uttered it on Bill Grundy's TV show, and punk itself was a four-lettered word that pogo-ed into no- go areas.

Will Self says it sounds "percussive", while DJ John Peel has his own "f***ometer", figuratively speaking, which he uses to count the f- words on tracks before he plays them. Later, rappers like Ice-T were castigated for their foul and allusive language. NWA's F*** Tha Police turned the airwaves blue, and Channel 4's own TFI Friday was almost pulled after Mancunian mumbler Shaun Ryder swore blind on consecutive appearances. It's even been uttered on Richard and Judy. Yet on the big screen it has lost its shock factor. James Ferman of the British Board of Film Censors now says it's a dead duck.

A Brief History Of The F-Word is narrated by Arabella Weir, and at one point the voiceover declares that "the f-word now lives in a classless society". To prove the point we're reminded that Four Weddings And A Funeral opens with Hugh Grant uttering the word, and introducing "f***ity-f***" as a variation on a theme. Critics say we are immune to obscenity now, and that audiences are more likely to flake out than freak out when their ears are assaulted, but a laissez- faire attitude to swearing in film and fiction can't hide the fact that it's on the defensive elsewhere. Feck and frig may outfox the censors, but the f-word remains fenced in at certain venues.

Football, where swearing once held sway, is feeling the pinch as all-seater stadia, a greater gender mix and club regulations all have an effect on what can safely be said. Lubomir Moravcik recently found to his cost that the SFA lives up to its name, and I heard of a fan being ejected from Ibrox during a Champions League match just for saying "that Effenberg can hit a ball!"

For Trotsky the f-word was a sign of slavery, the sigh of the oppressed, but for Steven Berkoff it is "a sign of passion", a mark of working-class resistance to an effete and effeminate middle class. Where Trotsky wanted workers fined for f-ing in the factories, Berkoff puts it centre stage as a form of resistance.

A sign of masculinity, then - and of misogyny too. Whether viewed as a quick fix or a counterblast, the f-word is always fraught with danger. Berkoff reports that the Kray Twins didn't like people swearing in mixed company, while Kathy Lette loathes such double standards, and says that while it's offensive as a sexual term if uttered as part of an unwelcome advance, she is prepared to countenance it alongside "making love" in the right context.

But where does the f-word come from? As a big B-movie fan, my own theory is that it came from the deep blue sea.

Nobody seems to have noticed the word "fucus". This f-word is a seaweed or rock lichen with flat leathery fronds, and its name stems from the Greek "phukos", of Semitic origin. We could be dealing with a word that is at the very origin of the specious. Or did it come from outer space, and are the f-ers laughing at us from the mothership? Then again, the word itself reminds me of a fox, feral and furtive, living on the edge of language.

(Of course, even after Lady Chatterley's Lover, the language of fiction was curtailed. John McGahern's novel The Dark opens with the word - and shows that there's worse things than swearing, like the c- word, namely the censorship that the writer suffered in Ireland. As Edwin Morgan has said: "Speech is a caravan that goes on its way no matter how many moralistic, linguistic or academic dogs bark at it." Academics are used to three terms of abuse. Morgan mentions "the age- old belief that the language of art should be 'better' than the rough untutored language of everyday life". So keep a civil tongue in your head, preferably your own.) The f-word is most efficacious in every way. Indeed, I've often wondered whether swearing is an art or a science, and whether its understanding is best reserved for the linguist or the philosopher. There are words I find obscene, offensive and vulgar, namely "obscene", "offensive", and "vulgar". I've never understood the rather redundant phrase "offensive weapon", never having seen a "defensive weapon".

But it's the c-word that sticks in my throat, censorship being the most offensive term of all. The Iron Curtain may have been raised, but there is a certain irony in the fact that the language barrier remains. Some curtains can't be lifted, twitch them as we may.

The fact we still get into such a flap about the f-word says a lot about our level of linguistic maturity. The language police are always on hand to help with local difficulties - so if you see a fork in the road, report it. You've enough on your plate.

A Brief History Of The F-Word, Channel 4, Monday, 10.50pm. Willy Maley is a professor of English at Glasgow University

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