The Four lettered sailor

[The contents of this blog could be classified as Parental Advisory, so request exercise of discretion in taking the plunge]

The guy on the street foul mouths the driver of the speeding roadster; the desperate loser attributes his distorted luck; the seductive girlfriend eggs on her reluctant boyfriend to go the distance; the reviewed silences his reviewers; the excited winner of the darned reality show expresses her astonishment on actually being crowned the bitchiest of em’ all; the average English-speaking ruffian across the road prefers to use it as a substitute to the well acclaimed punctuation of the Queen’s language. Different tones, different circumstances, different connotations, that is what the four-letter F-word, ‘FUCK’ has come to be.
It’s funny how acronyms are shaped, how they are twisted and turned to look normal! Else how could a protocol from the era of monarchy have given birth to this genius of a slang word? Something that deserves even more pondering would be that not many of the consumers of this brand of language know the roots of this commonplace figure of speech if I may say so. In the Isles of the Great Kingdom, where men had to seek consent of the Kings for their marriage, in an era where concubines and mistresses were not classified as abnormal no matter how shameful they might have been, ‘Fornication upon Consent of King’ was a custom that was not what you could categorise as illegitimate. One single meaning it had and a not so abnormal one during the times it was coined, no matter how morally low an act it was.
What has become of this protocol is definitely worth a laugh! As people say one bad remark stays put in spite of the numerous good you might have done to cover it up, it always shows its shameful head in a crowd, it’s the same with language. No matter how many beautiful words it might have gifted to mankind, it’s the bad ones that stick. I doubt if the acronym FUCK stood for ‘FOOD upon Consent of King’ or ‘FAITH upon Consent of King’ it would have given us this modern day adjective dear to many. FUCK has stood the test of time, though beaten, weathered and torn by the turbulent and changing winds of usage and lifestyles. Definitely some seeds of our ever-so-colorful vocabulary of the times would stand this same test and bloom in colors not conceivable at this stage.