[NSFW possibly] Do people who overuse the "F" expletive end up with a degraded view of the act of love?

No. Overusing any word is a sign of linguistic sloth. Too lazy to find a synonym? Fuck it.

Some people love to shock. And mixing up the work “fuck” with anything else is meant to shock.

The thing is when a swear word gets overused then it loses its power entirely. It just becomes noise.

No. I don’t see that at all. The f-word has become completely separate from the sexual act. Right now it is just a word that carries emphasis. But it has nothing whatsoever to do with intercourse.

No. Not if it is used when not speaking about, well, fucking. Maybe people who always use it in lieu of the terms sex or making love, maybe they already are not respecting the act between two people who love each other. Not that loving people can’t use the term once in a while, but if that is the only way they think of the act, then maybe they are missing the emotional connection. But, not necessarily.

Bollocks.

The word ‘fuck’ has been used so much that it has actually, in my opinion, lost it’s meaning as an expletive. It has become a noun, verb, adjective, and occasionally, an expletive. I don’t believe it diminishes ‘Coitus’ as Sheldon would say. lol

@majorrich Sheldon is perhaps the funniest person (character) alive!

I would guess that there is a relationship between the sophistication of one’s words and the sophistication of one’s love making.

But it would not preclude wordless people from being sensitive lovers, as well.

Those who use “F” words or phrases as expletives clearly do not attach a positive connotation to it. LOL!

Context matters, as does tone, and words often have more than one meaning and/or usage at the same time. Saying “he was a fucking racist, so I dumped him” does not somehow preclude one from also uttering “I hated how he left his wet towels on the floor, but he always made sure to pay attention to my pleasure in fucking, so I let it slide” or “I fucking love a good eco-friendly, vegan dildo”.

I use the f-word with great regularity. It has not degraded anything.

If anything, the stress reduction I receive from bandying the word about allows greater enjoyment of said act.

Absolutely not. I use the F-word a lot and I, in no way, connect it with any sex I have. The word I use as an expletive is not, nor has ever had anything to do with how I have sex or value sex. (and I do really really value the act of making love…. call me old fashioned, but that is just how I am…..) But I drop the F-bomb too much for a mother of a 7 year old.

No

Actions speak louder than words. There are quite a few people out there who don’t properly value the act of love and perpetually avoid swearing. I don’t believe that swearing and proper lovemaking are intrinsically linked in any way.

I will say, though, (for what it’s worth) .. swearing is a huge turnoff for me for friendship and love making. Intelligence is a turn on, and the use of colorful words that aren’t crude is evidence of intelligence. (no, swearing is not indirectly proportional to intelligence.. however, I think it would be a difficult point to argue that swearing is a sign of intelligence.)

And now I’m rambling away like a madman. Fuckin’ A.

What @elbanditoroso wrote.

Fuck you if you don’t fucking like it; it fucking is, quite fucking simply, the greatest fucking word on the fucking planet.

That sentence felt really good.

Incidentally, the conflation of the verb ‘to fuck’ with its… (hahaha) romantic connotation is probably in need of context:

“They [the monks] are not in heaven because they fuck the wives of [the town of] Ely.” Fuccant is pseudo-Latin, and in the original it is written in cipher. The earliest examples of the word otherwise are from Scottish, which suggests a Scandinavian origin, perhaps from a word akin to Norwegian dialectal fukka “copulate,” or Swedish dialectal focka “copulate, strike, push,” and fock “penis.” Another theory traces it to M.E. fyke, fike “move restlessly, fidget,” which also meant “dally, flirt,” and probably is from a general North Sea Germanic word; cf. M.Du. fokken, Ger. ficken “fuck,” earlier “make quick movements to and fro, flick,” still earlier “itch, scratch;” the vulgar sense attested from 16c. This would parallel in sense the usual M.E. slang term for “have sexual intercourse,” swive, from O.E. swifan “to move lightly over, sweep” (see swivel). But OED remarks these “cannot be shown to be related” to the English word. Chronology and phonology rule out Shipley’s attempt to derive it from M.E. firk “to press hard, beat.”” (source: http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=fuck)

In short, it’s got fuck all to do with love.

Well fuck yes! We’ve come to regard your fuckin’ “act of love” as just another way of marking our territory.

(it’s not)

I doubt they even connect the word and the act.

Shut the sex up you sexing mothersexer!
Doesn’t have the same ring to it somehow.

No – I don’t conflate the two and I’ve got no fucking love making in my life right now.

I love the word.

@mowens Fuck yeah.

I’ve done it more than I’ve said it.

I rarely curse. I just don’t have the need, nor see the point. There are so many other ways to add color to a discussion.

Well, at my school (I’m in 8th grade after the summer), everybody uses the F word in almost every sentence. It’s hard to get a sentence out of them without using a cuss word. It is very annoying and immature to me so I don’t do it at all. The other day, every other word out of one boys mouth was either the F word or S word.
So you can understand how it loses its power and gets downright aggravating after prolonged use.
They also use it in a crude sense for talking about any type of sexual intercourse. Emphasis on crude.
I’m not at all a fan of cussing. It makes me feel like I’m immature and beneath the adults, when in reality I see myself above my peers and equal to adults in intelligence and maturity.

I used to be very careful with my vocabulary. Somewhere along the line, I figured out that there were people who would be critical of your choice of words no matter what you said. Something was going to strike them as vulgar, or inappropriate or low class.

And of course, there’s drift in what’s generally accepted. So the more we use a word, the greater it’s general acceptance. The more we eschew its use as “low”, the less acceptance it has. If no one said, “Fuck,” something else would be held to be offensive in its place.

So for me, feeling that it’s impossible to please everyone – especially over time – I like to have the biggest arsenal of words possible. I don’t use “fuck” often. Nor, “eschew” or “aglet.” But when they’re called for, nothing can me clearer.

I agree with you. Used rarely, it still has impact.

Before I fuckin answer, will you fuckin define fuckin overuse fuckin please? Fuckin thanks.

: )

Lol. I’m not sure whether frequent F-word users have a degraded view of lovemaking. I’m willing to bet though that F-word users have wilder views of the sex act thereby experiencing better, much hotter acts of fuc, er, lovemaking.

For many people the use of vulgar language is just making sounds that have little or no meaning, other than to act as an expletive.

It seems like the people in my life who are sex-positive activists are also the people who swear the most, which includes variations of ‘fuck’.

I have a dirty mouth. I don’t use “fucking” EVER to mean “having sex with”...I use it to emphasize things in either a good or bad way. So the two are totally unrelated for me.

Fuck no. Seriously, though…I have major potty mouth, but I still appreciate the finer things in life, including sexual intimacy as an expression of love.

@augustlan I kept reading that as “the finger things in life”. And I thought, ”fuuuuccckkk yeah.”

I don’t like to use swear words that much. I’ll use if for effect, or where appropriate, but that’s not much.

I do like to call love-making fucking, because it adds excitement. This would not be the case for someone who says, “fuck” all the time, but it does work for me. It implies urgency and desire that hard to do any other way. But that’s just me. I seriously doubt there are very many people in the world who could get a charge out of it that way. Most people seem to swear a lot more than I do.

What can I say that they (^) haven’t already said? Just using the word fuck doesn’t make love any less. Besides, there is a difference between fucking and making love

Somehow “engage in vigorous coitus” just doesn’t sound as good as “fuck like a couple of weasles”

Last Friday, after the court proceedings and the judge’s signature, I wanted a “fuck yeah party.” Nahhh, the people around me had tight sensibilities that were too uncomfortable with that. Oh man.

I’ve gotten rid of an uber-scumbag. Do I want to have a “good riddance party?” “divorce party?” “new life party?” Sorry. Those don’t work. The only phrase that works for me is having a “Fuck! Yeah! Party!”

I use the Eff word and its colorful variations pretty liberally—but do clean up my mouf when I hafta.

As for the act of love… it depends, really depends on how it’s said and who says it. There are some people who, if they said, “I want to eff you.” I would go head over heels, others would make me laugh, and others would make me run for the hills faster than you can say eff…..

@all It’s way too fucking late to reply individually to all you fuckers tonight, but your stories have touched my fucking hard heart. Maybe a fucking F bomb here and there ain’t so fucked up after all. See, I can cuss like a sailor. After all, I was a sailor.

Let me tick off a few of you fuckers anyway. @gailcalled Great answer. I love “linguistic sloth” to describe overused words in general. And that choice of wording demonstrates you’re not guilty of using indolent idioms like “fuck you very much”. ~

@tranquilsea Quite right. But enough shock jock schlock from me for one full month. I can do it, but it’s really not my style.

@elbanditoroso I’m not so sure about that. You could get away with using it as an expletive but if you walked up to an attractive person in a bar and blurted out, “Wanna fuck?” my guess is it would not end well.

@JLeslie That’s what I was getting at. It does seem to me that if you routinely overuse that particular expletive, the attitude toward intercourse it expresses when used that way would have to rub off on you. It isn’t easy to remain unaffected by ones own words.

@ragingloli Thanks for that ejaculation. :-)

I use it all the time and don’t think it affects my sex life. Of course, I don’t think of sex as an act of love…that is, acts of love are everywhere and not every sex act has to be about love.

@ETpro It is my style now and then. lol

I agree @Simone_De_Beauvoir.

@Simone_De_Beauvoir …acts of love are everywhere and not every sex act has to be about love…

I love that statement.

@linguaphile Caught in the act of loving @Simone_De_Beauvoir‘s statement and @tranquilsea‘s endorsement of it.

But about the F bomb, if you use it while visiting Middleboro, MA, it’s going to cost you.

@ETpro Effin’ lurve you! giggle!

@ETpro – that has about as much possibility of surviving a court challenge as me becoming the King of France.

But I think @ETpro‘s question is I think, of all words why that word? Why not “Cancer!”, for example. Why wouldn’t everyone use their own word for something nasty, instead of the F word. So many people just happen to pick that word?

I love it when @gailcalled swears intellectually. Fluther at its best. Just saying.

…but maybe it is more my question not so much @ETpro.‘s

@zensky; I do keep beating a dead horse, I know, but there’s a good reason to vary your vocabulary and then, only very occasionally, surprise your reader.

@linguaphile Thanks.

@elbanditoroso How so? The current court seems to have scant if any knowledge of the Constitution.

@flo Exactly.

@zensky A true mountaintop experience.

@flo Have at it.

@gailcalled It’s a theoretically dead horse. But since you can’t prove anything, and Heisenberg proved that, who knows when the horse may rise from the dead?

@gailcalled You are right, of course. Fuck you very much.

@majorrich Being mostly clueless about TV sitcoms, your mention of Sheldon and “coitus” sent me to Google, which sent me to YouTube and a clip of the episode in question. If I’d known that was on TV, I’d likely have tuned in. Great comedy, as @missingbite says.

@wundayatta That brings up a separate interesting question. Is there any relation between IQ and LQ (Libidinal Quotient)? In other words, would Einstein be more likely to fuck like a mink than a mink would be to think up the Theories of General and Special Relativity?

@Aethelflaed You’;ve admirably demonstrated how fucking versatile the F word is.

@SpatzieLover Mere anecdotal evidence. Fuck that.

@cazzie Shouldn’t be a problem unless you would be concerned hearing it from a 7-year old’s mouth. :-)

Relevant

@zensky Useful. And far more creative than a constant string of F bombs.

Yes, buddy – someone’s done their homework.

I just need to interject that I find the terms “F-bomb” and “N-word” far more damaging to vivid language than the occasional “fuck” or, in appropriate historical context, use of the term “nigger” (or for that matter, “kike.”) Why are we still putting skirts on piano legs, linguistically speaking.

I don’t think there is any correlation between IQ and how profane one is. Some of the the most intelligent people I’ve known have also been fairly profane. Some, also, are not.

But I do often hear that claim.

Sometimes, just sometimes, only the word “fuck” will do. It is recognizable all over the world across many different languages. Billy Connolly says it better. Even better, watch _Fuck: A Documentary

@zensky: You’re illcome.

@ETpro: True or false about the dead horse. That means also, I assume, good or bad point.

@Ucme; I stand corrected. Sir (or might it be Dame) Elton.

I get in trouble for using the word Dikes for my Wire cutters, side cutters or whatever the new word for the fucking things is.

@gailcalled Error #1: My username begins with the lower case u, hence the lack of highlights in red.
Error #2: You posted that remark on the wrong thread, you silly little thing? ;¬}

@ucme: I actually posted it on both threads and should have done neither. Not a good joke, under any circumstances. (Although there is Dame Edna.)

Oh I know you did, just felt like pulling your chain m’lady.

@ucme:MIlo thought it was his tail.

@gailcalled I can safely say i’ve never typed mil…..no I refuse, i’ll acknowledge his existence, but not the attention he clearly craves :¬)

@ucme: I know. His inner egotist is really annoying to live with.

MIlo here: You should try living with Gail.

@his royal kittiness meow meow, meow meow meow, meow meow…prrrrrr!
@gailcalled It’s okay, I was saying nice things about you, just ask mi…...him.
It’s come to this, “chatting” with a puddytat online, fancy that!

@ucme I know the feeling. I found myself saying “goodnight” to someone’s goldfish online once!

And we all talk to penguins.

As i’ve said before, I eat penguins, they’re delicious.

blushes and runs away

@janbb I’m against putting skirts on pianos or referring to their legs as limbs. But I’m equally against substitution fuck and fucking for every third word in sentence after sentence. For the most part, let’s just call a spade a spade and not call a negro (or a nigger—two different meanings) a spade.

@tranquilsea Great links. And you might appreciate this one with Billy Connolly explaining why we ought to use the appropriate word for a thing as only he so eloquently can do.

@gailcalled Yes, absolutely. True or false. That was exactly my point.

@majorrich You’ll catch no grief from me for calling a pair of dikes what they are, or for that matter for calling a pair of dykes what they are. But ”...things is.” There we have a problem. Granted dikes are difficult to quantify. It’s one item that comes in pairs, just as dykes are one item that cums in pairs. But it is always either ”...thing is” or …things are. On that, there can be no proper exceptions.

@ucme, @gailcalled and @janbb You guys go get a room. And here I am the only human among you talking to an English coat of arms, a vase of flowers and a penguin.

@janbb I like to peel off the wrapper….very slowly ;¬}
@ETpro It’s the England football team’s club crest, supporting the lads in euro 2012.

@ucme Am I supposed to somehow feel better because I am talking to something I can’t even correctly identify?

@ETpro How you react to tiny pics on the tinterwebz is entirely your own affair good sir.

@ETpro I agree with you about its constant repetition but as I said, when used judiciously, I think the word still has impact. Like when I hit my thumb with a hammer – although that’s usually a “Shit! Oh shit!”

Oh, I had reason, recently, to look up some of the best insults ‘The Bard’ had to offer. I found this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ySKumLl5xC8
She’s great.

I’ve been using the word ‘fucktard’ quite a bit lately. It’s not PC, I know… not appropriate, I know… but nothing describes the ex quite as well.

@ETpro: If you’re a gardener, you never want to call a spade a shovel either.

@janbb My sympathy. Back when I was working my way through school doing carpentry work in the summer, I utterly smashed a left finger while driving a header into the framing for a door. My helper walked up and asked me something just as I was taking a massive swing to drive an oversized header into place. In turning toward him, I inadvertently redirected the hammer head to my finger. The whole end of it turned blue-black, and the fingernail dropped off bet regrew a bit deformed.

@ETpro Did you use colorful euphemisms?

@majorrich A long string of them.