MAKE YOUR PROFANITY COUNT

Say these words out loud to yourself: duck, buck, luck, fuck, muck. Did you hesitate on number four? Why? They all have the same structure: a consonant plus "uck". So why does number four make you hesitate to say it out loud? Because we've agreed, as a people, to deem it obscene.
Granted, it refers to a sex act, but should that make it unspeakable? We can say "screw", can't we? And that is another word for the same sex act, right? But "screw" has other meanings, whereas "fuck" doesn't. That's not true, though, as "fuck" has come to mean all sorts of things other than the sex act it was meant to name. In fact, it's been so widely used that it's lost its power. It should have real impact, when properly used. It can even shock people. But not when mis-used. If you say, for instance, "That fucking guy fucked me over, and I'm going to fucking kick his fucking ass," you've diluted the power of the word. It's become just a meaningless adjective, substituting for what you really wanted to say. If, on the other hand, you say, "I fucked your wife," that has real power, because you're using the word to mean what it was supposed to mean. You might also say, "You, my friend, are fucked," and we all know what it means: you, my friend, messed up so badly that there is no saving you. Americans -- and maybe others, too -- give too little weight to the words we, as a society, have decided are profanity. We should use them sparingly, if at all.
I once heard a woman friend of mine, a wonderful mother, grow so exasperated with her kids that she said, "Stop that, goddamn it!" The kids froze. They had never heard an expression like that leave their mother's lips. She was embarrassed, but it had the desired effect: they stopped doing whatever and retreated to their rooms. Profanity is what we decide it is, but the words we decide are unacceptable in polite company become, automatically, powerful. But only if we use them with discretion. If we spout out too often "damn" and "goddamn" and "fuck" and all the others when we're only a little bit frustrated, those words mean nothing when we really need them. Here's a suggestion: limit yourself to one damn a month, three goddamns a year, and only one fuck. In fact, maybe no fucks. You won't need it if you use the damns and goddamns properly.