F*CK
This movie caught my eye in the dvd shop and after reading the back of it I decided it might be an interesting watch. Turns out it was. It’s basically a movie about the word ‘FUCK’. A word that has been around for centuries, used in many different ways.
The movie looks at the word from many different angles and provides a pretty decent history of the word while also debunking a lot of urban myths about it.
I find it interesting that a word, made up of 4 separate letters, can have such an effect on people ranging from extreme excitement through to insane violence. It’s funny how we, as human begins, associate certain feelings and emotions to words and phrases.
Personally, I don’t really find particular words offensive. Sure, when used to verbalise a certain emotion, the word may take a certain meaning depending on what I associate with that word. However, it’s more about what the person is trying to express, not the way they express it that I may find offensive.
I found the movie really interesting. Certainly made me think about how humans express themselves and how we associate emotions with words.
I think it’s actually a failing of language whereby intent isn’t properly communicated. The ambiguity in English leads you to have to guess at a person’s intent, creating situtations like this. Not a bad thing in and of itself, but when you truly want to communicate an emotion, an intent, or something like offensiveness, there are very few ways of doing so without having to work around the barriers set up by the language.
If English was better there would be a more direct translation between intent or emotion and the actual language, and less unintentional play in words like “fuck” that end up meaning many different things to many different people.
Maybe the use of the word fuck is equivalent to more primal languages. I mean, a dogs bark or cats meow can mean a lot of different things, depending on how they are conveyed, ie pitch, tone, volume, etc…