What the frak.

So it turns out I'm partial to "freak" and "freaking" (pronounced "frick" and "frickin'"). My wife was somewhat more tickled by "feck," as borrowed from the TV comedy Father Ted. With George Carlin's recent death, it seems like everyone has swearing on the brain... so I wasn't entirely surprised to see that CNN finally picked up on how Battlestar Galactica's "frak" has infiltrated the language as a "pseudo-swear."

What did surprise me was the list of other scripts "frak" now graces. There's certainly some argument that The Office and Scrubs are pretty geeky, but... Gossip Girl?

The replacing of "bad" words with similar-sounding substitutes is a perfectly normal and long-observed process. If you're feeling especially brave (and not especially prudish), the BBC has a mind-bogglingly exhaustive etymology of English swears that can tell you where your favorite oaths and epithets originated. Of course pejoration and other semantic changes aren't limited to swears--the "euphemism treadmill" operates on pejorative words of all degrees--but in particular, "pseudo-swears," over time, tend to become swears themselves. Words used to signify taboo words eventually become taboo.

We all know that there are certain words in our culture that will get your mouth washed out with soap, get you detention, or get you fined by the FCC, depending on your age and situation. And we all know (as many comedians have repeatedly observed) how we work our way around these words with "shoots" and "dangs" and "oh-my-hecks" as though our very utterance weren't immediately translated into an oath in the mind of every listener. I realized recently that when I am frustrated with my children, I can even turn an exasperated "Child!" into an utterance akin to swearing.

I realized this when my 3-year-old got angry the other day and exclaimed, "Child!"

An in-depth discussion of what "makes" a word taboo is just beyond my capacity right at the moment--I'm taking a break from grueling Law Review edits to write this. But the homogenization of culture brought about by broadcast media has created an interesting problem that I wanted to make note of. By fixing the "unspeakable seven," has the FCC slowed the euphemism treadmill down, or sped it up? And, on a related note, by cordoning off certain words as flatly unspeakable in polite society, have we introduced pseudo-swearing as a more insidious linguistic problem?

This is a huge parental challenge. If I tell my children that a word is "bad," they will not say it. Furthermore, they will correct me if I say it. The big ones in my house are "stupid" and "hate," and every time I say them one of my children pipes up: "hate is not a good word." My 5-year-old is beginning to grasp the nuances ("fat is not a bad word, but you don't call people fat") but this is tough work! There's comfort to be had in the idea that, regarding some words, I can confidently tell my children, "just never say that, alright?"

But what is the point of forbidding any words, at all? That's not rhetorically intended to suggest that we shouldn't, by the way. Rather, there are good reasons to craft language carefully; language is how we think. Vocabulary enables and enhances reflection and contemplation. Nuance in language equates to nuance of thought. I'm sloppily dispensing some potentially problematic and somewhat controversial philo-, pscyho-, neuro-logicial conclusions, here, but the point is that parents teaching children what to say (or what not to say) is easily justified, even if government teaching children what to say (or not) is more problematic.

Rather, I ask the question because the English language seems to be actively flowing around the FCC's prohibitions against vulgar speech. Will "frak" ever match it's profane counterpart in terms of social taboo? At that time, will the FCC need to revise its list? Or does "frak's" very permissibility undercut the pejoration process, rendering the word functionally inert? It has been observed that the Internet sees censorship as "network damage" and routes around it; might the same be true of language generally? Have we beheaded the hydra of profanity, trading seven gaping maws for forty-nine smaller, more irritating ones?

In the immortal words of DJ RMP, "Well flippin', fetchin', scruddle-dee-me, Jiminy Cricket, and fiddle-dee-dee!"