UKat said:
No, it's not.........but I'm 52 yrs. old and I can assure you that in the 60's folks didn't use foul language like they do now. Sure men would say Damn or Hell...and on occasional Shite, but you rarely heard them say F@#k.
In time when I can't speak from personal experience I always love to turn to the great bastion of unquestionable information that is wikipedia -
In 1928,
D. H. Lawrence's novel
Lady Chatterley's Lover gained notoriety for its frequent use of the words
f**k,
f**ked, and
f**king. Perhaps the earliest usage of the word in popular music was the 1938
Eddy Duchin release of the
Louis Armstrong song "Ol' Man Mose". The words created a scandal at the time, resulting in sales of 170,000 copies during the
Great Depression years when sales of 20,000 were considered blockbuster. The verse reads:
(We believe) He kicked the bucket,
(We believe) Yeah man, buck-buck-bucket,
(We believe) He kicked the bucket and ol' man mose is dead,
(We believe) Ahh, f**k it!
(We believe) Buck-buck-bucket,
(We believe) He kicked the bucket and ol' man mose is dead.
The liberal usage of the word (and other vulgarisms) by certain artists (such as
James Joyce,
Henry Miller,
Lenny Bruce,
Peter Cook and
Dudley Moore, in their
Derek and Clive personas) has led to the banning of their works and criminal charges of
obscenity. After
Norman Mailer's publishers convinced him to
bowdlerize f**k as
fug in his work
The Naked and the Dead (
1948),
Tallulah Bankhead supposedly greeted him with the
quip, "So you're the young man who can't spell
f**k." In fact, according to Mailer, the quip was devised by Bankhead's
PR man. He and Bankhead didn't meet until 1966 and did not discuss the word then. The rock group
The Fugs named themselves after the Mailer
euphemism.
The Catcher in the Rye by
J. D. Salinger featured an early use of
f**k you in print. First published in the United States in 1951, the novel remains controversial to this day due to its use of the word, standing at number 13 for the most banned books from 1990–2000 according to the American Library Association.
[9] The book offers a blunt portrayal of the main character's reaction to the existence of the word, and all that it means.
One of the earliest mainstream
Hollywood movies to use the word
f**k was director
Robert Altman's irreverent antiwar film,
MASH, released in 1970 at the height of the
Vietnam War. During the football game sequence about three-quarters of the way through the film, one of the MASH linemen says to an 8063rd offensive player, "All right, bud, your f**kin' head is coming right off." Also, former
Beatle John Lennon's 1971 release "
Working Class Hero" featured use of the word, which was rare in music at the time and caused it to, at most, be played only in segments on the radio.
In 1965,
U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson said to the Greek ambassador Alexandros Matsas when he objected to American plans in
Cyprus, "F**k your parliament and your constitution."
During the
1968 Democratic National Convention,
Chicago mayor
Richard Daley became so enraged by a speech from
Abraham A. Ribicoff that he shouted "F**k you!"
The films
Ulysses and
I'll Never Forget What's'isname (both
1967) are contenders for being the first film to use the word 'f**k,' although the word 'f**king' is clearly mouthed silently in the film
Sink the Bismarck! (
1960), and the title character says it in the cartoon
Bosko's Picture Show (1933).
In 1971, the
U.S. Supreme Court decided that the mere public display of
f**k is protected under the
First and
Fourteenth Amendments and cannot be made a criminal offense. In 1968, Paul Robert Cohen had been convicted of "disturbing the peace" for wearing a jacket with "F**K THE DRAFT" on it (in reference to conscription in the
Vietnam War). The conviction was upheld by the Court of Appeals and overturned by the Supreme Court.
Cohen v. California,
403 U.S. 15 (1971).
None of that says anything about how much people used it, but I can't believe that if movie-makers, musicians and authors were trying to slip it in, with censorship being as bad as it was back then, that Marines in WWII weren't swearing constantly.
Edited by RDM, 24 March 2010 - 09:20 PM.
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