“I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”
~ Michael Jordan
Michael Jeffrey Jordan, also known by his initials MJ, is an American businessman and retired professional basketball player who is a minority owner of the Charlotte Hornets of the National Basketball Association. Wikipedia
Once, in an extreme of despair, I posed to my therapist a version of the haunting thought experiment Mary’s Room: How, I asked her, can a person who has never been modeled healthy, secure, steadfast love even recognize it when it comes along — to what extent is this knowing teachable, learnable? If a person has never seen the color blue, never experienced blueness in their creaturely sensorium, there are certain things you can do to convey to them a knowledge of it — give them the electromagnetic wavelength of the color and examples of blue things and a conceptual portrait of what blue feels like — but all they will ever do is run around the world with this checklist of criteria in hand, asking: “Is this blue? How about this?”
She paused for a moment, then said: “Maybe they will never see blue the way you or I see it, but they can have an experience that is entirely new and entirely wonderful — and that will be their blue.”
In 1672, holding up his finger in the shadow between the light from his candle and the rising sun, the German polymath Otto von Guericke was astounded to see his flesh turn an “azure blue of the utmost beauty.” Shadow, produced by the absence of light and therefore the absence of color we call black, suddenly had a hue — an optical effect caused by the contrast between different light sources.
Strolling through the royal gardens a century later, Goethe stopped to admire a yellow flower in the bright midday sun. When he blinked and looked away for a moment, a blue flower appeared before his closed eyes — he was seeing the opposite of the real flower, even though he was looking at nothing. (This negative after-image, we now know, when an image is too bright and brief for the retinal ganglion cells that carry signals from the brain to adapt to the changing stimulus.) Here was color not just as a function of light, as Newton had decreed upon unweaving the rainbow with his optics, but a function of the perceiving brain — a collaborative creation of the mind and the world.
Blue is not what we see but what we co-create with ourselves and each other.
Georgia O’Keeffe. Light Coming on the Plains, I, II and III, 1917, synthetic watercolor on paper. (Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas.)
Chilean philosophers Humberto Maturana (September 14, 1928–May 6, 2021) and Francisco Varela (September 7, 1946–May 28, 2001) explore this with uncommon subtlety and rigor in their 1984 classic The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Understanding (public library) — a timeless investigation of “why the apparent firmness of our experiential world suddenly wavers when we look at it up close,” and a timeless invitation “to let go of [our] usual certainties and thus to come into a different biological insight of what it is to be human.”
They write:
The experience of color corresponds to a specific pattern of states of activity in the nervous system which its structure determines … All knowing depends on the structure of the knower [but] the biological roots of knowing cannot be understood only through examining the nervous system… It is necessary to understand how these processes are rooted in the living being as a whole.
Our cognitive understanding may explicate blue, but our embodied experience implicates us in it, binds us both to our biology and to each other:
All cognitive experience involves the knower in a personal way, rooted in their biological structure. There, their experience of certainty is an individual phenomenon blind to the cognitive acts of others, in a solitude which… is transcended only in a world created with those others.
With the central premise that “every act of knowing brings forth a world,” they write:
Our experience is moored to our structure in a binding way. We do not see the “space” of the world; we live our field of vision. We do not see the “colors” of the world; we live our chromatic space… We are experiencing a world. But when we examine more closely how we get to know this world, we invariably find that we cannot separate our history of actions — biological and social — from how this world appears to us. It is so obvious and close that it is very hard to see.
René Magritte. The False Mirror. 1929. (Museum of Modern Art.)
Love, of course, is the deepest way we have of knowing one another. More than a psychological construct, more than a moral imperative, it is part of our creaturely inheritance. Defying the hollow dogma that questions of love are antiscientific, Maturana and Varela write:
To dismiss love as the biological basis of social life, as also the ethical implications of love, would be to turn our back on a history of living beings that is more than 3.5 billion years old… Love is a biological dynamic with deep roots. It is an emotion that defines in the organism a dynamic structural pattern, a stepping stone to interactions that may lead to the operational coherence of social life.
Biology also shows us that we can expand our cognitive domain. This arises through a novel experience brought forth through reasoning, through the encounter with a stranger, or, more directly, through the expression of a biological interpersonal congruence that lets us see the other person and open up for him room for existence behind us. This act is called love, or, if we prefer a milder expression, the acceptance of the other person beside us in our daily living. This is the biological foundation of social phenomena: without love, without acceptance of others living beside us, there is no social process and, therefore, no humanness. Anything that undermines this acceptance of others, from competency to the possession of truth and on to ideologic certainty, undermines the social process because it undermines the biological process that generates it… Biologically, without love, without acceptance of others, there is no social phenomenon. If we still live together that way, we are living indifference and negation under a pretense of love.
This essay is adapted from Traversal. Your email program may cut it short. Read it uncut at this link.
Sitting in the packed playhouse of the Bowery Theater on Manhattan’s Lower East Side one balmy evening in the summer of 1833 is a teenage boy who can barely afford the theater — he can barely afford his bread — but there he is, rosy-cheeked — an almost baby-like rosiness that would remain with him into old age — exhilarated by the spectacle on the stage, by having made the ferry crossing from Brooklyn in the warm salty breeze, by the triumph of having bought a ticket with his own money. He has just turned fourteen. Three years earlier, he left school to begin earning his living — partly to allay his family’s perpetual financial struggle, partly to allay the numbing of his soul. “Re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul,” he will later write. At eleven, he entered the labor force as an office boy for two lawyers, one of whom took the boy’s intellectual development under his wing and introduced him to the splendors of literature with a gift of a circulating library subscription. Within a year, he was apprenticing with the Quaker editor of a Democratic newspaper.
His parents — a twenty-one-year-old woman descended from a lineage of Dutch Quakers and a twenty-seven-year-old man whose ancestors arrived from England in 1640 on a ship named True Love — married the summer of the Year Without a Summer. The rosy-cheeked boy was the second of their eight children. Conceived the year Frankenstein was born, born months after the landmark legislation that proposed the abolition of slavery in Missouri and sparked the tensions that would eventually erupt into the Civil War, this Brooklyn boy would soon be shaking his young country awake from the slumber of complacency — not with preachings, not with politics, but with poems: poems that would effect more spiritual elevation, kindle more moral courage, seed more ideas of the basic humanity we call social justice, and thumb them deeper into the soil of culture than all the preachings and politics of his era combined.
“I would compose a wonderful and ponderous book,” he would resolve, not yet out of adolescence, his gray-blue eyes already drooping with a weary wisdom. “Yes: I would write a book!” And so he would — his life would become this book, then the book would become his life. He would revise it obsessively until his dying hour, expanding and republishing this swelling book, hoping it would beckon to “others who look back on me, because I looked forward to them.”
The newspaper he himself had founded as a teenager would scoff and call it “a repulsive and nasty book.” On its pages, he would declare himself “the poet of the body and the poet of the soul,” inviting again and again the difficult, daring understanding that the two are one and the same, that we are ensouled as much as we are enskulled; on its pages, he would emerge as a composite creature — a creature capable of sinking to unfathomed darknesses and soaring to transcendent heights; a celebrator and elevator of the patriotic spirit, but an artist who would always place nature over nation; a poet of immense talent and immense ego, but never grudging, never ungenerous, never small. The most erudite man in America would describe him as “a compound of New England transcendentalist and New York rowdy,” melding the traits of an Emerson or a Thoreau with those of a fireman. “Do I contradict myself?” the poet himself would write on those lush pages. “Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)” He would come to think of himself as a “chanter of pains and of joys, uniter of here and hereafter.” He would see his job, the poet’s job, as a joiner — of body and soul, of past and future, of the cosmic and the earthly, of races and genders and classes, of the disjointed parts in the body politic of the world—joining the myriad multitudes comprising personhood into an integrated, symphonic being. Against the starched proprieties of his time and place, he would kiss everyone he considered a friend — man or woman — in greeting and goodbye. He would make it his task to “show that whatever happens to anybody it may be turn’d to beautiful results.” His book would live up to his own description as “the song of a great composite democratic individual, male or female,” foundation for “an aggregated, inseparable, unprecedented, vast, composite, electric democratic nationality.” He would tease out of his poems a single running thread: “that time and events are compact, and that all the things of the universe are perfect miracles, each as profound as any.” He would resolve:
I will not make poems with reference to parts, But I will make poems, songs, thoughts, with reference to ensemble, And I will not sing with reference to a day, but with reference to all days.
In the most eternal of these poems, written under the title “Sun-Down Poem” and later retitled to “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” he would peer across the epochs straight into your eye and straight into mine:
It avails not, time nor place — distance avails not, I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever so many generations hence, Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt, Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a crowd. […] What is it then between us? What is the count of the scores or hundreds of years between us?
On Independence Day 1855, a strange book appeared in a handful of Brooklyn bookstores — a thin, capacious volume bound in green cloth, with delicate golden roots, branches, and leaves sprouting from the letters of the gilded title: Leaves of Grass>. After the silence of the first blank page, a whispered shock: a portrait of the author, engraved from a photograph, thoroughly unlike the expected likeness of a poet. He is not a New England poet-as-scholar, a buttoned and collared Emerson gazing with intense intellect at you, demanding a commensurate gaze back. He is not a Romantic poet-as-spirit, a windswept, full-lipped Byron gazing into space with the distraction of inspiration, beckoning your gaze to that invisible place. In this new nobody is the poet-as-everybody. Bearded beneath his wide-brimmed hat, with his rough-hewn linen shirt parted at his chest, with one hand casually rested on his tilted hip and the other tucked into his pocket, he seems to have just risen from hulling corn, looking at you the way one looks at a mirror when one has finished dressing for a date.
There is no name on the book. Only, midway through the sixty-five-page opening miracle he would later title “Song of Myself,” this self-introduction:
Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos, Disorderly fleshy and sensual… eating drinking and breeding, No sentimentalist… no stander above men and women or apart from them
The frontispiece of the first edition of Leaves of Grass.
Immanuel Kant had proclaimed in his Critique of Judgment that there shall never be a Newton for a blade of grass. On the strange and wondrous pages of this book—one of the farthest-seeing and deepest-reaching works of literature ever composed — Walt Whitman emerges not as the Napoleon of poetry — a grandiosity of Byron had aspired to, commissioning for himself a replica of Napoleon’s carriage — but as the Newton for a blade of grass; not as a plundering conqueror and colonizer, recompensed with riches and living glory, but as a semaphore of elemental truth, born to be posthumous and glad for it, glad and ready to take his position as a grain of sand in the geologic layer of a present upon which the unwitnessed future would be built, glad to look at ordinary grass and see “the beautiful uncut hair of graves,” to see himself in a grassy grave feeding other lives, to see the “the similitudes of the past and those of the future,” the continuities and consanguinities of life across the varied scales of existence and experience.
“A leaf of grass is no less than the journey work of the stars,” he writes. This overarching belief in the unity of everything, the interconnectedness and interbelonging of everything, colors his entire cosmogony. It would also render him wildly controversial, for he channeled this belief by writing about science and sex and the equality of the sexes and the races and the classes — ideas thoroughly countercultural in his day, in the most literal sense, for they are drawn not from culture but from nature. Verse after verse, detail after detail patiently recorded in his notebook, absorbed and distilled into some essential truth, he writes of the natural way of things, before society and civilization have disfigured them into biases and borders, into the hubrises and hierarchies of which the rickety scaffolding we call society is built.
At the same time, he recognizes that these hubrises and biases spring from the selfsame source as our noblest and most generous impulses, and in this recognition, he gives room for our own multitudes to unfold in his vast heart — the beautiful and the terrible equally welcome as particles of our humanity, for he knows that they are particles of his. “Every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you,” he writes in an era when atoms were still an exotic notion to the common citizen, an incomprehensible abstraction. Only by being porous to the whole of the universe, to every expression of existence, can he harmonize those particles — the cosmic and the earthly, the temporal and the timeless, the scientific and the spiritual, the human and the nonhuman — particles charged, always, by the reality of the present.
Because of his time and place and particular predilections, perhaps more so than any other poet’s in the history of our civilization, Whitman’s poetic development took place in the fragile, fertile ground between the personal and the political. Another titanic poet, Audre Lorde, would capture this fertility a century later: “The shortest statement of philosophy I have is my living, or the word I.” Walt Whitman was the great absorptive and adhesive I of his era. “The book arose out of my life in Brooklyn and New York from 1838 to 1853,” he would later recall of Leaves of Grass, “absorbing a million people, for fifteen years, with an intimacy, an eagerness, an abandon, probably never equalled.”
In the 1840s, the New York Democratic Party had begun fissuring along the line of slavery, eventually splitting into two continents — one against slavery, known as the Barnburners, and one for it, known as the Hunkers. The owner of The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, where Whitman was hired as editor in 1846, was among the Hunkers. Whitman was not. That year the American invasion of Mexico and the resultant war aggravated the rift, leading the Barnburners to split off and form the Free Soil Party, predicated on preventing Western territories from becoming slave states. Until then, Whitman’s editorials had been primarily about concerts; without music, he would later reflect, he could not have written Leaves of Grass. But when a proviso was proposed to ban slavery from the newly conquered Mexican territory despite its adjacency to the South, Whitman put his impassioned pen behind it, urging those in support of it to turn up and vote for its proponent-candidate in the November election. “One vote may turn the election,” he exhorted on the typeset pages of the paper as his longhand unspooled on the pages of his private notebook trial lines for what would become “Song of Myself”:
I am the poet of slaves and of the masters of slaves… I am the poet of the body And I am the poet of the soul I go with the slaves of the earth equally with the masters And I will stand between the masters and the slaves, Entering into both so that both shall understand me alike.
And so it is that Whitman’s most famous lines came abloom in the seedbed of his antiracist outrage, trellised by the yearning — so solipsistic, so human — for his own personhood to be understood.
By January, Whitman was fired from the Eagle
The following month, never having left New York, the twenty-eight- year-old unpublished poet left New York for New Orleans in search of freer journalism. Having met a Southern newspaper owner, who hired him on the spot to help establish an upstart paper, he traversed 2,400 miles via a Rube Goldberg machine of stage, train, and boat, accompanied by his fifteen-year-old brother Jeff. He left partly to pursue his journalistic career, yes — as Whitman himself later recounted, at the peak of the Mexican War, New Orleans was the “channel and entrepot for everything, going and returning,” the city with “the best news and war correspondents” and “the most to say.” But he left mostly, I suspect, to affirm with his own eyes the rightness of the outrage that had gotten him fired — the incomprehensible wrongness of slavery, which remained an abstraction, a party line, a moral and moralistic bargaining chip in the Northern bubble. He went from a city in which Black people comprised a mere 3 percent of the population to one in which they accounted for tenfold that — a proportion that had been even higher until the recent influx of immigrants; a city in which he witnessed the trade of goods and of ensouled bodies as goods. He saw persons treated as creatures or as commodities on the basis of their bodies, women sold into sexual slavery and priced out by the proportion of Blackness in their complexion. He pulled down a slave auction advertisement from a wall in the French Quarter, which he would keep for the next four decades — as a “warning,” he said — transmuting it into one of his steeliest, most indicting poems.
It was in New Orleans that his entire life-plan crumbled, and out of the rubble arose the realization that poetry was far more powerful an instrument for the propagation of ideas and ideals than journalism.
But something else happened in New Orleans, too — something profound and private that struck to the marrow of his own being.
New Orleans was not just a different city — it was a different world. In England, which remained the cultural and legislative model for the rest of America, the press frequently carried news of death sentences and executions for same-sex relations — barbarisms Whitman surely encountered as he sifted through the foreign papers at his newsroom desk. New Orleans, founded by French colonists a century before Whitman’s birth and eventually sold to the infant United States, was still legislated by a version of the Napoleonic Code, which had decriminalized sexual relations between consenting men. With its large rotating population of sailors and its permissive social mores, New Orleans was as close to an out gay life as nineteenth-century America could get.
Whatever happened to Whitman there, it was as much an experience of the body as it was of the soul, deep and beautiful and unsettling. He would allude to it only once, forty years later, obfuscating the details under a generality, deforming the reality of his heartbreak by inventing an ornate fiction about a romance with some mysterious Creole woman of higher social rank than his, invoked in his New Orleans poem “Once I Pass’d Through a Populous City”:
Once I pass’d through a populous city imprinting my brain for future use with its shows, architecture, customs, traditions, Yet now of all that city I remember only a woman I casually met there who detain’d me for love of me, Day by day and night by night we were together — all else has long been forgotten by me, I remember I say only that woman who passionately clung to me, Again we wander, we love, we separate again, Again she holds me by the hand, I must not go, I see her close beside me with silent lips sad and tremulous.
In the original draft of the poem, inscribed into Whitman’s private notebook, “the man I casually met” appears in place of the printed “a woman I casually met.” A poem that first appeared in 1860 hints at what quaked and quickened his heart that spring:
Sometimes with one I love, I fill myself with rage, for fear I effuse unreturn’d love; But now I think there is no unreturn’d love — the pay is certain, one way or another; Doubtless I could not have perceived the universe, or written one of my poems, if I had not freely given myself to comrades, to love.
Two decades after his time in New Orleans, Whitman would alter the ending to render it what might just be the central animating fact of all of Leaves of Grass and most of the art humanity has ever made:
Sometimes with one I love, I fill myself with rage, for fear I effuse unreturn’d love; But now I think there is no unreturn’d love — the pay is certain, one way or another; (I loved a certain person ardently, and my love was not return’d; Yet out of that, I have written these songs.)
After all the years, all the love, all the life poured into it, Leaves of Grass entered a world of indifference spiked here and there with derision and hostility. The tastemakers of literature hardly noticed the book at all. Even the handful of positive reviews punctuated their praise with caveats and cautions. Any artist — any person who has placed a piece of themselves in the lap of the world in the hope of enlarging its store of beauty and aliveness — knows intimately that awful physics of psychology by which the mind glides over the positive and latches onto the negative, however negligible, proving again and again that reading reviews at all is a peculiar form of willful self-assault with no victors.
One of America’s most prominent critics — Charles Eliot Norton, who would go on to endow Harvard’s esteemed series of lectures on “poetry in the broadest sense” — commended Leaves of Grass for entwining intellectual tradition and street culture with a thoroughly original style in which the two “fuse and combine with the most perfect harmony.” But he hastened to disclaim that Whitman’s free use of slang often “renders an otherwise striking passage altogether laughable.” Of the negative reviews, some were unabashedly vicious, saturated with that saccharine pleasure that small spirits and lesser talents take in denouncing what they don’t understand, can’t crush into conventional categories, or simply resent for the bold reach of a vision far exceeding anything they themselves could have conceived. A critic whose name rings hollow to anyone alive today and who left little in the world besides the hubris of his outrages, indicted the book — this life’s work, this personal record of becoming — as “a mess of stupid filth” and hurled the first major public grenade of homophobia at the poet for “that horrible sin not to be mentioned among Christians.” Another saw the book as an occasion for the author’s suicide. From Boston — America’s intellectual capital — came the diagnosis that Whitman “must be some escaped lunatic, raving in pitiable delirium,” for “there is neither wit nor method in his disjointed babbling.” Even the otherwise broad-minded Thomas Wentworth Higginson — the only editor Emily Dickinson ever had, a man who recognized the singular poetics of Negro spirituals and transcribed them for the world, a man who loved men — quipped that “it is no discredit to Walt Whitman that he wrote Leaves of Grass, only that he did not burn it afterwards.” Across the Atlantic, a royal we managed to insult both the poet and his young nation in one fell scoff: “We had ceased, we imagined, to be surprised at anything that America could produce,” the anonymous reviewer wrote, until Leaves of Grass arrived to show that this laughable country published poets “as unacquainted with art as a hog is with mathematics.”
These spare shrieks interrupted the cruelest verdict — that awful silence.
In his notebook, under the heading “Depressions,” Whitman scribbled:
Every thing I have done seems to me blank and suspicious. — I doubt whether my greatest thoughts, as I supposed them, are not shallow — and people will most likely laugh at me. — My pride is impotent, my love gets no response. — the complacency of nature is hateful—I am filled with restlessness. — I am incomplete.
All great works suffer from and are saved by a gladsome blindness to what they ultimately demand of their creators.
Within a year, Whitman would transmute this private passage of despair into a vessel of empathy in a new poem — one of twenty new poems in a second edition of Leaves of Grass he stubbornly published, determined to change the book’s course in the world; one of humanity’s masterworks of perspective and unselfing: “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.”
It is not upon you alone the dark patches fall, The dark threw its patches down upon me also, The best I had done seem’d to me blank and suspicious, My great thoughts as I supposed them, were they not in reality meagre?
Whitman might never have shifted his suffering into the past tense, into a poem, into renewed resolve to continue growing his leaves in an inhospitable world, were it not for a single kindness that changed everything — a kindness soon to be emblazoned in gilded letters on the spine of the second edition of Leaves of Grass to carry it into the canon of literature and to carry its author into his legacy as America’s first great poet.
Seventeen days after the first edition unspooled into the hostile void, Whitman was staggered to receive a letter from Ralph Waldo Emerson — America’s reigning philosopher-king of intellectual life and literary sensibility — to whom he had mailed a copy, hoping for everything and expecting nothing. Emerson’s long 1844 essay The Poet — a manifesto for poetry as an instrument of culture-building, which can “penetrate into that region where the air is music” to compose “the songs of nations,” exhorting American poets to find an original voice in which to sing their young nation’s singular truths “yet unsung” — had emboldened Whitman to sing the body electric, the body of his being and the body of his country. “I was simmering, simmering, simmering,” he later recalled. “Emerson brought me to a boil.”
In The Poet, Emerson had urged American poets to persist in the break with tradition, in the search for an authentic voice, and to be unafraid to “stand there, balked and dumb, stuttering and stammering, hissed and hooted” as that voice is denounced by the bastions of convention. Now, awestruck by the bold defiance of convention emanating from Leaves of Grass, the Sage of Concord wielded his words to nurture the daring young poet. Having introduced America to Eastern philosophy in his pioneering Transcendentalist journal The Dial, which Margaret Fuller had edited before leaving their frustrated love behind for New York to become the first female editor of a major newspaper at the Herald, Emerson found Leaves of Grass to be “the Bhagavad Gita and the New York Herald combined.” He knew the life of the mind and the half-life of ideas well enough to recognize that the debut of so unexampled a work must have had a long invisible incubation. “I greet you at the beginning of a great career,” he wrote to the young man in Brooklyn, “which yet must have had a long foreground somewhere, for such a start.”
I am not blind to the worth of the wonderful gift of Leaves of Grass. I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed. I am very happy in reading it, as great power makes us happy. It meets the demand I am always making of what seemed the sterile & stingy Nature, as if too much handiwork, or too much lymph in the temperament, were making our Western wits fat and mean. I give you joy of your free and brave thought. I have great joy in it. I find incomparable things said incomparably well, as they must be… I rubbed my eyes a little, to see if this sunbeam were no illusion; but the solid sense of the book is a sober certainty. It has the best merits, namely, of fortifying & encouraging.
So profound was Emerson’s gratitude for the existence of this improbable fruition of his vision that he ended the letter by offering to travel to meet Whitman—his “benefactor,” he called him.
And so he did, making the arduous traversal from Concord to Brooklyn across snow and ice in the vicious winter of 1855 — one of the coldest winters since Tambora. Two weeks before Christmas, with the Erie Canal frozen and the roof of the Brooklyn sugar refinery blown off two hundred feet and the steeple of St. Mary’s Church blasted to pieces by the storm that had raged the night before, Emerson boarded a coach, then a train, then a ferry to Whitman’s home on Classon Avenue—a house I passed daily on my bicycle my first five years in Brooklyn.
There is no record of what was said between these two men with such overlapping ideals and such wildly divergent life paths. I picture Emerson, with his starched dignity and his combed reserve, sizing up the brushy-haired poet in the half-unbuttoned shirt—part Shelley, part sailor, entirely himself.
When Whitman’s father died seven days after Leaves of Grass was published — his father, a large-nosed, full-lipped, hollow-cheeked man of democratic sympathies and brutal moods who had known Thomas Paine in his youth and had failed at just about everything he’d ever undertaken except the drink, and whom Walt loved — there was still Emerson’s letter.
For Whitman, Emerson’s attention and encouragement were nothing less than a lifeline. For months, he carried the letter in his breast pocket, folded and unfolded it, read it to his mother, read it to his lover, read it to himself in the bleak small hours, the hours James Baldwin saw as the time when the unconscious self tries to “force a reconciliation between oneself and all one’s pain and error,” Baldwin who would emblazon his semi-autobiographical novel Giovanni’s Room, published exactly one hundred years after Leaves of Grass, with an epigraph from Whitman: “I am the man, I suffered, I was there.”
Nine months after Emerson’s visit to Brooklyn prompted by the first edition of Leaves of Grass, Whitman published a second, with Emerson’s private praise gilded on the spine as public endorsement, haphazardly capitalized like a subtitle:
I Greet You at the Beginning of A Great Career R.W. Emerson
Piqued, no longer sure what to make of the young poet who had so impressed him with his unbuttoned sincerity but who had so savvily appropriated his words of encouragement, Emerson dispatched one of his closest and most discerning friends to Brooklyn, to see for himself. And so, in the autumn of 1856, Whitman received another New England luminary in his Classon Avenue home: the utopian Transcendentalist and devout vegetarian Bronson Alcott, whose teenage daughter Louisa May was absorbing the ideas and experiences that would one day become Little Women.
The record Alcott left in his journal that October afternoon remains the most vivid direct portrait of Whitman — a portrait that is itself a poetic image of immense graphic power, crosshatched with admiration for the poet’s genius and warm amusement at his self-regard, sensitive and sentient of both the costumed performance of personhood and the naked soul beneath the performance:
To Brooklyn, to see Walt Whitman. I pass a couple of hours, and find him to be an extraordinary person, full of brute power, certainly of genius and audacity, and likely to make his mark on Young America — he affirming himself to be its representative man and poet…
A nondescript, he is not so easily described, nor seen to be described. Broad-shouldered, rouge-fleshed, Bacchus-browed, bearded like a satyr, and rank, he wears his man-Bloomer in defiance of everybody, having these as everything else after his own fashion, and for example to all men hereafter. Red flannel undershirt, open-breasted, exposing his brawny neck; striped calico jacket over this, the collar Byroneal, with coarse cloth overalls buttoned to it; cowhide boots; a heavy round-about, with huge outside pockets and buttons to match; and a slouched hat, for house and street alike. Eyes gray, unimaginative, cautious yet sagacious; his voice deep, sharp, tender sometimes and almost melting. When talking will recline upon the couch at length, pillowing his head upon his bended arm, and informing you naively how lazy he is, and slow. Listens well; asks you to repeat what he has failed to catch at once, yet hesitates in speaking often, or gives over as if fearing to come short of the sharp, full, concrete meaning of his thought. Inquisitive, very; over-curious even; inviting criticism on himself, on his poems — pronouncing it “pomes.” — In fine, an egotist, incapable of omitting, or suffering any one long to omit, noting Walt Whitman in discourse. Swaggy in his walk, burying both his hands in outside pockets. Has never been sick, he says, not taken medicine, nor sinned; and so is quite innocent of repentance and man’s fall. A bachelor, he professes great respect for women.
Much is striking about Alcott’s portrait, but two things especially: It radiates the author’s bewilderment at how such daring, arresting, supra- ordinary poems could have sprung from so sub-ordinary a maker, and it captures his warmhearted suspicion that Whitman was deliberately styling himself that way, art-directing his own image for this emissary of New England’s intellectual aesthetes, the portal to America’s literary consciousness. The irreconcilable tension ensnared Alcott. Wary of the hazards of first impressions and hasty assessments — especially on so grand a proposition as America’s first original poet — Alcott added with a scientist’s insistence on testing hypotheses with repeat observation: “I must meet him again, and more than once, to mete his merits and place in this Pantheon of the West.” This confusion, this inability to pin Whitman down—it was an echo of an intuition that Alcott could not name. Some haunting sense that beneath the poet’s posture of simplicity, beneath his monotone bravado, there was a real guardedness. Some roiling complexity, some trembling insecurity he did not want revealed. Perhaps even to himself.
Because Whitman saw his poetry as a proxy for his totality of being and a record of the ongoingness of his own development, he saw Leaves of Grass not as an isolated art object but as a living ethos, a creation in every aspect of which he wanted to be involved, immersed. Morning after morning, week after week, month after month, he had made his way to the print shop to oversee the production, typesetting some of the pages himself — a redemptive echo of his days as an apprentice printer, setting other writers’ work into the world; of his days as a bookshop proprietor, transacting other writers’ work into readers’ hands. I picture him in 1855, the age I am as I write this, crossing what is now Cadman Plaza, the promenade I too crossed daily for years when I first moved to New York, with the manuscript under his arm. He wanted that, of course. He wanted us — “men and women of a generation, or ever so many generations hence” — to project ourselves onto him as he projected himself onto us. “I considered long and seriously of you before you were born.” He may have opened with “Song of Myself,” but you is the most common word in Leaves of Grass.
Whoever you are, now I place my hand upon you, that you be my poem… I will leave all and come and make the hymns of you, None has understood you, but I understand you, None has done justice to you, you have not done justice to yourself None but has found you imperfect, I only find no imperfection in you, None but would subordinate you, I only am he who will never consent to subordinate you, I only am he who places over you no master, owner, better, God, beyond what waits intrinsically in yourself.
Over the last half-century, a surprising number of new democracies have put their former dictators, or the children of those dictators, back in power. In Why We Elect Former Dictators and Their Children,” James Loxton explains the electoral success of these “dictocrats” and “dictobrats,” and what we can do about authoritarian nostalgia
President Abraham Lincoln was once embroiled in a dispute with a colleague. Unable to get his opponent to see the error in his thinking Lincoln said, “Tell me, how many legs does a cow have?” “What?” responded the man, “why four of course.” “Now suppose,” continued the president, “that you call the cow’s tail a leg. Then how many legs does a cow have?” “Five,” replied the man. “That’s where you are wrong,” replied Lincoln. “Calling a cow’s tail a leg does not make it a leg.”
Author Unknown
AN OPPORTUNITY FOR DAILY REFLECTION BROUGHT TO YOU BY THE SCHOOL OF PRACTICAL PHILOSOPHY
On February 9, 1927, Mae West was arrested after a performance of her play Sex, which she had written and in which she starred. In fact, the New York Police Department’s Municipal Vice Squad arrested the whole cast, and carried them off in black vans.
“I was the first one ever to say ‘sex’ on stage,” Mae West told Anjelica Huston and Peter Lester in 1974. The play in question, which West wrote, was “a dramatic play with a jazz band in it,” originally called Follow the Fleet, she told them, but when she brought it to the director, Edward Elsner, he couldn’t stop saying how sexy it was. “I was hearing the word sex so much I was beginning to like it,” she said. “‘Gee,’ I thought, ‘this might be good for the title, Sex.’ So I tell my manager I want to change the title to Sex. He says, if only we dare… so we do! Then there was a lot of trouble.”
At first, it was only publicity trouble. “When it opened, the newspapers wouldn’t use the word,” West said. “They said, ‘Mae West in that certain play.’ Finally we had to hire those sticker guys, you know. You’d leave your car for ten minutes and there’d be Sex all over it.”
But eventually, when the play had been running for almost a year, the complaints piled up and the morality hammer came down.
On April 19, 1927, West and two producers were fined and sentenced to ten days in jail, while the nineteen other cast members were given suspended sentences. The official crime? Giving a performance that “tended to corrupt the morals of youth and others.”
“The jury was instructed by the Court to render a verdict based upon their conception of the moral standards of today as they exist in this city, of which they were representative citizens,” the trial Judge commented. “Their verdict, based on this standard, ought to silence forever those who are continuously maligning the fair name of New York.”
He also described New York City as “the most moral city in the universe.” As for West, he argued that “she seemed to go to extremes in order to make the play as obscene and immoral as possible.”
West was sentenced to ten days in jail, but was released after eight, no doubt for charming behavior. Of course, the publicity from the whole affair only made her more famous. “She knew that in showbiz, crime paid,” writes Frank Rich. “Festooned with white roses, she rode a limo to incarceration on Welfare Island and boasted of wearing silk underwear throughout her eight-day stay there. When Liberty magazine paid her $1,000 for an exit interview, she used it to start a Mae West Memorial Library for female prisoners.”
The writing was on the wall. Soon she’d be a superstar.
In all of English there are few words rich enough in their history and variety of use to warrant a dedicated dictionary that runs to hundreds of pages and multiple editions. That fuck is at the same time one of the most notorious, popular, and emotive words in the language makes it all the more fascinating—and deserving of the attention given to it in this volume.
There’s a good chance you have some story about your relationship to the word fuck. You asked a teacher what it meant; you used it inappropriately in a professional situation; you were thrilled to learn a story about its origin (probably false—see “Where It’s Not From,” below); you were disciplined by a parent or guardian for saying it; you discovered that a romantic partner liked—or really did not like—hearing it, or used it in a way that had a strong effect on you.
How has this word, which has been around for many hundreds of years, maintained both its intense interest and its uncommon power?
There is no simple answer to this question; too many factors come into play. Sex is certainly one factor. The vast majority of uses of fuck in modern English are nonsexual, but it has retained its sexual meanings and connotations across many centuries, and sex is something that’s always hovering around our consciousness. The word has amassed a great many other uses, though, and so the reasons for its singular force and appeal are likewise diverse and complex.
Fuck has an enormous range of uses across many parts of speech, as this dictionary details: sexual and nonsexual, positive and negative, literal and figurative, funny and violent. For any situation, there’s probably some sense, some expression or catchphrase, some proverb, some intonation that can be brought to the table.
That fuck is at the same time one of the most notorious, popular, and emotive words in the language makes it all the more fascinating—and deserving of the attention given to it in this volume.
And it just feels good to say. It feels good in the mouth, giving shape to catharsis; it can also feel good in the brain, satisfying a strong emotional need or a desire for personal expression. It can help us bond with peers, gain or direct attention, persuade listeners, and establish or test intimacy.
Psycholinguistic research shows that using certain kinds of swear words can even improve the body’s physical strength and resistance to pain. (But the more you swear in daily life, the smaller the analgesic effect.)
Words such as fuck are often criticized for being “bad,” or we are told that we should avoid them. But what is appropriate depends on context—and sometimes we want to be inappropriate. This word is an important part of our culture, our vocabulary, and our heritage, and that is always something worth knowing more about.
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Etymology: Where It’s From
The word fuck is of Germanic origin. It is related to words in several other Germanic languages, such as Dutch, German, Norwegian, and Swedish, that have sexual meanings as well as meanings like “to strike” or “to move back and forth.” The English word is the earliest recorded member of this family, but this does not imply that the other languages borrowed the form from English; rather, the words are all cognate.
Ultimately these words are members of a group of loosely related verbs having the structural form f plus a short vowel plus a stop (a consonant such as k, d, g, or t, in which the flow of air from the mouth is briefly interrupted), often with an l or r somewhere in between. These words have the basic meaning “to move back and forth,” and often the figurative sense “to cheat.” English examples of this family—all arriving later than fuck—are fiddle, fidget, flit, flip, flicker, and frig.
Fuck has no connection to some superficially similar words in other languages—Latin futuere, and its French derivative foutre. Though the Latin word is vulgar and means “to copulate,” it is almost certainly not related to fuck. Theories attempting to tie fuck to words in other languages, sometimes via a proposed Indo-European root meaning “to strike,” are possible, but for now remain uncertain.
Nor is fuck an “Anglo- Saxon” word—that term refers to the earliest period of English (now called Old English by scholars), before around 1100 A.D., and fuck is simply not found this early.
There are various claims that certain words in Middle English represent early examples of fuck, but these are usually unlikely. For example, Carl Darling Buck, in his 1949 Dictionary of Selected Synonyms in the Principal Indo-European Languages, cited a 1278 example of the name “John le Fucker.”
But he did not cite the source of this name, and no one has found a reference to it. More important, even if the source is authentic, there are many other possibilities for the name (the word fulcher “soldier,” or a misreading of the name Tucker, are the most likely).
However, if the bird name windfucker noun (or fuckwind noun) is ultimately related to fuck, it is interesting to note the name Ric Wyndfuk and Ric Wyndfuck de Wodehous, found from 1287 in documents related to Sherwood Forest, which may show another form of the bird name. Use of the word in the sense “to strike” could perhaps also be reflected by the surname Fuckebegger (also 1287); compare the Anglo-Norman surname Butevilein (literally “strike the churl or wretch”), found in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
Two recent discoveries have changed our understanding of the word’s earliest history in English. The historian Paul Booth found court records from Cheshire in 1310 and 1311 concerning a man named Roger Fuckebythenavele, who was charged with a serious (though unspecified) criminal offense.
As authorities tried to apprehend him, his name entered the records several times over the course of many months, showing that this was a real name rather than a one-off joke. The most plausible interpretation would seem to be sexual, with Roger either believing that copulation should be done through or next to a partner’s navel, or having attempted such an act.
And in 1373, a charter from Bristol gives us an unusual placename: a field called Fockynggroue, i.e. “Fucking Grove.” While there are other interpretations, “a grove where one copulates” is the most likely, and is supported by various parallels.
Early evidence for our word is relatively slight, and may have more than one explanation. One possibility is simply that the word isn’t much older, that it was a new development in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The usual Middle English word for sexual intercourse was swive—itself considered vulgar—and fuck could have arisen to take its place as that word became more rare.
The most likely possibility for fuck, however, is that the word carried a taboo so strong that it was rarely written down in the Middle Ages. The fact that its earliest known non-proper-name appearance in English, around 1475, is obscured by a cipher lends support to this interpretation.
Since many of the earliest examples of the F-word come from Scottish sources, some scholars have suggested that it is a Norse borrowing, Norse having had a much greater influence on northern and Scottish varieties of English than on southern dialects.
But the fourteenth-century examples, the 1475 ciphered use, and the 1528 example of “O d [probably damned] fuckin Abbot” (at fucking, adj., sense 1) are all from England, proving that fuck was not restricted to Scotland in its earliest days. The profusion of early examples in Scotland is probably because the taboo against the word was less strong there.
(The 1528 quotation, found in a marginal note to a manuscript—that common source of bawdy jokes—has been referred to repeatedly in popular articles as the first use of fuck, despite the many earlier examples.)
Taboos against particular words or types of speech are not new. There is ample evidence from the earliest times in England that certain forms of speech were restricted. As far back as the seventh century, there are records of a law from Kent reading “If anyone in another’s house…shamefully accosts him with insulting words, he is to pay a shilling to him who owns the house.”
*
Where It’s Not From
The word fuck definitely did not originate as an acronym, as many people think. Acronyms are extremely rare before the 1930s, and etymologies of this sort—especially for older words—are almost always false. (Posh does not come from “Port Outward, Starboard Home,” cop is not from “Constable On Patrol,” and tip is not from “To Insure Promptness.”)
To this editor’s knowledge, the earliest suggestion of an acronymic etymology for fuck appears to be in the New York underground newspaper The East Village Other, on February 15, 1967:
It’s not commonly known that the word “fuck” originated as a medical diagnostic notation on the documents of soldiers in the British Imperial Army. When a soldier reported sick and was found to have V.D., the abbreviation F.U.C.K. was stamped on his documents. It was short for “Found Under Carnal Knowledge.”
The more usual variant along these lines is “For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge,” abbreviated to fuck and allegedly worn on a badge by convicted adulterers, rapists, or prostitutes in some mythical Olden Tymes; other variants include “Found in Unlawful Carnal Knowledge” (specifically for adulterers) and “Forced Unsolicited Carnal Knowledge” (for rapists).
The word fuck definitely did not originate as an acronym, as many people think.
(The publication of a play in 1965 titled “For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge” led to a controversy when the University of California, Berkeley, tried to ban its sale; but the play seems not to have suggested that the phrase was the true origin of fuck.)
The other common acronym is “Fornication Under Consent of the King,” said to have been some form of royal license, often specifically to repopulate the country after a plague. This variant is first found in the May 1970 issue of Playboy:
My friend claims that the word fuck originated in the fifteenth Century, when a married couple needed permission from the king to procreate. Hence, Fornication Under Consent of the King. I maintain that it’s an acronym of a law term used in the 1500s that referred to rape as Forced Unnatural Carnal Knowledge.
When acronymic origins are suggested, the original phrase usually sounds artificial, not like some real phrase that would be common enough to be abbreviated. “For unlawful carnal knowledge,” however, has the ring of a stilted legal expression.
In fact, “unlawful carnal knowledge” has appeared in legal sources for some time. It was used in definitions of rape under English Common Law, can be found in Britain’s Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, and is present in Northern Ireland’s current statute on sex offenders.
This formula appeared even earlier in criminal statutes throughout the southern United States, attested from the 1870s and 1880s from Arkansas, Tennessee, Florida, Georgia, and Texas. The full phrase (with “for”) is first found from the late 1880s in US statutes.
All of which still does not mean that the word fuck derives from this or any other acronym: it does not.
A far more absurd entry in the category of folk etymology is the “pluck yew” story, which conflates the origin of fuck with earlier folklore about the origin of the offensive backhand two-finger gesture, the British form of what is usually an extended middle finger in America. In the original form of the tale, before the battle of Agincourt in 1415 (immortalized in Shakespeare’s Henry V), the French taunted the English longbowmen by waving two fingers at them, saying that those fingers—used to pull back the bowstring—could never defeat the mighty French.
After the English longbowmen convincingly showed their superiority (ten thousand French dead to a mere twenty-nine British, in Shakespeare’s exaggerated count), they waved their two fingers back at the French in the now familiar gesture. The fact that longbows were traditionally made of yew has produced a recent twist in the telling: to claim that drawing back the bowstring was called “plucking yew,” and thereby to assert that the victorious English not only waved their fingers at the French but shouted “We can still pluck yew! Pluck yew!” at them.
A convenient sound change and a respelling brings us to the familiar phrase “fuck you.” This story, totally ludicrous in any version, was popularized on the NPR show Car Talk, where it was meant as a joke; it spread on the Internet in the 1990s as a serious explanation.
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The Taboo Status of Fuck
Early Modern English
The demand for bawdy humor throughout history has meant that writers have always found ways to use certain words, even if they were prohibited by social conventions. In Shakespeare, for instance, one can find two clear references to cunt.
In Twelfth Night (II.v), Olivia’s butler Malvolio receives a letter written by Maria but in Olivia’s handwriting; analyzing the script, Malvolio says, “My my life this is my lady’s hand. These be her very C’s, her U’s and her T’s and thus makes she her great P’s.” With the and sounding like “N,” Shakespeare not only spells out cunt, but gets a pun on pee in there as well.
And more famously, in Hamlet (III.ii) the prince uses the phrase “country matters” in a manner clearly alluding to cunt (Hamlet’s next crack is about what “lie[s] between maids’ legs”).
Though Shakespeare never actually uses fuck itself, his plays contain several examples of probable puns on or references to the word. A Latin grammar lesson in The Merry Wives of Windsor (IV.i) gives us the focative case (punning on the vocative case, used for direct address), followed up immediately with a raft of lewd wordplay, including sexual puns on Latin words and references to various English words for the sexual organs.
In Henry V (IV.iv) the notoriously bawdy Pistol threatens to “firk” an enemy soldier; though firk does have a legitimate sense ‘to strike’, which is appropriate here, it was used elsewhere in the Elizabethan era as a euphemism for fuck, and it is likely that Shakespeare had this in mind as well. In several places he refers to the French word foutre, which is the literal (and also vulgar) equivalent of fuck; the most notable is this passage in Henry V (III.iv), in which Princess Katherine is having an English lesson:
Katherine: Comment appellez-vous les pieds et la robe? [What do you call le pied and la robe?]
Alice: De foot, madame; et de cown [a French pronunciation of gown; these English words sound like the French words foutre “fuck” and con “cunt”]
Katherine: De foot et de cown? O Seigneur Dieu! Ils sont les mots de son mauvais, corruptible, gros, et impudique! [Dear Lord! Those are bad-sounding words, wicked, vulgar, and indecent!]
Shakespeare elsewhere (2 Henry IV V.iii) has Pistol say, “A foutra for the world and worldlings base!,” and in at least one place (Merry Wives II.i) he uses foot as a probable pun on foutre. As the Henry V passage shows, Shakespeare was well aware that this word was vulgar—at least in French—and there is a good possibility that these examples are intended to represent the taboo English word fuck.
Though the evidence clearly shows that fuck was considered vulgar in Shakespeare’s time, it’s hard to tell just how bad it was. But we have a remarkably informative example of its status from a source unexpected in the late seventeenth century: pornography. Though there is little truly explicit English erotica before the Victorian era, one exception is the 1680 The School of Venus, a translation of an earlier French work.
This graphically illustrated book—surviving in only a single copy, in the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in Munich—is presented in the style of a dialogue between a sexually experienced older woman and her young niece, this format (common especially in the eighteenth century) allowing highly explicit discussions to appear in the guise of instruction. The author appears to have been unusually interested in language: at one point the characters discuss the precise differences in meaning among occupy, fuck, swive, incunt, and other verbs, and elsewhere the older woman explains why men use offensive words like cunt during intercourse.
We are also treated to a clear statement of how offensive fuck was:
There are other words which sound better, and are often used before Company, instead of Swiving and Fucking, which is too gross and downright Bawdy, fit only to be used among dissolute Persons; to avoid scandal, men modestly say, I kissed her, made much of her, received a favor from her, or the like.
Late Modern English
Certainly fuck was considered literally unprintable throughout the nineteenth century, except in obscure, secret, legal, or privately printed publications. Important early authors known to have used the word include Lord Rochester in the seventeenth century and Robert Burns in the late eighteenth; Burns was probably the latest important author known to use the word before the twentieth century, and he uses it only in The Merry Muses of Caledonia, a bawdy manuscript intended purely for private circulation.
Even Captain Francis Grose—a friend of Burns—felt compelled to spell it f—k in his Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1785 and later editions; the word was expunged from the 1811 edition by a different compiler).
In a striking example of some Victorians’ unfamiliarity with bawdy vocabulary, we see that the poet Robert Browning egregiously misunderstood one common word. He encountered the couplet “They talked of his having a cardinal’s hat, / They’d send him as soon an old nun’s twat,” in a seventeenth- century poem. Erroneously believing from this passage that the last word referred to a part of a nun’s habit, Browning wrote of “Cowls and twats” in his 1848 poem Pippa Passes.
This does not imply that fuck was unused, of course. John Farmer and W.E. Henley’s monumental Slang and Its Analogues (privately printed; the volume with fuck appeared in 1893) included the use of fucking as both an adjective and an adverb, described respectively as “A qualification of extreme contumely” and “a more violent form of bloody.”
These are labeled “common,” despite the fact that this editor has been able to discover hardly any earlier examples. No doubt this and various other senses were common but unprinted for some time previously.
While there seem to be a large number of new senses that are first found around World War I, it is likely that these were in use earlier, and their appearance in the 1910s is more a result of weakening taboos than of an actual increase in the number of words coined in that era. For although fuck may have been strictly taboo in mainstream usage in the nineteenth century, it was extremely common in the flourishing world of Victorian pornography.
Many explicit F- words are found in such sources from the 1860s onwards, often in ways that are scarcely different from their use in the hardcore pornography of the present day. And recent research has shown that various forms or senses that were thought to have emerged later were indeed in use in the nineteenth century.
In two remarkable incidents, fuck even found its way into the very proper London Times in this prudish era. Reporting a speech delivered by Attorney General Sir William Harcourt, the Times printed on January 13, 1882:
I saw in a Tory journal the other day a note of alarm, in which they said, “Why, if a tenant- farmer is elected for the North Riding of Yorkshire the farmers will be a political power who will have to be reckoned with.” The speaker then said he felt inclined for a bit of fucking. I think that is very likely.
It took the stunned editors four days to run an apology for what must have been a bit of mischief by the typesetter:
No pains have been spared by the management of this journal to discover the author of a gross outrage committed by the interpolation of a line in the speech of Sir William Harcourt reported in our issue of Monday last. This malicious fabrication was surreptitiously introduced before the paper went to press. The matter is now under legal investigation, and it is hoped that the perpetrator of the outrage will be brought to punishment.
And later that year, on June 12, 1882, the following advertisement appeared in the Times: “Everyday Life in our Public Schools. Sketched by Head Scholars. With a Glossary of Some Words used by Henry Irving in his disquisition upon fucking, which is in Common Use in those Schools.”
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Current Norms
The twenty-first-century Times still holds its nose and avoids publishing swear words whenever it can, at least in theory. If they must be included, its 2022 style guide says, writers must “soften them with three asterisks: f***.” Though it acknowledges that the practice looks “horrid,” for the Times editors this is a reason to avoid not the asterisks but the entire swear word.
Other text-led “broadsheet” or “quality” press in the UK are more or less matter-of-fact about printing fuck and other taboo terms. Meanwhile, the so-called red tops—image-led tabloids with a sensationalist tone, and a red masthead that gives them their informal collective name—are more inclined to apply asterisks even to relatively mild swear words. This approach can sometimes pose a puzzle for readers: is “b*******” meant to be bastards or bollocks?
Different kinds of language have been considered incendiary at different times. Several centuries ago religious blasphemy was the most unforgivable type of expression (we observe that in the 1528 example we’ve mentioned, it is the word damned, not fucking, that is elided).
Parentage based insults were also considered extreme, with bastard often written with dashes in place of some letter. In more recent times, words for body parts and explicitly sexual vocabulary have been the most shocking: in nineteenth-century America even the word leg was considered indecent; the proper substitute was limb.
Now slurs, such as racial or ethnic epithets, are the scourge; recent surveys in multiple countries, including the United States, UK, and New Zealand, show them rising to the top of the offensiveness charts. One prominent professor told US News & World Report in 1994 that if she used fuck in class, no one would bat an eye, but that she would never dare to use any racial epithet in any context.
This trend has only accelerated: simply mentioning the word that we euphemize as the N-word is usually forbidden even in educational contexts, while the unrelated word niggardly, tainted by similarity, has fallen into disuse, itself often specifically banned. Research has found that exposure to slurs, uniquely among taboo words, can cause measurable psychological and social harm.
Today it seems that the taboos against the F-word are weaker than ever. Regular surveys of public attitudes published by British broadcasting regulator Ofcom provide a useful barometer of the word’s changing taboo status in the UK.
Today it seems that the taboos against the F-word are weaker than ever.
In its recent reports, older people are more likely to rate the F-word as a strong swear, while middle-aged people consider it moderate, and young people see it as becoming more acceptable in public use. Equivalent research in New Zealand shows “significant declines in unacceptability of fuck– words” even from 2018 to 2022.
While a few publications still refuse to print fuck regardless of the circumstances, most have no such qualms. The more literary magazines have printed the word for some time, and by the early 2000s even Newsweek and Time had started to do so; the publication of the Starr Report in the New York Times, and a notable comment from Vice President Dick Cheney in the Washington Post, has meant that even the proper papers consider fuck fit to print.
Even commercial television, though still subject to Federal Communications Commission (FCC) regulations, is becoming more open in its use.
______________________________
Excerpted with permission from The F-Word IV Edition, edited by Jesse Sheidlower. Copyright @2024 by Oxford University Press.
Jesse Sheidlower
Jesse Sheidlower is the editor of the previous editions of The F-Word. He was Editor at Large of the Oxford English Dictionary from 1999 to 2013; since then, he has remained active in linguistic matters. He has served as President of the American Dialect Society, and now teaches lexicography at Columbia University. He has written about language for a wide range of publications, including The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s Magazine, Lingua Franca, Playboy, Esquire, Slate, Boing Boing, MBookforum, and various scholarly journals, including American Speech, Dictionaries (journal of the Dictionary Society of North America), and The Journal of English Linguistics. He is also the editor of the Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction, an online resource which launched in 2021.
Many people all over the country have been involved with the “No Kings” movement and rallies. We had more than 1,000 participate in our small town of Willits, California. I have been a rebel with a cause my whole life. My parents were active in the human rights and labor movements in the 1950s and my father was one of the black-listed writers in Hollywood who stood up against McCarthism. My causes have involved love, compassion, and dignity for all people and true partnership with the communities of life on planet Earth.
Timothy Snyder is a widely respected professor and author of numerous books including On Freedom and On Tyranny. He says,
“The Founding Fathers tried to protect us from the threat they knew, the tyranny that overcame ancient democracy. Today, our political order faces new threats, not unlike the totalitarianism of the twentieth century. We are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience.”
Snyder goes on to ask,
“What does it mean to be commemorating 250 years of the American republic? To an uncanny degree, what the Trump people in this 250th year are doing is repeating the abuses that the American founders complained about: arbitrary taxation; taxation without representation; imperial attitudes; wars without consent.”
He calls us to fight for democracy in the same way our founding fathers did.
“To honor the origins of our republic, says Snyder, “doesn’t mean going back to the eighteenth century. It means being rebels in our own time. It means demanding freedom, aiming for something radically better in the future.”
Certainly men are not the only ones who can fall under the spell of fascism, but there is a reason historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat said in her prescient book Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present published in 2020,
“Ours is the age of authoritarian rulers: self-proclaimed saviors of the nation who evade accountability while robbing their people of truth, treasure, and the protections of democracy. They use masculinity as a symbol of strength and a political weapon. Taking what you want, and getting away with it, becomes proof of male authority. They use propaganda, corruption, and violence to stay in power.”
In her book she described seventeen examples of authoritarian leaders, all of them men including:
Benito Mussolini, Prime minister of Italy
Adolph Hitler, Chancellor of Germany
Saddam Hussein, Prime minister of Iraq
Victor Orban, Hungarian prime minister
Vladimir Putin, President of Russia
Donald J. Trump, President of the United States of America
Ben-Ghiat concludes saying,
“They promise law and order then legitimize law-breaking by financial, sexual, and other predators.”
MenAlive: A Community of Rebels For Men and Their Families
Another step in my own “rebellion” occurred during the birth of our first child on November 21, 1969. After coaching my wife through the pre-birth Lamaze breathing methods we had learned, I was told she was ready to move into the delivery room.
“Your job is done, now Mr. Diamond,” the nurse told me. “You can go out to the waiting room, and we’ll let you know when you can see your wife and child.”
The hospital rules had been explained to us both: Fathers were not allowed in the delivery room. That was OK with me. Although I felt I was able to coach my wife during the first stages of birth, I was afraid I might pass out or otherwise be more of a hindrance than a help during the actual delivery.
I hugged my wife and wished her luck as she was wheeled one way toward the delivery room and I went the other direction toward the waiting room. But I never made it through the waiting room doors. I felt a calling from my unborn child: I don’t want a waiting-room father. Your place is here with us.
I turned around and walked back the way I had come and found the delivery room. I walked through the doors and took my place at the head of the table. There was no question of leaving, if asked. My child needed me and my response was more important than following the rules. Amid tears of relief and joy our son, Jemal, came into the world and he was handed to me.
Holding him for the first time I made a vow that I would be a different kind of father than my father was able to be for me and to do everything I could to create a world where fathers were fully healed and involved with their families throughout their lives.
When we met and fell in love in college, my future wife and I talked about our desire for children. We decided we would have one child then adopt a child. Even in 1964 we felt the world was becoming overcrowded. Three years after Jemal was born, we adopted a 2 ½ month old African American little girl we named Angela.
My website MenAlive was launched in 1972 as my window to the world. The purpose of MenAlive is to share ways we can come together to create a world of true partnership. I want everyone to live fully authentic lives, to love deeply and well, and to make a positive difference in the world.
My first book, Inside Out: Becoming My Own Man, was published in 1983. I have now written 17 books including international best-sellers, Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places, Surviving Male Menopause, and The Irritable Male Syndrome: Understanding and Managing the 4 Key Causes of Depression and Aggression.
I write articles and interview experts on various aspects of men’s mental, emotional, and relational health. One of my recent articles, “Father Time: How Dad’s Are Being Called to Change the World for Good,” featured one of my colleagues, Dr. Sarah Hrdy. Dr. Hrdy is an anthropologist and primatologist and one of the world’s leading experts on the evolutionary basis of female behavior in both nonhuman and human primates. She has recently turned her attention to men.
After seeing how her own sons were connected to children in ways she had previously assumed was what came naturally only to women, she researched and eventually wrote a book called Father Time: A Natural History of Men and Babies. She found that fathers are as biologically capable of nurturing small children as mothers are.
She said, “My unexpected finding is that inside every man there lurk ancient caretaking tendencies that render a man every bit as protective and nurturing as the most committed mother. It is a journey that has forced me to rethink long held assumptions about man’s innately selfish, competitive, and violent nature, what Darwin described as his ‘natural and unfortunate birthright.”
At MenAlive we have always known that men and women may be different in many ways, but when it comes to loving and nurturing children, we are as biologically programmed and capable of developing the same skills that mothers learn to develop. I will soon be introducing our MenAlive community to other expert colleagues. I describe what is coming in my recent article: “The Future of MenAlive: From Men’s Health to Relational Healing and Transformation.”
Come join us. You can read my latest blog posts here. If you feel called to change the world for good, I invite you to join us.
Best Wishes,
Jed Diamond
Founder and VHS (Visionary Healer Scholar) of MenAlive
New Thinking Allowed with Jeffrey Mishlove Apr 19, 2026 Daniel Bourke is the author of Telepathic Tales and Apparitions at the Moment of Death. A poet and songwriter, he also has a background in the natural sciences, the arts, and the video game industry. His newest book is Déjà Rêvé & Love at Second Sight: The Experience of Meeting in Dreams before Meeting in Life. Daniel discusses the phenomenon of meeting people in dreams before encountering them in waking life, drawing on hundreds of cross-cultural and historical accounts. He explores distinctions between déjà vu and what he calls “déjà rêvé,” along with evidence suggesting these experiences may be more common than previously assumed. Bourke also examines precognitive dreams, spiritual encounters, and the possible implications for our understanding of time, consciousness, and human relationships. 00:00:00 Introduction 00:02:01 Precognitive dreams and origins of research 00:06:22 Patterns across hundreds of dream encounters 00:10:01 Psychological interpretations and risks 00:11:30 Spiritual reality and nature of time 00:15:14 Historical accounts and dream divination 00:18:15 Veridical dreams and recorded evidence 00:23:29 Dream imagery and encounters through images 00:30:08 Crisis apparitions and parapsychological research 00:48:30 Conclusion (Recorded on March 21, 2026)
Amrit Sandhu ???????? Apr 19, 2026 Inspired Evolution Podcast ???????? Dr. Heather Ensworth PhD — clinical psychologist, shamanic practitioner, and evolutionary astrologer — takes us on a sweeping journey through the 24,000-year precessional cycle and reveals why the window between 2025 and 2032 may be the most consequential period in human history. As Heather puts it, this is an incredible time and opportunity if we harness it, given all that’s happened since the Age of Taurus. ???????? Your birth chart is your medicine wheel — and when you come to the centre of it, you remember who you actually are. 1-in-12,000 year shift. ✨ ???? It’s collective AND it’s personal — it’s in your chart right now. If you’d like Amrit’s support to understand what’s being asked of you in this time, what’s ready to heal, and where you’re being called next… ???? YOU CAN BOOK YOUR ASTROLOGY READING directly here: ???? https://amritsandhu.com/reading
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The experience of color corresponds to a specific pattern of states of activity in the nervous system which its structure determines … All knowing depends on the structure of the knower [but] the biological roots of knowing cannot be understood only through examining the nervous system… It is necessary to understand how these processes are rooted in the living being as a whole.
