The Ineffable Efficacy of the F-word

I don't have much to say about l'affaire Blagojevich per se, but one does notice that in addition to being as crooked as a dog's hind leg, the man has the blowhard bullyboy's tendency to lard the F-word into his speech with no discrimination at all, like people who coat everything with ketchup. It's just a meaningless repetitive noise, like an "um" or a "you know."

Now, I'd like the young people particularly to gather around and pay attention: There's a right way to use this particular word. Imagine you're talking to someone, trying to make a point, and you have a bullwhip in your hand. You could crack the bullwhip all the time, which would eventually just bore and annoy the listener, or you could wait until you want the listener's attention to spike up. Or you could compare it to slapping the table hard with your hand. If you do that constantly, people think you're nuts. If you do it once, they think you mean what you say.

A conversation with a writer friend comes to mind. She expresses herself vividly, tartly, but usually in a way that could play unaltered on the radio. But once she was telling me that her husband, who makes his living mainly by being a mime, had written a book so good that she was envious and annoyed thereby. She was offended by the cosmic injustice of it, the way Amadeus portrayed Salieri feeling about the talent that God had disproportionately bestowed on the vulgar, impious Mozart. Her temper flared, talking about it. "He's a f---ing mime!" she said. See what I mean? There's a smart, classy way to cuss, and while it may be too late for Mr. Blagojevich, young people can resolve to cuss that way and the rest of us can too.