'Fuck' - A Critical Deconstruction

 I wrote this on a napkin on my lunch break when I was maybe 20:

Sitting in the food court, I wondered, "Would they really throw me out of the mall if I were to shout 'Fuck!' at the top of my lungs? I mean, I work here." And at first I thought, "Yes, they would," but I asked myself why. I had, for the moment, entirely forgotten why one would not say ‘fuck’ in public.

I ran a simulation in my head: If I shouted "Fuck!" and no one did anything, then the adorable little girl walking past me could say "Fuck!" and I knew this to be funny and wrong, but I still couldn’t remember why.

I idly thought the word to myself, how everyone says it, how if everyone uses it–most often without any meaning–how then could such a word be bad? I thought the word again, and in one golden moment it was entirely without meaning or power, and everything made sense. I had deconstructed the word and removed its center, separating signifier and signified.

Then I imagined a 19 year-old brunette, mid-coitus exclaiming, “Fuck my fucking cunt!” and reality snapped back into place, and ‘fuck’ was dirty again.

On the upside, that brunette had a fabulous body.

On Real Life Conversations VI: Grandmothers

Not my grandma, but she looks the part. If I were holding open-casting for a grandma, this lady would be a front-runner alongside Betty White and Mel Brooks in a wig.


My grandmother has a typically Bronx-Jew idiosyncratic speech pattern.

For one thing, she's fairly incapable or saying Ts in the middle of a word. "Mitten" comes out as "Mì'en," with a hiccupy linguistic hiatus in the middle.

On another note: when verbs affect verbs, her grammatical syntax reverts to Yiddish.

"Do you want me to…" becomes, "You want I should…?"

This would make sense in some Romance languages, where the expressions "You want" and "I should" can each be expressed as single, conjugated nouns without necessary pronouns, then modified into a question simply by adding an inquisitive inflection. For example, the Spanish "¿Quiere me deber?" literally means "[Do] you want [that] I should?" However this still makes no sense, considering that Yiddish is mostly German (written in Hebrew) and English itself is a Germanic language as far as syntax is concerned.


Fun for the whole family is trying to discern What the Hell Is Grandma Trying To Say?! (from Parker Brothers)!

"You know how to hang Venetians?"

Proper response: "Yes, Grandma, I know how to hang Venetian curtains."

Rejected response: "What? Like people? Yeah, I know how to lynch a Guinea."

On Race Relations

Society screwed up when it tried to make "nigga" a socially acceptable term of endearment.

What we should have done is started also calling poor, uneducated, shiftless white criminals "niggers."

On Accents

For the most part, I tend to get more annoyed than anything else if someone intimates that I have a funny sounding accent.

I'll freely admit that I have a bit of a New York cut to my voice, but I assure you it's only out of laziness and it in no way sounds funny. In fact that only people who could pick up on it within the U.S. are those who have much heavier regional accents which would be openly mocked in New York, likely through the use of name-calling, questioning of sexuality and perhaps metaphors for corn fucking.

Yes, I have something of a lazy tongue. It does not like to work hard and sometimes, in a comfortable environment, it is perfectly willing to give up precision for expedience and minimum effort. A consonant or two might get dropped, an odd N swallowed here or there. If I am suitably drunk, I apparently drop down into a full-on Brooklyn accent, which is somewhat disconcerting as I have never lived in Brooklyn and my family exclusively comes from The Bronx, and even then only two generations back. Depending on which lineage you choose, I'm either the third or fifth generation to be born and raised in my small town. But I digress.

As I was born in a small town in Westchester, New York, and as I was raised Jewish as a condition of my parents' protracted divorce process, I was bar-mitzvahed, the up-shot to which is basically receiving a free year of public speaking and diction classes.

Frankly, when I have the time to formulate a full response before having to speak, I can enunciate to the back row of any room, pause and punch on par with presidential candidates, alliterate most eloquently and defer any semblance of provincialism from my thoughts and mannerisms.

And I say this now: I can speak without any accent whatsoever.

Any accent. I don't care what the British or Professor Henry Higgins say, Americans speak English the way it's supposed to sound. If you were to pronounce every syllable as it should sound according to modern linguistic phonetics it would come out sounding like a West Coast news anchor (who are incidentally trained to remove all accent and speak correctly). The British swallow every end consonant and depending on class and region distort every single vowel sound in the most ghastly ways. There's a reason it's easier for Englishmen to put on a fake American "accent" than it is for an American to intone a believable British accent: we have to say things wrong in a precise way, they merely have to say everything correctly for once.

Unfortunately my argument loses something of its edge. As it stands, my friends and I have spent so much time together that we have complimented the little off nuances in our speech patterns, and unfortunately nearly all of us come from boisterous, Irish upbringings.

Jay, for instance will invariably return from his yearly family visits to Boston with an inability to pronounce the letter R.

"Aw, dammit, I left my lighter in the cah."

"The cah?"

"Dammit, shut the fuck up."

Sadly, we've all adopted this to a lesser, year-round extent. I recently discovered how Irish my group of friends are: Dave Zucker ("Murray" on my mother's side), Dean Thomas Luke McGowan, Daniel Murray, Mac Russel, Terrance Kennedy, James "Jay" Connor Michael O'Neill MacDunough of the Clan Brae. Dropped outside Boston College I am absolutely certain we could not only survive penniless for days, but do so smiling and drinking.

It's weird how much we were affected by listening to Dropkick Murpheys, Flogging Molly, and watching The Boondock Saints 837 times through high school.

Especially considering all my friends are Yankees fans.