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The word that says it all

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wolf of wall street f-word

Who needs nuanced dialogue?

Sometimes as a kid I’d pick a word at random and just repeat it over and over. I found it interesting how quickly the word would lose its meaning and become just this odd sound issuing from my mouth. (Yeah, I had kind of a relaxed schedule as a kid.)

I thought of this after Variety recently noted the new record for film use of the word “fuck”: Martin Scorcese’s The Wolf of Wall Street uses it — drumroll — 506 times! That’s a fuckload of fucking f-words! If you’ll pardon my fucking French. The only words used more often were “the” and the pronoun “I.”

If you’d asked me earlier, I would have guessed the record-holder to be Goodfellas (300 times) or The Big Lebowski (292 times.) Hard to imagine a time when one use of the word “damn” created such a stir in Gone With the Wind. We’ve come a long way. I completely understand why Mom, whom I’ve heard swear exactly twice in six decades, doesn’t go to the movies anymore.

I also understand why Scorcese keeps upping the f-word ante. I’m quite sure that the real wolves of Wall Street talk just this way, as do butchers and bakers and candlestick makers. And cops and clerks and school teachers. Did we learn it from the movies, or did the movies learn it from us?

In any case, if this is the way we all talk now, what does it mean when every sentence must contain what used to be the queen mother of swear words? In any language, profanity exists for a reason. If everything is profane, then nothing is. All our amps are turned to 11 right at the get-go. So we’re kind of losing the ability to emphasize.

Key & Peele illustrated this in a recent sketch, having Peele’s gangster character repeatedly utter a complex sentence composed almost entirely of the word “motherf&%$#er” — I mean, the word did every duty a word can do: noun, verb, adjective, adverb, conjunction and maybe an infinitive or two. Talk about some harsh gerunds.

It was pretty funny, and pretty effective satire of the trend. I think modern script writers should check it out. Yep, it’s harder when you have to come up with a lot of different words. But maybe the sentences will be more interesting.

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Comments

  1. Thanks for providing the actual number—506. It is unfathomable that people make the big bucks for that inexcusable level of crudity and lack of creativity. My SIL, who goes to a lot of movies, heard from friends that it was very bad, and may well not go. I certainly wouldn’t.

    There are still plenty of us out here who don’t talk like that, even though Hollywood pretends we don’t exist. I’m not one to walk out of a theater over every little thing, but that is so over the top and senseless, I would walk out. Being forewarned, I would never buy a ticket. Every dollar we spend is a vote.

    My father always said profanity was evidence of a small mind and a small vocabulary.

    • In my Forest Service days, I worked with a guy whom I still remember as the most profane man I’ve ever met. I mean, literally, every other word began with the F.

      And yes, this man’s mind was kind of small.

      • In my high school days, I met a guy like that. He was the younger brother of a classmate. For him, too, it was literally every other word, like some kind of verbal tic.

  2. I’m totally with you on this one, Dave. When John Lennon sings the line, “… but you’re still fucking peasants, as far as I can see”, in “Working Class Hero”, you really feel his anger and frustration. If every line had that word in it, it would be meaningless.