Federal Liberal leader Justin Trudeau dropped an F-bomb at a charity boxing event, causing thousands to scatter to their social network of choice to weigh in on what they think of a prominent politician's profanity. As the dust settled, and Trudeau was promptly scolded, the question became a different one, that being whether or not profanity actually holds weight anymore.
In context, Trudeau was using the word as emphasis, which is the way a lot of people use it. It has impact because we know it's prohibited from airplay before the watershed, and I definitely cannot reprint it here, but it doesn't actually mean anything, whether in that context or most of the others where it is dragged out. It's one of the few words that can be dropped in at any point of a sentence and sort of make sense, because it has essentially lost all meaning. Were I to use the line "none of that filleting matters" it would be outright gibberish in the same context, because filleting has a real meaning and it involves fish rather than boxing. The prohibited bit of the dictionary has become just a word for impact, little more.
Admittedly I swear a fair bit myself, generally in traffic, often an incomprehensible stream of bad words combined in ways that are almost artful in their inscrutability. This is because some drivers somehow don't see a bright red hatchback and I need to blow off steam by using words with impact and not much else. Trudeau, in the context, had just been either punching or getting punched by another man - I didn't watch the match, so I don't know how successful he was - and as a result he was also looking for impact above all else. It's an understandable, if unfortunate, mistake.
Still, the word itself is becoming ubiquitous, whether or not we want to admit it. The censoring on radio broadcasts of the word in songs has become increasingly half-hearted to the point where it's basically nonexistent - I have had several moments where I just think "did that person just swear on the radio?" when a new single gets played and the portion of the song isn't completely blanked out. Other words that would get fines for broadcast in decades past are now commonplace in both film and television. Swearing is increasingly becoming something approaching accepted in entertainment and every day life.
I know I personally do not think it's a big deal that Trudeau let loose with the bad words, but then I also think we're kind of losing something now that it's just a bit of meaningless emphasis. As the words become increasingly meaningless and irrelevant, they lose their impact, and soon we will have to find something else to shout at the probable drunkard who is determined to blow past a stop sign and into the side of your vehicle. If profanity is all used up, as it is now steadily becoming, what on earth can we even shout at them, to calm ourselves and feel as though we are giving this negative force a thorough what-for where they can't actually hear it?
Profanity serves a purpose, as silly as that purpose may be, and the more it's used the less able it is to actually serve that purpose. Perhaps we should all get up in arms over Trudeau's gaffe and get generally prudish about language, to restore the impact to profanity that it is currently lacking.
