I recently read a scene in a glowfic thread in which a wife, speaking to her husband, uses “fuck” where I would use “make love to.” While the primary meaning of both locutions is “copulate with,” they have very different connotations.
There certainly is that process, and not only in English; the French foutre, originally meaning "fuck" (and derived from Latin futuo, which means the same thing), has now come to mean simply "do."
At the same time, there's a process in which words originally intended to be neutral and descriptive become abusive epithets. The words "moron," "imbecile," and "idiot" supposedly used to indicate different degrees of cognitive subnormality; certainly by the time I was in high school they had become insults (and there were also "moron" jokes), and the professional terms were educable, trainable, and custodial mental retardation; but then "retarded" and "retard" and "MR" became abusive epithets, and the conditions apparently are now called "intellectual disability." I expect that if "ID" becomes a term of abuse we will see yet another neologism.
Consider, too, the adoption of metaphorical expressions, as when the slightly learned word "pregnant," in the sense of "having numerous implications" ("a pregnant utterance"), was adopted to mean "with child" or "gravid," and then came to mean that primarily, and so strongly that people looked for less blunt expressions, such as "expectant."
Words seem to take on emotional overtones from the way people tend to regard the things those words refer to, regardless of how people intend them to be used.
I grew up hearing a story that "fuck' came about as a notation in Police Records of "Forced Unlawful Carnal Knowledge" in full being shortened for ease of recording as the letters "FUCK". The obvious reference to rape as the offence for which someone was charged or the report made by the victim.
I don't recall whether the story about the derivation originated in the USA or Britain or Australia.
Probably just a myth made up by someone musing about its derivation.
As best I can tell that is a false derivation. I think the empirical rule is that a guess is converted to a fact by three repetitions. The word appears in English at least as early as the 16th c.
I rather like the etymology that "fuck" derives" from a (possibly Dutch) word meaning "to strike". It provides a convenient explanation for the violent connotations, plus we can see something similar happening right now with "hit" (e.g., "I'd hit that").
A pair of words that have not so much changed their meanings but get substituted for one another according to the lay of the land is "progressive" and "liberal". I'm not so sure of the initial replacement of "progressive" with "liberal", likely at the beginning of the New Deal, but it must have been that "progressive" was becoming less popular, so they stole our word. I'm on firmer ground with the recent reversion, eschewing "liberal" and substituting "progressive". That was completely conscious and intentional, because "liberal" had become malodorous to much of the population.
It may have initially been that but I think at this point a lot of people on the left think of "liberal" and "progressive" as different left wing factions, most obviously with liberals in favor of free speech, progressives not.
For one thing, the odds are that a liberal will think the survival of Israel is desirable; the odds are that a progessive will favor its replacement with a Palestinian state controlling its entire land area.
Dan Klein has written a great deal on the topic of how liberal went from being a more freedom oriented word in the late 1700’s and early 1800’s everywhere to the statist leftish use in America around the late 1800’s. The progressives were naming themselves around the same time, a little later perhaps, then liberal came to be the dominant self descriptor for the leftists around the middle of the century it seems. In Europe is still retained its freedom from the state meaning, and in the US as late as 1968 WF Buckley described Milton Friedman as a “classical liberal” in the context of “maybe not a conservative, but more libertarian “. Buckley seemed to assume everyone would know what he meant, and that it wasn’t “a member of the democrat party”.
After watching the series Deadwood, I wondered if the words motherfucker and cocksucker were actually used in the 1800's. From what I have learned, they were not. The really bad words in those days were God damn, hell, and other religious profanities. But today, those words don't have the shock value they did then, so they used the more modern profanities. It is also interesting how today's euphemisms will become tomorrow's prohibited words. It seems like an endless cycle.
Michael is correct that "make love" has passed out of popular usage to the point of now being associated with the elderly and 'cringe' when used by someone in a younger cohort, just as cringe as "make romance" or "make whoopie" would seem today. A slight exception may be some legacy phrases that contain "make love" but with additional context and the traditional emotional connection. One can still say, "They made love on the beach".
But "fuck" has not actually taken its place, and so he is leaving out some subtlety with regard to connotation.
Alas, it turns out that the passage of "make love" is almost a pure linguistic loss as there now remains no adequate substitute in common usage that serves as an replacement, and I'll explain below.
Perhaps an apt analogy could be to the many subtle variations along a whole spectrum of affectionate possibilities for which the ancient Greeks developed a whole descriptive vocabulary (e.g., philia, eros, agape, etc.) but which tend in modern English to all get lumped into "love". This strikes me as kind of aberrant as English is otherwise a robust and rich language, and was especially so before widespread use of the Thesaurus contributed to sloppy convergence in perceived meanings in related words and the erosion of precision with the loss of previously salient distinctions. This also reminds me of C.S. Lewis' quip that when trying to discuss sexual topics in English one is, "... forced to choose between the language of the nursery, the gutter, and the anatomy class."
At any rate, in contemporary usage, "they fucked" has no important connotation of rape or violence. It means copulation but without the parallel aspect of deep emotional bond, or romantic, loving affection. It has nothing of the reciprocal, caring infatuation that is brought to mind about two "lovers". The emotional load varies from almost absent and mechanical at one extreme, to "no big deal" / "inconsequential" / "just having fun" / "one-night stand" / "hooking up after meeting at a bar or party" / "friends with benefits" in the middle, to a state of passion that is not 'loving' but better described as intensely lustful, raw, insatiable, physically vigorous (e.g., "he fucked her good"), volcanic, hormonal, and animalistic almost in the sense of Mr. Hyde being unleashed from Dr. Jekyll or the transformation into the sexual equivalent of a werewolf - that is - more like the distorted fantasy portrayed in contemporary pornography.
Only the more emotionally light meaning is close in meaning to "they had sex". One wouldn't say "they had sex" when intending to convey the more lustfully passionate meaning of "they fucked". One wouldn't say "they had sex like animals", but "they fucked like animals" is common. "Bang" is still in common usage, and has less 'edge' than "fuck", and "they banged" is somewhere in the middle of "they had sex" and "they fucked".
And I think it's rejected by many because sex doesn't have to be about love or emotion, but can be just for pleasure. It can be about love, obviously, or both things, love, emotion, and pleasure.
But to limit it to only a "loving relationship" strikes me as basically embracing religious crap about sex.
I may be mistaken, but my impression is that sex tends to create feelings appropriate to a pair-bonded relationship and that some of the hostility that can be associated with sex is due to getting those feelings when not appropriate and wanting to suppress them. That speculation is based not on religion — I'm an atheist — but on evolutionary psychology plus introspection.
I can tell you, although of course this is anecdotal, that it's quite easy to have sex without any emotional attachment, at least for some...
And I wouldn't say my experience is based on some sociopathology in myself, as I've also been married, in love, and currently I've been with my girlfriend for the last 3+ years (we were together before this going back about 5 years, but broke up for awhile).
I guess it's typical, what you're saying, and maybe the issue is what percentage of this is evolutionary psychology and what percentage is based on cultural influences.
Since humans used to be more harem breeders, the reason why men are bigger than women, and stronger, i.e. mammals with big discrepancies in size have evolved harem breeding strategies, bulls, elephants, elephant seals, elk, etc., as examples, and certain a great number of our primate cousins, it seems that we evolved to be fine not associating sex with pair bonding.
But of course, we could imagine an alpha male loving all his harem and the women all being in love with 'the man' although that would seem like a lot of conjecture.
FYI: I did ask my girlfriend if she wanted to make love and she didn't even know what the phrase meant. Granted, this could be a language issue, her first language is Spanish, but still, she's pretty good with conversational English and I was surprised she didn't even know the phrase at all.
I've read nineteenth century fiction where "make love" means to court someone. Then it got adopted as a politer word for "copulate." I'm not sure when the change took place.
"Lover" gets used the same way, I think well into the 20th century. The "young lovers" in a detective story are a courting couple, not assumed to be lovers in the modern sense.
But note that "make love" makes sense in both the older and the newer contexts, if I am right about the emotional concomitants of intercourse.
"If I describe the American public school system as a socialist institution that will be interpreted by almost anyone, with the possible exception of a fellow economist, as a right wing complaint against what is taught, not as the observation, obviously true, that it is a means of production owned and controlled by a government."
Spot on! On an education discussion board, populated by leftists, I once called the public school system "government schools" [to avoid the positive connotation of "socialist" in that circle]. The uproar! Against what was obviously a factual statement.
I try to use govt schools, and govt transportation, rather than “public”.
It was a rhetorical mistake to misname “Government Choice Theory” as the far more popular and Dem accepted phrase “Public Choice Theory”.
I also don’t think leftists are the problem so much as Democrats. Dems are on the ballots, like Reps (and often Libertarians, Libbers.) Dem support for govt schools pretty much as they are now, is why it’s so difficult to make them better.
How far back are we looking? Apparently the proto-Indo-European root meant "to hit." Latin futuo referred to penetrating a vagina with a penis; I don't know if it had a hostile meaning. French foutre seems to have had some hostile meanings: va te faire foutre, "go make yourself fuck," is the equivalent of "go fuck yourself." And apparently the Old French fotre had a variety of hostile meanings, or so says Wiktionary.
There is an even earlier meaning of the word "gay" that you might be interested in. In the late 19th century, "gay" also denoted a prostitute or who worked in what we now call the sex industry.
When guys in the joint say 'bitch', it's a rape threat. In social circles where many people have done time, it's still fighting words. When nice people say 'bitch', it's schoolgirlish poddymouthing.
There's an awful lot of schoolgirlish poddymouthing around respectable center-left journalism these last twenty years. Freddie deBoer, The New Republic crowd, the New York Times or Washington Post crowd and people who trust their taste, learn their great language, catch their clear accents.
My wife doesn’t like the use of vulgar words at all, and I had already grown out of my F-speak phase, modeled a bit on Lou Reed Live, Take No Prisoners, also seen in Liar’s Poker (Michael Lewis) with a senior bond salesman using fucked and fucking as emphasis words more than shock.
WTF can be seen on kids’ T shirts. What the fuck? No fucking respect for fucking adult words that the fucked up parents are fucking allowing their kids to fucking wear.
That’s sad for culture, and might be contributing to increased hate speech and violence. Comparing “kill the rich” to “fuck the rich”, or kill/fuck Trump, or Jews, or any target, I’d prefer more anger opposition expressed as fuck rather than kill. Fuck ‘em.
OT: Has there ever been a legal system (or has anyone proposed) with a chance based death penalty instead of jail? More severe crimes would have a higher chance of resulting in a death penalty.
But why do some other words get more pejorative in time? In my own language the word "lavatory" has been replaced several times through near history because each new term becomes pejorative in time and has to be replaced for polite texts. The totally neutral terms for cognitive disabilities were already mentioned above. These two examples could otherwise perhaps be explained by the phenomena themselves being unliked by people and therefore also dragging down the words they are labelled with. But this cannot explain the terms for minority groups (which are good or at least neutral, because humans as such have a good connotation) having to be replaced the same way. As a non-native speaker I used to be constantly anxious if I'm using the latest correct terms that haven't been degraded yet. So while some words lose their pejorative meaning, others gain it, and we need an explanation for the difference.
One thing I picked up in a sociolinguistics class many years ago, was that negativity sticks more tightly to nouns than to adjectives (and verbs least of all). Thus we get progressions such as "coloureds" -> "coloured people" -> people of colour". Also "Jews" -> "Jewish people".
The explanation for the euphemism treadmill was that the fundamental motivator is the stigma. Merely changing the word may serve as a social signal for one generation, but as long as the stigma remains in place, the next generation will simply use the new word as an insult. Only when accompanied by actual society-wide change will the treadmill stop. Until then, it serves as a fashion fad crossed with a partisan sibboleth.
The word in your first example has long had a pejorative connotation but, as others have pointed out, the shock value has dwindled considerably over time, especially through overuse. A hackneyed phrase to the extent that, as you point out, is used “…to express a vaguely negative emotion with no sexual content at all.” I was in an airport recently and at a nearby table, with families and children nearby, two guys interjected the F-bomb in almost every sentence as they talked sports. So, with this word we have: a cultural shift, broadened meaning, and perhaps even metaphorical extension all in play. I would add there is a certain disrespect for others in the careless way it is used (my airport example).
There certainly is that process, and not only in English; the French foutre, originally meaning "fuck" (and derived from Latin futuo, which means the same thing), has now come to mean simply "do."
At the same time, there's a process in which words originally intended to be neutral and descriptive become abusive epithets. The words "moron," "imbecile," and "idiot" supposedly used to indicate different degrees of cognitive subnormality; certainly by the time I was in high school they had become insults (and there were also "moron" jokes), and the professional terms were educable, trainable, and custodial mental retardation; but then "retarded" and "retard" and "MR" became abusive epithets, and the conditions apparently are now called "intellectual disability." I expect that if "ID" becomes a term of abuse we will see yet another neologism.
Consider, too, the adoption of metaphorical expressions, as when the slightly learned word "pregnant," in the sense of "having numerous implications" ("a pregnant utterance"), was adopted to mean "with child" or "gravid," and then came to mean that primarily, and so strongly that people looked for less blunt expressions, such as "expectant."
Words seem to take on emotional overtones from the way people tend to regard the things those words refer to, regardless of how people intend them to be used.
Do you know if foutre initially had the sort of connotations that fuck did, was a hostile term?
I grew up hearing a story that "fuck' came about as a notation in Police Records of "Forced Unlawful Carnal Knowledge" in full being shortened for ease of recording as the letters "FUCK". The obvious reference to rape as the offence for which someone was charged or the report made by the victim.
I don't recall whether the story about the derivation originated in the USA or Britain or Australia.
Probably just a myth made up by someone musing about its derivation.
As best I can tell that is a false derivation. I think the empirical rule is that a guess is converted to a fact by three repetitions. The word appears in English at least as early as the 16th c.
Interesting that it was used as early as 16th C.
As I said "Probably just a myth made up by someone musing about its derivation."
I rather like the etymology that "fuck" derives" from a (possibly Dutch) word meaning "to strike". It provides a convenient explanation for the violent connotations, plus we can see something similar happening right now with "hit" (e.g., "I'd hit that").
There is apparently a conjectural derivation from an Indo-European word that meant "to strike."
A pair of words that have not so much changed their meanings but get substituted for one another according to the lay of the land is "progressive" and "liberal". I'm not so sure of the initial replacement of "progressive" with "liberal", likely at the beginning of the New Deal, but it must have been that "progressive" was becoming less popular, so they stole our word. I'm on firmer ground with the recent reversion, eschewing "liberal" and substituting "progressive". That was completely conscious and intentional, because "liberal" had become malodorous to much of the population.
It may have initially been that but I think at this point a lot of people on the left think of "liberal" and "progressive" as different left wing factions, most obviously with liberals in favor of free speech, progressives not.
For one thing, the odds are that a liberal will think the survival of Israel is desirable; the odds are that a progessive will favor its replacement with a Palestinian state controlling its entire land area.
Dan Klein has written a great deal on the topic of how liberal went from being a more freedom oriented word in the late 1700’s and early 1800’s everywhere to the statist leftish use in America around the late 1800’s. The progressives were naming themselves around the same time, a little later perhaps, then liberal came to be the dominant self descriptor for the leftists around the middle of the century it seems. In Europe is still retained its freedom from the state meaning, and in the US as late as 1968 WF Buckley described Milton Friedman as a “classical liberal” in the context of “maybe not a conservative, but more libertarian “. Buckley seemed to assume everyone would know what he meant, and that it wasn’t “a member of the democrat party”.
After watching the series Deadwood, I wondered if the words motherfucker and cocksucker were actually used in the 1800's. From what I have learned, they were not. The really bad words in those days were God damn, hell, and other religious profanities. But today, those words don't have the shock value they did then, so they used the more modern profanities. It is also interesting how today's euphemisms will become tomorrow's prohibited words. It seems like an endless cycle.
Using "make love" is totally boomer language.
My girlfriend and I use "fuck" as a synonym for sex, no negative connotation, no violence, nothing bad, it's just another word.
If I asked her to "make love" she'd laugh and then she'd say, "what's wrong with you?"
Part of the reason I like "make love" is that I think it is not merely a euphemism but a description of the emotional consequences of intercourse.
Michael is correct that "make love" has passed out of popular usage to the point of now being associated with the elderly and 'cringe' when used by someone in a younger cohort, just as cringe as "make romance" or "make whoopie" would seem today. A slight exception may be some legacy phrases that contain "make love" but with additional context and the traditional emotional connection. One can still say, "They made love on the beach".
But "fuck" has not actually taken its place, and so he is leaving out some subtlety with regard to connotation.
Alas, it turns out that the passage of "make love" is almost a pure linguistic loss as there now remains no adequate substitute in common usage that serves as an replacement, and I'll explain below.
Perhaps an apt analogy could be to the many subtle variations along a whole spectrum of affectionate possibilities for which the ancient Greeks developed a whole descriptive vocabulary (e.g., philia, eros, agape, etc.) but which tend in modern English to all get lumped into "love". This strikes me as kind of aberrant as English is otherwise a robust and rich language, and was especially so before widespread use of the Thesaurus contributed to sloppy convergence in perceived meanings in related words and the erosion of precision with the loss of previously salient distinctions. This also reminds me of C.S. Lewis' quip that when trying to discuss sexual topics in English one is, "... forced to choose between the language of the nursery, the gutter, and the anatomy class."
At any rate, in contemporary usage, "they fucked" has no important connotation of rape or violence. It means copulation but without the parallel aspect of deep emotional bond, or romantic, loving affection. It has nothing of the reciprocal, caring infatuation that is brought to mind about two "lovers". The emotional load varies from almost absent and mechanical at one extreme, to "no big deal" / "inconsequential" / "just having fun" / "one-night stand" / "hooking up after meeting at a bar or party" / "friends with benefits" in the middle, to a state of passion that is not 'loving' but better described as intensely lustful, raw, insatiable, physically vigorous (e.g., "he fucked her good"), volcanic, hormonal, and animalistic almost in the sense of Mr. Hyde being unleashed from Dr. Jekyll or the transformation into the sexual equivalent of a werewolf - that is - more like the distorted fantasy portrayed in contemporary pornography.
Only the more emotionally light meaning is close in meaning to "they had sex". One wouldn't say "they had sex" when intending to convey the more lustfully passionate meaning of "they fucked". One wouldn't say "they had sex like animals", but "they fucked like animals" is common. "Bang" is still in common usage, and has less 'edge' than "fuck", and "they banged" is somewhere in the middle of "they had sex" and "they fucked".
And I think it's rejected by many because sex doesn't have to be about love or emotion, but can be just for pleasure. It can be about love, obviously, or both things, love, emotion, and pleasure.
But to limit it to only a "loving relationship" strikes me as basically embracing religious crap about sex.
I may be mistaken, but my impression is that sex tends to create feelings appropriate to a pair-bonded relationship and that some of the hostility that can be associated with sex is due to getting those feelings when not appropriate and wanting to suppress them. That speculation is based not on religion — I'm an atheist — but on evolutionary psychology plus introspection.
I can tell you, although of course this is anecdotal, that it's quite easy to have sex without any emotional attachment, at least for some...
And I wouldn't say my experience is based on some sociopathology in myself, as I've also been married, in love, and currently I've been with my girlfriend for the last 3+ years (we were together before this going back about 5 years, but broke up for awhile).
I guess it's typical, what you're saying, and maybe the issue is what percentage of this is evolutionary psychology and what percentage is based on cultural influences.
Since humans used to be more harem breeders, the reason why men are bigger than women, and stronger, i.e. mammals with big discrepancies in size have evolved harem breeding strategies, bulls, elephants, elephant seals, elk, etc., as examples, and certain a great number of our primate cousins, it seems that we evolved to be fine not associating sex with pair bonding.
But of course, we could imagine an alpha male loving all his harem and the women all being in love with 'the man' although that would seem like a lot of conjecture.
FYI: I did ask my girlfriend if she wanted to make love and she didn't even know what the phrase meant. Granted, this could be a language issue, her first language is Spanish, but still, she's pretty good with conversational English and I was surprised she didn't even know the phrase at all.
I've read nineteenth century fiction where "make love" means to court someone. Then it got adopted as a politer word for "copulate." I'm not sure when the change took place.
"Lover" gets used the same way, I think well into the 20th century. The "young lovers" in a detective story are a courting couple, not assumed to be lovers in the modern sense.
But note that "make love" makes sense in both the older and the newer contexts, if I am right about the emotional concomitants of intercourse.
Gen X, everyone I know just says sex. Not sure why the euphemisms then or now. At most, maybe "go to bed"
As in "have sex with" or has "sex" itself become a verb in some contexts?
I've heard the usage "to sex [someone] up", but mostly in a self-consciously silly way, at least in my circles.
"If I describe the American public school system as a socialist institution that will be interpreted by almost anyone, with the possible exception of a fellow economist, as a right wing complaint against what is taught, not as the observation, obviously true, that it is a means of production owned and controlled by a government."
Spot on! On an education discussion board, populated by leftists, I once called the public school system "government schools" [to avoid the positive connotation of "socialist" in that circle]. The uproar! Against what was obviously a factual statement.
I try to use govt schools, and govt transportation, rather than “public”.
It was a rhetorical mistake to misname “Government Choice Theory” as the far more popular and Dem accepted phrase “Public Choice Theory”.
I also don’t think leftists are the problem so much as Democrats. Dems are on the ballots, like Reps (and often Libertarians, Libbers.) Dem support for govt schools pretty much as they are now, is why it’s so difficult to make them better.
How far back are we looking? Apparently the proto-Indo-European root meant "to hit." Latin futuo referred to penetrating a vagina with a penis; I don't know if it had a hostile meaning. French foutre seems to have had some hostile meanings: va te faire foutre, "go make yourself fuck," is the equivalent of "go fuck yourself." And apparently the Old French fotre had a variety of hostile meanings, or so says Wiktionary.
There is an even earlier meaning of the word "gay" that you might be interested in. In the late 19th century, "gay" also denoted a prostitute or who worked in what we now call the sex industry.
When guys in the joint say 'bitch', it's a rape threat. In social circles where many people have done time, it's still fighting words. When nice people say 'bitch', it's schoolgirlish poddymouthing.
There's an awful lot of schoolgirlish poddymouthing around respectable center-left journalism these last twenty years. Freddie deBoer, The New Republic crowd, the New York Times or Washington Post crowd and people who trust their taste, learn their great language, catch their clear accents.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43762/the-lost-leader
My wife doesn’t like the use of vulgar words at all, and I had already grown out of my F-speak phase, modeled a bit on Lou Reed Live, Take No Prisoners, also seen in Liar’s Poker (Michael Lewis) with a senior bond salesman using fucked and fucking as emphasis words more than shock.
WTF can be seen on kids’ T shirts. What the fuck? No fucking respect for fucking adult words that the fucked up parents are fucking allowing their kids to fucking wear.
That’s sad for culture, and might be contributing to increased hate speech and violence. Comparing “kill the rich” to “fuck the rich”, or kill/fuck Trump, or Jews, or any target, I’d prefer more anger opposition expressed as fuck rather than kill. Fuck ‘em.
Fuck ‘em, he said. And fuck ‘em they did.
Because in those days, the King’s word was law.
Your comments on socialism being washed clean inspired my simple post on communism and socialism today. Thanks Prof. Friedman.
https://scottgibb.substack.com/p/communism-a-history
OT: Has there ever been a legal system (or has anyone proposed) with a chance based death penalty instead of jail? More severe crimes would have a higher chance of resulting in a death penalty.
But why do some other words get more pejorative in time? In my own language the word "lavatory" has been replaced several times through near history because each new term becomes pejorative in time and has to be replaced for polite texts. The totally neutral terms for cognitive disabilities were already mentioned above. These two examples could otherwise perhaps be explained by the phenomena themselves being unliked by people and therefore also dragging down the words they are labelled with. But this cannot explain the terms for minority groups (which are good or at least neutral, because humans as such have a good connotation) having to be replaced the same way. As a non-native speaker I used to be constantly anxious if I'm using the latest correct terms that haven't been degraded yet. So while some words lose their pejorative meaning, others gain it, and we need an explanation for the difference.
One thing I picked up in a sociolinguistics class many years ago, was that negativity sticks more tightly to nouns than to adjectives (and verbs least of all). Thus we get progressions such as "coloureds" -> "coloured people" -> people of colour". Also "Jews" -> "Jewish people".
The explanation for the euphemism treadmill was that the fundamental motivator is the stigma. Merely changing the word may serve as a social signal for one generation, but as long as the stigma remains in place, the next generation will simply use the new word as an insult. Only when accompanied by actual society-wide change will the treadmill stop. Until then, it serves as a fashion fad crossed with a partisan sibboleth.
The word in your first example has long had a pejorative connotation but, as others have pointed out, the shock value has dwindled considerably over time, especially through overuse. A hackneyed phrase to the extent that, as you point out, is used “…to express a vaguely negative emotion with no sexual content at all.” I was in an airport recently and at a nearby table, with families and children nearby, two guys interjected the F-bomb in almost every sentence as they talked sports. So, with this word we have: a cultural shift, broadened meaning, and perhaps even metaphorical extension all in play. I would add there is a certain disrespect for others in the careless way it is used (my airport example).
I believe "socialist" started as a self-identifier.