The Four Letter Word

“Fuck” can be pretty much any part of speech and indeed can be used for every word in a sentence, i.e. “Fuck the fucking fuckers.”  Lucifer’s Hammer is a lesson in the uses of the English language’s most vulgar word, but its use is not meant for shock and vulgarity.  Fuck is a very strong word used to express the strongest of emotions, hate, love, tragedy, fury, etc.  In the book it is used 16 times as an adjective, “fucking”, and 10 times as a noun or verb in the past or present tense.  Most of the time it is used in Alim Nassor’s viewpoint sections or John Baker’s sections in Hammerlab, but as the story progresses after the impact more and more characters find that the only way to react to their problems is by throwing up their hands and saying, “Fuck it.”  Also after the impact the use of the stem-noun “motherfucker” becomes far more common, further exhibiting that the breakdown of civilization is such an intellectually staggering event for the characters that more diplomatic vocabulary is often set aside for the more stress-reducing power of using the “f-word”.  I think it is possible too that the author in his 70’s environment might have thought that black people swear more than white people since “fuck” is in every other sentence of Alim’s sections, then again it might be that any racism is purely incidental to the reader’s own perspective; maybe I have some subconscious racists stigmas about black people and swearing.  A caveat to the “blacks swear more than whites” claim though is that men swear more than women except in the few cases where Maureen talks about her or other women’s sexual habits.  The increased use of the word in the latter half of the book is meant to clearly counterpoint the devastation of civilization and reversion to man’s primordial selfish instincts with the previous state of high-civilization news networks, politicians, and billionaire cocktail parties.

1 comment

  1. This is a very intriguing idea, and it shows the paradox of the word “fuck.” As you note, it’s associated with Alim and his gang, presumably signifying “realistic” urban ghetto talk. That is, it’s associated with cities (which we already know the novel takes a dim view of). Then after Hammerfall it’s associated with primitive, shattered rural society — the opposite of cities. If you push these associations far enough, it seems that the authors suggest that urban city life is essentially the same as the primal, instinctual life of the post-apocalypse. The city was apocalyptic even before the apocalypse.

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