{"id":303,"date":"2009-09-19T22:42:14","date_gmt":"2009-09-20T02:42:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2009\/459\/?p=303"},"modified":"2009-09-20T11:40:33","modified_gmt":"2009-09-20T15:40:33","slug":"the-four-letter-word","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2009\/459\/archives\/303","title":{"rendered":"The Four Letter Word"},"content":{"rendered":"

“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.”\u00a0 Lucifer’s Hammer<\/em> is a lesson in the uses of the English language’s most vulgar word, but its use is not meant for shock and vulgarity.\u00a0 Fuck is a very strong word used to express the strongest of emotions, hate, love, tragedy, fury, etc.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.”\u00a0 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”.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“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.”\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Fuck is a very strong… Continue reading The Four Letter Word<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[10],"tags":[31,34,13,30],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2009\/459\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/303"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2009\/459\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2009\/459\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2009\/459\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2009\/459\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=303"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2009\/459\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/303\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":317,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2009\/459\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/303\/revisions\/317"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2009\/459\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=303"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2009\/459\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=303"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2009\/459\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=303"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}