Time is for other people and older generations. It certainly doesn’t happen to us. We will never have to see our one true permanent culture shift into new paradigms. We have completed the project of assembling the best possible culture and now our culture is fixed and objectively correct and will never be any different than it is today.

Right?

This psychological safety bubble was popped last month when I saw this tweet from Andrew Yang and witnessed the hour hand of history tick over to a new generation.

I am a man in mourning. Something I love about our culture is dying and there’s nothing that can be done to save it. I’m writing this piece to inform you of the imminent death of the F-word.

Oh, I know you think it can’t be true but examine the evidence. Look up at that tweet! There is the F-word in all its glory, not only once but twice! In the present participle no less! [EDIT: Someone has informed me the F-word is actually used three times. I couldn’t even see the last one until this was pointed out. This means the F-word literally died two-thirds of the way through this tweet. That’s how specific we can be.] Yet when you read it, don’t you have the exact same emotional experience as you would if someone were shouting “Zounds!” or “Gadzooks!” in public? It carries with it absolutely no sense of transgression or violation. Andrew Yang is a math and science nerd who ran for President of the United States. When he was young, he probably did things like serve as captain of the calculator club. He might have even been president of the calculator club! Definitionally, nothing he says can be profane.

Andrew Yang picked up the F-word to try to show seriousness, a gesture to say “a rule-following man shall now violate the social rules in order to demonstrate the severity of this circumstance,” and instead of the F-word giving him power it crumbled to dust in his fingers. I was not shocked. I wasn’t even bored. I felt nothing. Only a distant sense I was observing an old man use old people language. History will show this was the exact moment the F-word’s death became certain.

Please be honest with yourself. It hasn’t been doing the job it used to do for a while. Today’s F-word doesn’t feel at all like the classic “Look both Directions to Make Sure Your Grandmother isn’t Around because Samuel L. Jackson is Dropping F-Bombs” from thirty years ago. Andrew Yang’s tweet made me realize I couldn’t even remember the last time I experienced that kind of thrill. It’s just a silly word now. Someone’s grandma was saying the F-Word at Home Depot the other day and I didn’t try to put my hands over my children’s ears or anything. I just laughed. It was funny. Everyone thought it was funny. The F-word was a joke.

The young can’t imagine what has been lost. The F-word used to be dangerous and forbidden. Only men who worked dangerous jobs, murderers, or Satanists were allowed to speak it aloud. The F word was darkly magical. I remember one of those repeating parrot toys shouting the F word in a department store in my youth. It caused an uproar and a scandal. Some kid had probably done it as a prank but that hardly mattered. The mood was such that if anyone found that kid he might have been publicly executed. That’s how powerful the F-word used to be. People would literally use violence on a kid for making a parrot toy say the F-word in public. Now it’s silly that anyone ever thought there was anything indecent about it.

When Gen Alpha has children, those children will experience the F-word the same way we would experience someone shouting “Intercourse!” on the street while trying to look tough. It will exist only for out of touch eccentrics. Those children will laugh and roll their eyes, and know that the person shouting that word is just some lonely old man or woman who needs more attention than they’re receiving. Some nice person will stop and help the would-be offender get back to their nursing home. Then they’ll put on some Gangster Rap music in the ancient Millenial’s room before turning on Grand Theft Auto XXX on their AARP Centrum Silver X-Box.

All of our words are going to undergo this fate and we have no one to blame but ourselves. You want to know how long this has been coming? South Park did a whole episode on it in 2001. That’s almost a quarter of a century ago for any millennial living in denial of our generation’s advancing age. Shit has become equivalent to saying “feces” and motherfucker will soon be a lovable children’s word for “Dad.” We said them all too much, too many times, so that whatever “line” we were crossing to be risqué has simply ceased to exist. We are living in the very last days where these words mean anything dirty. Their magic is fading and they will be less and less sure to cause offense as time goes on.

What will replace these words? This is what I didn’t know until recently.

You’re really not going to like this. I don’t like it. I felt the vacuum and then I immediately knew what was going to rush in to fill its place. Profanity is an emotion tied to an utterance. It’s that sense of the forbidden spoken out loud. What words won’t you say out loud? What concepts make you deeply uncomfortable that you’d blow up on a kid who pulled a prank with a repeating parrot toy?

If your imagination is struggling, please see this video from Kanye West. In this video, several rows of black men repeatedly shout the N-word and “Heil Hitler.” The use of the N-word in particular strongly contrasts to previous compositions by West. All prior instances use it to reference a common cultural experience, always as an in-group word to address the music to a particular audience, and insofar as the music was marketed to Caucasian audiences it preserved the sense of “outsider looking in.” The use in this video is simply, well, “fuck you.” The same as Heil Hitler, which has no purpose in the song at all other than the knowledge that it will be rejected by the audience. Both exist only to successfully elicit offense. The song was a success in this sense as it was immediately banned from most social media platforms. So the great cycle of profanity begins again.

I want to deny it, too! I don’t like racial slurs! But that’s the strongest indicator that’s where the next profanity will come from! Decent society doesn’t like them and profanity is whatever decent society abhors.

I come from a logging culture. The F-word was like poetry to us. It was tied to the blood of the men who worked cutting down trees, a special word by right of sacrifice. Some of the curses I heard as a child were almost musical. I knew even as a child that my right to this word was secondhand until I too took up a dangerous job. This whole paradigm shift makes me sympathize with everyone who tries to fight “cultural appropriation” because they see something important to them being changed and eaten by the broader culture. They fight because they know that what they love will not survive mass attention. They know that forbidden words cannot remain forbidden in the mouth of Andrew Yang.

Gadzooks and Zounds.

God’s Hooks and Wounds. Those were religious bits of profanity, tied to a religious culture. These words drew on the horror of the crucifixion. Those were the unthinkable thoughts in the age when those words were first spoken. Then the hour hand of history ticked and other thoughts and ideas became prominent. Those words don’t remind me of anything at all, even knowing their origin.

One day, maybe not even so much as a hundred years from now, a spoken “fuck” will land with the same weight. Someone will hear it and grow curious, a sort of party-trick curiosity, and do some cursory research. Then some distant descendant of our culture will read this article and cite it in a research paper titled: “How Andrew Yang killed the F-Word.” Then, finally, the F-word will have its justice.