Eff.

If I were to tell you that this post had close to 20 discarded starts, you might opine that what flows hence is a masterpiece rather than the usual drivel I drown my readers in and you’d be wrong. If I were to tell you it took inconceivable self-loathing for me to login to www.blogspot.com before taking the next sip of Bailleys, you might term me a depressed drunkard. If I confess to you of a recent craving to smoke, catching me off guard puffing at one end of a blunt pencil, you might judge me to be weak. If I were to apologise to every soul I’ve hurt, an eon would transpire and I would still not be half done. Yet here I am, in the confession box, listing. Why? It isn’t for retribution, not for perdition, no sir. I stand before you, dear Reader, to confess, that no matter what sin I succumb to, what blasphemy I commit, I stand true to one principle and to one alone, to not give an eff.


“Mighty rude”, the Queen would have surmised. The Devil would surely cheer minions like me on, taking solace in the corrupted soul. Yet in all our hush-hush diplomacy we have ignored and oft denied the necessity of eff in our lives. It stays amongst us, lurking at the back of tongues for some, ready to jump off the tip for others, but omnipresent, always. You have cried eff moist with tears in times of loss, cheered an eff through guffaws of laughter, burnt eff into the other’s soul in moments of rage and at times just let the solitary eff stand out as your expression of shock and surprise. It is one word that has remained true and faithful to you through thick and thin, in sickness and in health, to love and to hold till death do you both part.

The Americans did a great service to the language by nurturing a word that saw its humble beginnings in what I can only imagine as the dingy backyard of New York streets and gained fruition in the pit at the Wall Street. It journeyed across the Atlantic, into the cultural realms of Europe, embraced with open arms by the non-purists. The English chose to stay stiff-chinned, unwilling, and ever so defiant; happy with substitutes that were difficult to explain let alone serve in eff’s stead. I mean how do you “sod off” or “piss off”? Our generation witnessed something that was far more liberating than the hippy revolution, reaching beyond the barriers of language and region, paving the way for a movement that would question societal norms and hypocritical standards. No longer do you question the French or the German guy, “Can you tell me some swear words in your language?” Curiosity is now defined as “How do you say eff in your language?”

From movie stars blurting it out on the silver screen, even in Indian cinema, to the teenager next-door using it as a conjunction to form what might appear to be a grammatically correct sentence, the word is now becoming, what we term “common parlance”. Your ticket to becoming ‘cool’, the weapon to look dangerous, the elixir of a drama queen, eff has managed to manifest itself in all possible forms. To think, even on Scrabble the word would fetch you a healthy 13 points standing alone! And this is how we repay such selflessness of a word that has always ‘given’ and asked for nothing in return except universal acceptance and a place in our limited vocabulary without being judged! Yet there seems to be hope, from those who choose to sail the seas of diction under the pirate flag of eff, and promise a future when a newborn would be able to utter eff as his first word and not be shunned.

What began as a rebellion is now culminating into a concept, one that has risen, withstood resistance and proven its worth and rightful place in the commonplace language. It won’t be long before the linguists take notice and we read in a small advert on the corner of the newspaper, sipping on our morning coffee – “Oxford agrees. Vatican pissed.”

Come now; try saying “Fuck!” out loud after reading this post. Liberating, isn’t it?

Yes, I did actually write it out, and here’s what I have to say to that:

..|..