[FRIAM] Communication guides for the elderly

Sat Jan 22 17:13:19 EST 2022

Nick,

you lapsed etymologist,

*Fuck never meant, nor had any connotation to, "love making."*

**It derives from the Saxon 'fochen' and referred to nothing more than the physical act. It was the Normans that denigrated the Saxon language (Norman Conquest) and made the term vulgar and obscene — purely as an act of linguistic genocide and political dominance.

The French word for intercourse "rapports" along with romantic notions of love, "rapports sexuel," and "les relations,"  are what gave rise to euphemisms like 'making love' thereby superimposing the romantic meaning you are thinking of.

Since the word escaped its obscenity prison and became mainstream, it also picked up all kinds of nuance baggage*[1]*; including violence and aggressive nuances.It also evolved from a simple verb to adverb, adjective, and noun (gerund). But that should not make it any more confusing to children than any other complicated linguistic term — especially since most children tend to be uniformed as to the physical act itself along with all the romantic fallacies associated with the term 'love."

it should also be noted that the concept of "making love" or "romantic love" is a, linguistically speaking, very recent innovation. Prior to, roughly the Age of Chivalry, the only two words for 'love' were agape (brotherly love or godly love) and eros (sexual pleasure and sensations). Most children are only with the agape version of love, parent-to-child- or among siblings. Still less grounds for the confusion you fear.

A far more interesting issue than the one you bring up, concerns the apparent divorce of sex from both erotic and romantic love, e.g., sexting and hooking-up. But that is an entirely different conversation for another time.

*[1]* Admittedly, among the plethora of nuanced meanings, the romantic nuance did sneak in. That is why George Carlin's routine about replacing the word "kill" with the word "fuck" in movie dialog is so amusing. Bad guy talking to sheriff: "I'm going to fuck you now; and I'm going to fuck you slow."

davew

On Sat, Jan 22, 2022, at 12:06 PM, thompnickson2 at gmail.com wrote:
> Eric, You Souless Heathen,
>  
> I feel it is my duty as the group’s only Silent, to go all rationalistic on all you xers, and zers, and boomers, and whatevers.   Besides, Eric IS, demonstrably, trying to get my goat here.
>  
> So: FWIW, I use ellipses to indicate hesitation, sometimes for irony,  roughly equivalent to “for lack of a better word”, “not to put to fine a point on it”, or, more simply, “um.”
>  
> What I did want to press on the group was a wonder I have always had since the sixties when “fuck” went middle class.  What questions does it raise in the mind of the young when a word for “love making” takes on all these aggressive and exploitative meanings.  Eric claimed  that only in the caverns of a 50’s Freudian mind could these usages imply anything at all.  I just can’t believe that.  (Eric’s point perhaps proven.)   Certainly, a child, wondering why adults are so secretive and obsessed about sex, and listening to how words for are so blatantly used, might come to assume that that sex is an occasion for one person to do harm to another.  Now I grant you that children assume that adults get up to a  lot of stupid things that children just don’t need to attend to, and that that boundary provides a lot of protection for kids.  But still! Give how little we know about the origins of sexual and gender identity, would it make sense to pay some attention to the categories we adults so vigorously assemble with our words?
>  
> No?
>  
>  
> Nick Thompson
> ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com
> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/
>  
> *From:* Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> *On Behalf Of *Eric Charles
> *Sent:* Saturday, January 22, 2022 9:02 AM
> *To:* The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
> *Subject:* [FRIAM] Communication guides for the elderly
> 
>  
>  
> Part 1 (Yes, the generation labels are out of order.)
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> Part 2
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> Part 3
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