The Gift of F*ck

Here are today’s Wonderful Words:

They taught me to say the word “fuck,” gave me this word as if it were a pocketknife or a good suit of clothes, something every boy should have…They taught me to pronounce it forcefully, gutturally, even gracefully, to get my money’s worth from the word. Why inquire meekly what’s going on when you can demand, “What the fuck?” They demonstrated the many verbal recipes in which “fuck” was the main ingredient. A burger at Gilgo, for instance, was twice as tasty when it was a “Gilgo fucking burger.”

-The Tender Bar, J.R. Moehringer, page 105

Background

The Tender Bar is a memoir about Moehringer’s days growing from boy to man in the company—and under the questionable guidance—of his uncle and friends. This particular passage is one of the many life lessons he learned from his unusual group of role models.

What makes it wonderful?

So what makes this writing wonderful? First of all, you can feel it. The sentences stir emotions deep in your soul, or at least in your distant memory. We all remember this rite of passage where we first learned to swear. Maybe it was from a cool older cousin at a family gathering. Maybe it was from the big kids in the back of the school bus.

Wherever we learned it, we have the familiar feeling of hearing the words, trying to use them awkwardly, then—with a bit of practice and possibly some coaching—adding them to our verbal repertoire like a commando clipping grenades to his chest.

Moehringer’s words evoke those memories from the depths of our minds and bring smiles to our faces as we recall them.

Let's get technical

From a technical standpoint, he uses multiple literary techniques in this single paragraph.

A subtle one is the alliteration he sprinkles throughout the sentences. Alliteration is a succession of words beginning with the same letter or sound. They’re pleasing to the ear and make the words ring like poetry. He writes, “gutturally, even gracefully, to get my money’s worth from the word.”

Moehringer also employs a simile—a comparison between two things, generally using the words “like” or “as.” He writes, “They taught me to say the word “fuck,” gave me this word as if it were a pocketknife or a good suit of clothes, something every boy should have.” Comparing the word fuck to a pocketknife or a suit of clothes gives it a more tangible feeling in our minds. We can imagine Grandpa passing down his pocketknife, and because we can imagine that, now we can imagine how Moehringer’s mentors passed down a word in much the same way.

This passage is ripe with more examples, but we’ll stop at two today. Simply soaking in Moeringer’s Wonderful Words gives us a well from which to draw water as we work to put our own on the page.

Happy writing,

Joe