The Correct Use of the Word Fuck

The book is called 正しいFUCKの使い方—the right way to use FUCK—and it does exactly what it says. Chris Broad, a British expat spending time in Japan, brought it to his friends: a guide to the word and its extended family—shit, damn, hell, the full Anglo profanity starter pack—walked through for people who have enormous emotional range in their own language but not quite the blunt, one-syllable gut-punch that fuck delivers in English. The video of them trying it out—getting the pronunciation slightly wrong at first, then getting it right and looking quietly relieved—is one of the more genuinely joyful things I’ve seen online in a while.

There’s something real in it. Japanese has extraordinary precision for certain kinds of feeling, and the culture has its own forms of expressing frustration—it’s not that people don’t feel things, they clearly do. But the unmediated expletive, the word you just say when you drop something heavy on your foot, occupies different cultural territory. Watching someone find a word that finally fits a feeling they’ve always had is satisfying regardless of language. Fuck. It really does feel good to say.