How did the F-bomb take over politics? | Canada Voices

A couple years ago, country rappers Adam Calhoun and Bryan Martin released “FAFO Country,” and if the lyrics – about burying bodies of those who cross them in the woods – don’t inspire fear, the video should. In it, Martin and Calhoun pretend their hands are shotguns, while the sound of the weapon reloading plays underneath.

For the uninitiated, FAFO stands for “eff around and find out,” the “eff” being the four-letter swear word. While the acronym has been around for some time, it recently came to prominence in January when, on the same day Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro was captured by the U.S., the White House posted a black-and-white image on social media of President Donald Trump with “FAFO” written across it. It was a succinct description of U.S. foreign policy under Trump – and maybe the country’s domestic policy now, too.

The term FAFO encompasses so much in so little: coarse language, the suggestion that the speaker is “just one of the guys,” an expression of the volatile times we live in and a warning that consequences to any action can change on a whim. The power of the threat lies in its elusiveness, offering its speaker plausible deniability. No one knows exactly where “eff around” stops and “find out” begins until someone pulls the trigger – and that’s the point.

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It’s difficult to recall, but there was a time when politicians rarely swore in public, even in an acronym. Four years ago, former prime minister Justin Trudeau stirred controversy when opposition members accused him of dropping an F-bomb in the House of Commons, in response to a question about whether a military plane was used to surveil the trucker convoy protest.

That scandal seems almost quaint by today’s standards. U.S. Ambassador to Canada Pete Hoekstra dropped a series of swears last October to express his displeasure with Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s anti-tariff ad campaign. In recent months, it’s been uttered enough by public officials that we’re becoming slowly immune to it. But FAFO, with its threat of violence, takes things to a new level.

“Profanity transgresses a norm, it transgresses polite society. It’s one reason why it’s so common among military combatants,” said Janet McIntosh, author of Kill Talk, a book about the relationship between language and military violence.

“The idea that someone could be taboo, and break a rule, has implications that they might be kind of lawless. Whatever you are going to ‘find out’ – it’s not going to respect your feelings, it’s not going to respect your rights, it might not respect laws or norms or anything about society,” she said.

Breaking down the term, the “eff around” part of the phrase is the kind of language an angry parent might level at their teenager. And in fact, a recent trend called “FAFO parenting” offers an alternative to the perceived liberal-minded “gentle parenting” approach, replacing empathy and clear boundaries to keep kids safe with tough love, discipline and allowing them to suffer the natural consequences of their actions.

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In the political arena, the rebellious child is anyone who challenges the status quo (protestors, Venezuela’s leadership, etc.). The chastising authority presents them as naive or delusional about how the world really works. And that seems to capture well the point of view of White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller when he said on CNN shortly after Maduro’s capture that those who still believe in “international niceties” don’t live in “the real world,” one that is “governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.”

A couple weeks later, Trump insisted that Europeans call him “daddy” during his speech in Davos, Switzerland. And in this “daddy knows best” political landscape, the transgressive language from the top filters down, and is often accompanied by violence. Jonathan Ross, the ICE officer who killed Renee Nicole Macklin Good in Minneapolis last month, spat the F-word and another offensive term after he’d shot her three times.

While free-speech advocates will often (and correctly) argue that words don’t equal violence, they can inspire it – and it’s hard not to see a correlation between FAFO and Macklin Good’s death.

“Trump is clearly giving license to all those ICE officers, to use violence both in their language and their actions,” said Peter Ives, a professor of political science at the University of Winnipeg, on the prevalence of the term FAFO. Ross, he pointed out, could have pulled the trigger and said nothing.

While researching Kill Talk, McIntosh said many former military personnel she interviewed spoke about how, in order to kill, they would “switch” how they speak. She coined the concept “semiotic callusing,” to explain how, for example, a drill sergeant will use insulting language towards recruits to toughen them up, with the idea that once they develop a thicker skin, they can mete out the same insults or pain on others.

These days, we’re all becoming victims of “semiotic callusing” by hearing leaders use dehumanizing profanity so frequently. When Trump used the F-word and flipped off an autoworker at a Ford plant in mid-January, it barely made the news.

Anyone can swear with impunity now – and maybe, for those who stand up and push back against “daddy,” that’s a silver lining.

After all, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey swore when insisting that ICE leave his city after the killing of Macklin Good. And last week, nine progressive prosecutors from cities across the U.S. banded together to bring law enforcement officers who break state laws to justice. Their group’s name, The Project for the Fight Against Federal Overreach – or FAFO – manages to mock Trumpian profanity without actually using it.

This clever wordplay may not chart a way back to more civilized times, but at the very least it serves as a reminder that words can defuse violence as easily as it can provoke it.

Leah Eichler, a self-proclaimed word nerd, writes regularly about our evolving use of language.