WARNING! XXX EXPLICIT DIRTY WORDS!

NOTE: If you have children make sure they don't catch you reading this! As a matter of fact, if you can't handle hearing the word "fuck," you should stop and back out right now! Don't say I didn't warn you.

My wife and I watched The Wolf of Wall Street (henceforth referred to as Wolf) on DVD last night. It was an excellent movie. However, by the time the credits rolled I was getting tired of hearing the “F-Word,” or “F-Bomb,” or just plain “fuck” (pardon my French). Curious about the number of times the word and its many variations were used in the movie, I went to the Internet. Did you know there are actually people out there who count stuff like this?

A piece in Variety (January 2, 2013) reported that Wolf used the F-Bomb 506 times. This was picked up and repeated in Time, Rolling Stone, USA Today, the Guardian, Fox News, and the Today show. Variety says the number came from Wikipedia but where Wikipedia got the number is a mystery. Wikipedia’s source was a blog (and you know you can’t believe anything you read in a blog!) but I was unable to find the Wikipedia page cited by Variety. I entered “fuck” into Wikipedia’s search engine and the result was 8,098 pages on which the word appears. I only looked at one, a list of films that most frequently use the word “fuck,” and it reported the word and its many variations were uttered 569 times in Wolf. But, hey, who’s counting? Well, that would be Forrest Wickman, a journalist at Slate. He tallied 544 uses of the F-Bomb while watching Wolf. Not to be undone, Gilbert Cruz, a writer for Vulture.com not only counted the F-Bombs but every single curse word in the movie! Counting all variations of the word "fuck" he came up with a total of 569 F-Bombs (confirming the list on Wikipedia). He also counted 79 “shits,” 22 references to male genitalia, 9 to female genitalia, and 8 “bitch”/”bitching.” He broke it down further to show which characters said the words.

It doesn’t matter whether the number is 506, 544, or 569. Wolf would still set a record for the most F-Bombs in an American, mainstream, non-documentary movie. Any of those numbers is far greater than the previous record-holder, Summer of Sam from 1999, which had 435 F-Bombs. The 2005 documentary, Fuck, holds the overall record at 857 and Fuck has a running time of only 93-minutes versus the 180-minutes for Wolf.

I’ve seen a lot of movies without paying much attention to how many times the F-Bomb was used. But I must admit that I was somewhat surprised to find that, according to the list I found, GoodFellas was only ranked at number 9 (not counting the British film, Nil by Mouth), with 300 F-Bombs. Even more surprising was to learn that neither of Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs or Pulp Fiction made it into the top 20. They are listed as numbers 24 and 25, respectively.

I’m no prude, certainly no saint, but I found it difficult to understand why the word had to be used so many times in one movie. So I decided to look into this phenomenon and I found that it is one of the most versatile words in the English language. The word “fuck” is one of the few words with so many legitimate grammatical usages. For example:

As a transitive verb:  "John fucked Shirley.”
As an intransitive verb:  "Shirley fucks.”
As an adjective:  "John's doing all the fucking work.”
As part of an adverb:  "Shirley talks too fucking much.”
As an adverb enhancing an adjective:  "Shirley is fucking beautiful.”
As a noun:  "I don't give a fuck.”
As part of a word:  "Abso-fucking-lutely,” or: "In-fucking-credible”

As such, the word can be extremely useful and efficient in conversation. There aren't too many words with the versatility of 'fuck'. For example:

Fraud:  "I got fucked at the used car lot.”
Dismay:  "Aww, fuck it!"
Trouble:  "I guess I'm really fucked now.”
Aggression:  "Don't fuck with me buddy!"
Difficulty:  "I don't understand this fucking question.”
Inquiry:  "Who the fuck was that?"
Dissatisfaction:  "I don't like what the fuck is going on here.”
Incompetence:  "He's a fuck off.”
Dismissal:  "Why don't you go fuck yourself?"

Compliment:  "You’re one smart fucker."

Since completing my research I have gained a much greater respect for this remarkable word. Perhaps you have also.