Can we all agree, from this point forward, never to use the phrase “the f-bomb” (or any variant where the f is replaced with a c, or an s, or any other letter you care to mention)? I should point out here, for those fortunate enough never to have heard such a phrase, that it is normally used to indicate that another has uttered a word, beginning with the specified letter, that is deemed too terrible to utter even in the context of quotation, i.e. “Jim dropped the f-bomb”.
This may be a flaw in my own psyche (there are many), but whenever I hear a colleague utter this phrase I am overcome with sympathetic embarrassment at the sheer childishness of it. As obvious as it seems, I feel compelled to assert that the words for which this phrase and its variants stand in are in-fact not bombs. They have no inherent power beyond the puff of breath used to utter them, and have never, in the history of language, rent a person limb from limb.
If you really are keeping such timid company that the utterance of vulgar language may injure them in some way, my primary advice is to seek more robust company. Otherwise simply avoid directly quoting anyone who uses such language, or, as an absolute last resort, use the time-honoured phrase “the f-word”. That phrase is marginally less childish than “the f-bomb”, but shares the same fundamental, self-defeating silliness: anyone hearing it will immediately think “oh, fuck”.
