Drive

There’s a particular word in our English vocabulary that makes it way into our conversations pretty often. It’s very versatile. It starts with an f. It ends in a u-c-k. And of course, I mean fire-truck. I’m kidding, it’s exactly the f-bomb you’re thinking about right now. You might be wondering – can we say the f-word on radio? According to the programming policy on our station charter, we do “reserve the right to broadcast subject matter and language which some might consider offensive, if such usage is considered appropriate and justified in context”. That being said, this story explores the trends and academic study of when and why we use the f-bomb from a sociolinguistic perspective. To that end, Drive caught up with Robbie Love, Research Fellow in Applied and Corpus Linguistics at the University of Leeds in the UK earlier this week on the infamous “f-word”.

Content warning: the f-bomb expletive is used in the context of giving examples