Is Anglo-Saxon finally wearing thin?

But “f–k” climbed to the top, vanquishing “swive” along the way, according to Adams, not because it was a better word for sex, but because it was a better word, period: its combination of explosive consonantal start, short vowel and hard ending—all coloured by the emotional flavour of a sexual term—made it just right for an expletive. When you spill coffee on your new white shirt, yelling “swive!” doesn’t cut it. From expletive to intensifer—“you f–king idiot!”—to literally every other syntactical niche, “f–k” took over...