There’s poetry and beauty to be found in the unlikeliest of places. Perhaps even at the precise moment you’re advised to get fucked or told to fuck off. I especially adore performances by afuckingmazing actors whose cussin’ is nothing short of endearing. Expletive infixation – it’s comfuckingpletely up my street.

All derivatives of His Esteemed Effness can be (parental advisory) music to the ears, but ONLY when used correctly. Whether or not you choose to use the hard G is up to you…. there’s a place for all in the kingdom of fuck. It’s character-building—quite literally.

When a writer has a person to create, it’s important to know how they feel and therefore how they SPEAK. In building those characters, something as simple as the inclusion or omission of the hard G can say so much and make for a solid foundation. When scribin’ a Scouser, or creating a Cockney, you need to FUCKIN’ LEAVE IT OUT. For the posh or pedantic, make the G as hard as you can. Emphasis by inflection is then up to your actor’s understanding of the invented individual they’re about to inhabit.

The greatest fucking characters? Well…..the gorgeously observed Deb Morgan would have you fuck her twice on Sundays, or even sideways at times. You could shit a brick and fuck her with it, but not one single such utterance makes you respect her any less. These words are so beautifully written—and performed—that they are simply audible proof of a soul on display as Jennifer Carpenter sings the swearsome lyrics she’s given.

Then there’s Bruce Robinson’s fucking BEAUTIFUL ART. With such judicious swearing, he gives life to nothingness, breathing oxygen right into the heart of the mundane. “Of COURSE he’s the fucking farmer” is the ONLY way Marwood could have expressed his sopping wet frustration to Withnail at that muddy juncture.

Chuck Palahniuk and Jim Uhls welcome you into their Fight Club, as long as you obey and welcome this rule: they KNOW their characters and will hurl them at your screen until you do too. They make Marla siiing as she informs us that “My God, I haven’t been fucked like that since grade school.” Tyler Durden looks like you wanna look, fucks like you wanna fuck, and through this, we learn that he is “smart, capable, and most importantly…. free in all the ways that you are not.”

Martin McDonagh – what else can I say but FUCK ME, THAT MAN CAN FUCKING WRITE. When you stay over with him In Bruges, he paints colourful mirth as Ken retracts that bit about Harry’s cunt fucking kids. But if ever swearing were appropriate, it’s here, as the perfect antithesis for that Christmas tree somewhere in London, with a bunch of presents underneath it which will never be opened.

McDonagh does it again a few years later with Seven Psychopaths, where he takes you on this journey via his screenplay-within-a-screenplay, and makes you wonder if you can change the title from Seven Psychopaths to The Seven Lesbians Who Are All Disabled And Have Overcome All Their … Shit And Are Really Nice to Everybody And Two of Them Are Black. I can’t analyse how he does it, I don’t WANNA. I just know that he does.

Stephen Adly Guirgis takes on Judas Iscariot’s Last Days, via a courtroom full of street-talkers. It starts beautifully, before a single word, as a woman emerges from her past. It’s funny in parts, too. with some good Little Bits.

Saint Monica is a nag, whose ass gets results, but on first read, I’m not sure whether she gets those results in spite of or BECAUSE of her many mothafuckahs. It’s not only Saint Mon, there are others whose street language just doesn’t scan. I’m told (by very reliable sources) that this is one AMAZESOME play in the flesh. Perhaps those characters leap from page-to-stage, so I’d love to see it FUH REALZ and be proven the fuck wrong.

Where the FUCK does fuck come from in the first place? How did he evolve into this perfect tool for ANGER and PASSION? Fuck’s etymology isn’t certain; he has a plethora of apocryphal acronyms. He wasn’t derived from Fornication Under Consent of the King, nor did he come from Forced Unnatural Carnal Knowledge. That’s all bollocks, stuff of (Urban) Legend. Fuck has his own Wiki page, (check it out) with some far more probable word-birthdom, from the Dutch fokken (to breed, to beget); dialectal Norwegian fukka (to copulate), and dialectal Swedish focka (to strike, to copulate).

However he was conceived, I love Fuck like he was one of my own, and will continue to do so until the day I fucking die.