An audible part of this sudden evolution of mores, one that was for me a vivid lived experience, was university women making free use of the coarse short Anglo-Saxon words. Women contemporaries told me that the conversations overheard in elite women’s colleges turned dorm and cafeteria life into an open sewer. The rude words began appearing more freely in print.

I took part in this free for all, although I tempered it in mixed company. But the feminist ideology of those days ruled that to speak one way to guys and another way to gals was inherently sexist!

Here we are 40 years later. I find the f word all over blog and forum posts by purported young women. The c word remains taboo, for now. Derogatory terms for the male member are not too common.

I concluded long ago that it was high time that we stop invoking the act which makes human existence possible as an all-purpose derogatory metaphor. We all owe our existences to the genitalia of our parents, and to their coming together in passion. This elemental fact deserves our reverence and affection. The metaphorical use of words denoting our private parts, and loving consensual acts involving those parts, should be terms of praise and approbation, and not of contempt.