"Excuse me, hello. What is the meaning of word 'fuck'?"

This Tuesday I had one of the more mortifying conversations of my life.

I was sitting at my desk grading papers in the afternoon when a Japanese woman in her 50s appeared next to me.  I'd never met or even seen her before.  She said the two sentences in the post title, then continued.

"F-A-C-K. Fuck.  Do you know this word, please?"

I commenced to stammer.

"I, well...do you mean...this word?"  I scrabbled for a piece of scratch paper and wrote "Fuck" on it.

"Ah, yes yes."

It might be difficult to understand why I would just continue talking to this woman without asking who she was or why she needed me to define swear words for her, but you should understand something about most of my days.  I sit in the middle of an office where people are frequently talking, but rarely talking to me or using sounds I understand.  Occasionally my brain gets so bored by this that it makes me think I hear English when I don't (I do understand a lot more Japanese than I did at the beginning of my time here, but language study has not continued to be a primary focus of mine).  I relish the opportunities I get to impart any kind of knowledge or be of any help, so when a very professional and kind-looking woman (only a few inches taller standing than me seated) arrives speaking excellent English, I am instantly in obliging-helper-overdrive.

Back to me calmly writing "Fuck" and showing it to her for approval.

"Yes, what does it mean?"

"It's...it's a bad word.  It's our--the most bad--worst word in English." (Debatable, yes, but roll with me.)

"How do you use it?"

Oh man.  I was at a crossroads.  Should I sit her down and pull up this video?  Fuck is a uniquely flexible word, and if I was really committed to teaching English, maybe....  But no, aside from the time that would take, I don't think I could get through half of it without swallowing my own tongue in embarrassment.  This is completely silly of me, but I was having trouble even saying the word out loud to this woman.  She had little idea what I was saying, and the difference in cultural weight meant I might as well have been saying "Yalx" or "Marb" or "Hergensplatteryoip".  I was literally the only one in the room who'd grown up knowing and feeling that it was rude to say "fuck", but this nice woman very automatically and very inconveniently represented all of the mothering, nurturing, respectable women I've ever known.  And I do my best not to swear around them (on that note, sorry for this whole post, Mama).

"Well...we often use it to say 'fuck you'."  I added "you" to the paper.  "That means...'I don't like you', or 'I hate you'.  That's what...what this gesture means."  Here I brought up my right hand and raised my middle finger.  Because of our positioning I was almost directing it at her at first--I felt a stab of panic and quickly turned and pointed it away from her towards the curtains.

She made a small "hmm" noise, entirely unimpressed, and barely looked at my finger.

"But what does it mean, this word?"

Uh oh.  I had specifically hoped to avoid this.

"It can mean many things, many different things, but it...it means, well, the word 'fuck' comes from...sex, it means--sex."

And then came the slightest pause, a barely perceptible freeze in her motions.  In that pause bloomed the first blush I've had in a long time.  THAT she had understood.  She inclined her head a little, and said, just a bit more softly,

"Oh.  I see...."

"Yes...."  Misery.

She leaned a little closer in to the vulgar, blaring, and completely culturally disconnected "Fuck you" on the desk.  She then brought up her other hand to reveal a printout of a picture of some graffiti on a series of beige lockers.  In black was written the kanji for Nuka Junior High School, my other school, followed by a red scribble, and then "Fuxx".  I gathered that "Fuxx" had taken her to "fuck" but then from there she had a little trouble making sense of the syntax of "Nuka Junior High School blibbety blab fuck".  I don't blame her.

She straightened up.  "So, it means 'I don't like you, I hate you'?"

Ah, yes, let's keep it with the hate, away from the sex.  Much more comfortable.  "Yes.  I think that probably means 'I hate Nuka'."  Saying you outright hate something in Japanese is in fact incredibly strong and rarely used, so maybe that was an effective cultural translation.  Even explicitly saying "I don't like X" doesn't happen often, it's usually framed more in terms of silence and equivocating head tilts.

Seeing that the offending graffiti was probably written by one of my students, I had to smile.  They have trouble with deciding what the future tense is and distinguishing between the sounds of "want" and "went" (or, weirdly, "see you" and "thank you" ("sank you, Creighton Sensei--ah, no, see you!"))--there ain't no way they knew what they were trying to write.  I've seen them flip each other off in class, but with the same goofiness with which I swore in French when I first learned how (different than the glorious day I learned that the French word for seal, "phoque", is pronounced exactly like "fuck").  If there's no connotation or understanding of context, language loses a lot of its punch.

The woman thanked me profusely, moved off and I saw her talking with my principal later on.  I never got confirmation on the incident or who she was.  I breathed easier, though my eyebrows were stuck in raised alarm mode for quite some time.

At around 3:30 PM I looked down at my desk again absentmindedly and saw "Fuck you" leering up at me.  I started a little bit, then smiled and muttered, "Yeah, yeah, fuck you too...."  I reached over, grabbed the piece of paper, and tossed it in the recycling bin, facedown.

It just felt better that way.