Dear Reader,
Few singular words in the modern English language carry as many definitions, as much emotion, and as heavy cultural baggage as the humble “fuck.” There is no etymological consensus over the origins and early usage of the word — plenty of theories, sure, but when you dig into it, we really don’t know how it came to be. That kind of makes sense, doesn’t it? If you learned that “fuck” was simply a translation, or an acronym, or a rehashing of something else, it wouldn’t feel right. Fuck is fuck, we can’t imagine it being much else.
One explanation for the desert of etymological history surrounding “fuck” is the fact that no one wanted to write it down. People likely said it out loud relatively naturally, but it was too taboo and offensive to be immortalized in documents, certainly not in any deemed formal enough to be archived. “Fuck” was likely reserved for the uncomfortable, the unprofessional, and the lines of irrational hate and love that were drawn into the sand with the knowledge that waves would soon crash, washing the beach anew. Maybe it was a word that could only be spoken when a situation was fucked up enough to warrant it. Maybe it was only said when people were fucked up enough to not want it to be remembered. And though times have changed, they haven't changed that much.
So what happens when we ask college students to write pieces, explicitly asking them to be “fucked?” The answer is simple, and complicated, and most of all, fucked up. Some of these pieces are callouts, some are callbacks, and some feel like swallowing a large pill without water. This is your trigger warning. This is your moment to close the magazine and live without the Fucked Up issue. To ignore the etches of fucked-upness in our muscles. But those etches are already there, carved by years of side comments, minimum wage jobs, and the realization that everything means more than you’d like it to. No amount of immobility will guarantee atrophy, so you might as well flex while you’re still limber and READ THIS FUCKING ISSUE.
Pardon our French,
Cipher