ABSTRACT
Words and phrases have their parentage, and sometimes they can be clearly and accurately ascribed by philologists, etymologists, and their like. Mostly they have relations and well-wishers who offer help and friendship and, on occasion, a godfatherly gesture of power and authority, rich in assertiveness. Godfathers are to be cultivated if a weak and neglected word, of lowly origin, its growth stunted and its very life threatened by taboos, is to flourish and come into its rightful inheritance. The f-word in literature and in journalism has had the good fortune to grow up under the protection of many such godfathers, and none—at least in our media world of newspapers and magazines, film and television—deserves more recognition than Kenneth Peacock Tynan. Kenneth Peacock Tynan's achievement was not rooted in English insularity and singularity, but shaped by a "special relationship," an Anglo-American partnership with a traditional ring of Allied liberation about it.
