If you’ve watched British television lately, you might be shocked at how mainstream the F-word has become. In the BBC comedy show 8 Out of 10 Cats, both the host (Jimmy Carr) and the guests constantly drop F-bombs. In an American network show, by contrast, they’d be lightly bleeped — and undoubtedly the word would be used much less frequently. On American cable, things are somewhat different: In the Apple TV series Ted Lasso, set in England, there’s no bleeping of the ubiquitous F-bombs dropped by the English characters. By my reckoning, American characters on the show rarely use the expletive. British English has changed right before our eyes.
Or maybe we didn’t really see it at all: It happened when we weren’t looking. That’s typically how change works. Just as you can’t see the hands of a fine clock move, you can’t see linguistic change happening. You can only realize that it has happened.
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