The title of this post overstates the scope of this essay. I am an academic, and academics often do such things. At any rate, what I am interested in is how often the word fuck gets used in award-winning contemporary Canadian literary fiction. For the purposes of this essay, fuck includes the word’s variants and derivations (fucked, fucking, fucker, fuck’s, motherfucker, etc.) as well as itself. My interest in the topic arose from the possibility that I may have overused the word in my novel, The View North from Liberal Cemetery. It occurs 95 times. Given that my novel is 95,603 words long, fuck-related words show up once every three-plus pages on average.
I limited my data mining effort to the five most recent Giller Prize winners. This decision enabled me to compare my novel to ultra-high-class contemporary Canadian fiction. Also, I needed the guidance that only this particular analysis could provide. One day I’d like to have one of my books in the running for the Giller. Actually, I would be happy just making the long list. I want to go to the awards ceremony. The party looks pretty grand on TV, more fun even than raking leaves or shoveling snow.
I acquired ebooks of the Giller winners from 2009 to 2013 and opened them in Marvin, my favorite iPad ebook reader. I used Marvin's capabilities to quantify occurences of fuck, and to calculate each book's total number of words. Here are the results. My novel is included at the bottom of the table for comparison:
I limited my data mining effort to the five most recent Giller Prize winners. This decision enabled me to compare my novel to ultra-high-class contemporary Canadian fiction. Also, I needed the guidance that only this particular analysis could provide. One day I’d like to have one of my books in the running for the Giller. Actually, I would be happy just making the long list. I want to go to the awards ceremony. The party looks pretty grand on TV, more fun even than raking leaves or shoveling snow.
I acquired ebooks of the Giller winners from 2009 to 2013 and opened them in Marvin, my favorite iPad ebook reader. I used Marvin's capabilities to quantify occurences of fuck, and to calculate each book's total number of words. Here are the results. My novel is included at the bottom of the table for comparison:
The F Value is a measure of the frequency of occurrence of fuck relative to a book's total number of words. It is calculated it by obtaining
Fuck words / Total words
and multiplying the result by ten thousand in order to eliminate numbers smaller than one. As can be seen from the chart, Giller winners always employ fuck. In fact, one might reasonably conclude from the data that a book bereft of the word has a snowball’s chance in Hell of taking the prize. Second conclusion: fuck wasn’t used all that frequently by four of the five Giller winners. Fortunately, my novel was saved from anomaly by Johanna Skibsrud’s The Sentamentalists. Thanks, Johanna, much appreciated.
Further analysis revealed that all of the three female Giller winners employed motherfucker and/or motherfucking in their books, but neither of the two men did so. Though this "reversal" seems surprising, it merely indicates that men are more likely to avoid longer and more ambiguous words than are women. Fucker has but one meaning, motherfucker at least three.
I was disappointed to learn that none of the award-winning writers used fuckingly. This nonword appeared in an earlier version of my novel. I eliminated it because my Squaw Valley workshop leader, Max Byrd, had double-underlined it and added the comment, “No,” though without further explanation. He probably disapproved of the specific word choice rather than of its adverbial nature, but I won't know for sure unless I ask him, which I don’t think I will.
Next, I attempted to determine if Canadian authors of literary fiction are prudes, relative to American authors. What better way to find out than to compare the F values of Giller Prize winners with those of Pulitzer Prize fiction winners? Here’s the Pulitzer data:
Further analysis revealed that all of the three female Giller winners employed motherfucker and/or motherfucking in their books, but neither of the two men did so. Though this "reversal" seems surprising, it merely indicates that men are more likely to avoid longer and more ambiguous words than are women. Fucker has but one meaning, motherfucker at least three.
I was disappointed to learn that none of the award-winning writers used fuckingly. This nonword appeared in an earlier version of my novel. I eliminated it because my Squaw Valley workshop leader, Max Byrd, had double-underlined it and added the comment, “No,” though without further explanation. He probably disapproved of the specific word choice rather than of its adverbial nature, but I won't know for sure unless I ask him, which I don’t think I will.
Next, I attempted to determine if Canadian authors of literary fiction are prudes, relative to American authors. What better way to find out than to compare the F values of Giller Prize winners with those of Pulitzer Prize fiction winners? Here’s the Pulitzer data:
Clearly, Canadian authors are not more fuck-aversive (literarily speaking, that is) than U.S. authors. In fact, the F values total up to 17 in both tables, or a 2.4 mean per book. Note, however, that unlike the Giller Prize, it is possible to win a Pulitzer Prize without including fuck at all. Paul Harding did it with Tinkers (a fabulous book, by the way). On the other hand, Tinkers was a shortish book. Had Mr. Harding added another 50,000 words to it, I’m confident that at least a handful of them would have been fuck-related. In his Enon, after all, an even better book than Tinkers in my estimation, fuck appears 29 times in 72,261 words for a respectable F value of 4.
There are many examples in literary fiction of books attaining higher F values than those reported above. Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, for example, contains 213 fucks in 150,369 words (F value = 14). Martin Amis’s Money: a Suicide Note presents the word 198 times in 151,000 words (F value = 13). I was surprised to find that Fifty Shades of Grey employs the word at a much more modest clip: just 117 times in 151,530 words (F value = 7.7).
What’s the all-time record, you ask? Remember, we’re talking literary fiction, not pornography. In a recent New Yorker, James Wood wrote the following of James Kelman’s Booker Prize-winning book, How Late It Was, How Late: “...it was reckoned that ‘fuck’ occurs four thousand times….twenty-one times in the first three pages alone.“ The correct total is actually 2,114, but once you get past a thousand or so, who's counting? How Late It Was, How Late clocks in at 119,000 words. Its F value thus is a staggering 177. Fucking amazing, eh?
All in all, I’m encouraged. My book isn't even close to being an outlier.
There are many examples in literary fiction of books attaining higher F values than those reported above. Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, for example, contains 213 fucks in 150,369 words (F value = 14). Martin Amis’s Money: a Suicide Note presents the word 198 times in 151,000 words (F value = 13). I was surprised to find that Fifty Shades of Grey employs the word at a much more modest clip: just 117 times in 151,530 words (F value = 7.7).
What’s the all-time record, you ask? Remember, we’re talking literary fiction, not pornography. In a recent New Yorker, James Wood wrote the following of James Kelman’s Booker Prize-winning book, How Late It Was, How Late: “...it was reckoned that ‘fuck’ occurs four thousand times….twenty-one times in the first three pages alone.“ The correct total is actually 2,114, but once you get past a thousand or so, who's counting? How Late It Was, How Late clocks in at 119,000 words. Its F value thus is a staggering 177. Fucking amazing, eh?
All in all, I’m encouraged. My book isn't even close to being an outlier.
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