This is in response to Mark LaFlamme’s article about the f-word, printed March 24.

I was first exposed to the f-word during the 1940s and ’50s when I lived in New York and Michigan. I didn’t use the word because those who did were usually the most risky folks to be around. Much later, I figured out that it had different meanings for different people, not always deplorable.

Still, the predominant usage has been to describe a negative fact or person as if they were engaged in sex, which is assumed to be degraded.

Also, we should remember that among the now-shrinking population of the pious, hitting a finger with a hammer was more like to provoke “damn” rather than the f-word.

As the decades passed since the 1960s, the f-word has become chic among artists and intellectuals who wish to identify with the common man.

Personally, I feel the f-word supports an attitude which degrades women and also betrays an inner acceptance of corruption in the sexual attitude of people who use it, although certainly not in every case.

In my view, decency requires us to refrain, so long as its usual implications are corrupt.

For most of my life, the f-word was never heard spoken by a female until it became fashionable for some “liberated” women to adopt the uncouth ways of men.

Arthur Harvey, Hartford